This simple chart is the recipe for life, according to the latest origin of life research. Just follow these simple steps and you can produce your own life forms.

The chart comes from N. Kitadai et al. Origins of building blocks of life: a review, Geosci. Front. (2018)

The chart is actually showing many real reactions that actually work (in a laboratory), but there are many missing (unknown) steps and the interconnections between them is largely hypothetical.

What the chart isn't telling you:

• Incompatible Conditions: Most of the reaction require distinct and incompatible chemical and environmental conditions (different temperatures, pH levels, solvents, concentrations, chemical environments, etc), so the links between each reaction should be interpreted as, "...and then stuff happens here..."
• The Mass Transportation Problem: Molecules need to reach the right environments, in the right concentrations, without degrading, dispersing or being contaminated.
• Dismal Yields: There is no accounting for cumulative yield (that enough material survives the complete sequence) and no demonstration of overall mass balance.
• The Purification Problem: The needed molecules have ti be separated from competing compounds and unwanted byproducts.
• The Homochirality Problem: No way for producing, amplifying and preserving the chirality that life needs, across the entire pathway.
• The Probability Problem: Just starting with the reasons above, you've probably already inferred that it's highly unlikely that any of this is going to occur naturally across all of the multiple, exacting conditions required.

And somehow, at the end of this abstruse chemical obstacle course, we're still left with:

• The Information Problem: Even if you manage to make molecular building blocks, that still doesn't explain the emergence of functional, self-replicating genetic information. The molecules still have to organize themselves into a system that can:

1. store information
2. use energy
3. maintain themselves
4. reproduce.

Easy peasy.

I think that if one looks at this honestly, it doesn't inspire much hope. Maybe it inspires hubris, but the reality is that we can't even take a dead cell (with all of its intricate machinery still present) and make it alive again; yet we think we can construct a living cell from parts, and then insist that nature could do it all on its own, without direction, and without any real purpose or goal in mind.

TL;DR: you just need to move enormous amounts of pure molecules (in the right forms and concentrations) around through very different chemical environments, in the right order, at the right time, while preventing them from degrading, dispersing, or reacting with the wrong substances.

Oh, and some of the necessary conditions for one reaction would actually destroy the products of another.

In a recent video captioned "a challenge to common descent", Donny Budinsky discusses human orphan genes.

Apparently, there are genes that are:

• unique to humans
• functional and essential
• without any precursors in other species
• without any evidence for how they evolved

The challenge is to explain these genes in the paradigm of evolutionary common descent.

This is a great challenge, and it makes total sense.

Donny forgot one thing though: he didn't mention a gene that matches all four criteria.

Let's help Donny make his challenge specific enough to investigate!

these represent the living members of the giraffe kind. This is an informal type page so it has a less writing on it than the rest of the pages will.

We are all aware of what fine-tuning arguments are [1]; the claim that the laws and constants of physics appear to be set within an extremely narrow range that allows a universe capable of producing stars, planets, and life. I have also discussed the same here in one of my earlier post titled A small discussion on the probability arguments of the idea of Intelligent Design, where my main focus was on why the probability arguments makes little to no sense on this topic.

Here, my aim is to discuss the work by Fred Adams [2, 3] and show that the idea that our universe is so fine tuned that only a intelligent creator could have created this doesn't hold much of water. Infact, it was shown that it is even possible to make a more habitable universe by tweaking the parameters. You can watch the full video for more detail or read his paper for all the gory details, but here I will present a very concise, to the point summary of that. For your ease of access I have also added the time stamp where you can go to in the video for more detail.

Like I said above, the intelligent design (ID) proponents present arguments that if you changed gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, or cosmological parameters by tiny amounts, stars and life would become impossible. So Adams here tested that claim and tried to answer the question,

How much can these parameters actually change before the universe stops producing complex structures?

1. Gravity is not tuned to one tiny value (20:01-21:00)

Gravity looks extremely weak compared with electromagnetism (by about 10^36 in dimensionless strength), which is often presented as a huge coincidence.However, when actually varied, the strength of gravity, stars still work over a very large range. Gravity can be roughly be 10,000 times stronger or about 1 billion times weaker and stars can still exist.

2. The electromagnetic force also has a wide allowed range (21:00 - 21:08)

The calculations show that the electromagnetic interaction can vary by about 100 times stronger and 100 times weaker while still allowing functioning stars.

3. The cosmological constant (52:23 - 54:35)

Adams here finds that by changing cosmic parameters, such as the primordial fluctuation amplitude or baryon abundance, universes can form galaxies even with a cosmological constant many orders of magnitude larger than ours. The allowed range can extend up to around 10^20 times larger (depending on the other parameters).

4. Famous nuclear examples (30:55 - 35:20)

The triple-alpha process is often presented as an incredible coincidence where carbon exists because a nuclear resonance happens to have exactly the right energy. Even here there is a range of 800 kev where carbon can be formed. This gets even better though.

In our universe, beryllium-8 is unstable, which makes carbon production require the famous triple-alpha process. However in a universe where beryllium-8 was stable would have a much simpler pathway to carbon production and interestingly, the allowed change needed to make beryllium-8 stable is smaller than the change required to completely prevent carbon production.

5. Even better habitable universe (1:00:15 - 1:02:00)

The argument is often presented that our universe sits at the perfect point. However this may not be true. For example, increasing the primordial density fluctuations from their observed value (Q~10^-5) could create denser galaxies and with the right parameters, these galaxies could contain a larger fraction of habitable planets than galaxies like our Milky Way (48:48 - 50:10). It also turns out that a universe with stable beryllium-8 would arguably have a more efficient way of producing heavy elements than our universe.

So finally while I only focused on a few of them (same as in video), here is the summary of all the tuning that was done in the study. The right most column named range gives you the range you can vary the parameter and still have a viable universe. The unit decades (see caption as well) means in power of 10, i.e. 3 means 10^3.

[1] List of Fine-Tuning Parameters

[2] (Youtube) Saturday Morning Physics: Fred Adams - The Degree of Fine Tuning in our Universe - and Others

[3] (arXiv) The Degree of Fine-Tuning in our Universe -- and Others

Recently there was a post in this sub on Earth being formed before the sun and there was quite a discussion going on that. That reminded me of this very interesting and humorous and biblical-style parody written by physicist George Gamow which is an excellent summary of nucleosynthesis , going from the creation of light nuclei in the heat of the Big Bang to the creation of heavy nuclei in supernovae.

The entire history of the Big Bang and our understanding of the origin of the elements is one of the most beautiful stories in science, full of remarkable ideas, brilliant, tenacious people, wrong turns, and extraordinary discoveries.

" In the beginning God created radiation and ylem [Gamow's term for the primordial, hyper-dense soup of fundamental particles present at the origin of the universe]. And ylem was without shape or number, and the nucleons were rushing madly over the face of the deep.

And God said: "Let there be mass two." And there was mass two. And God saw deuterium, and it was good.

And God said: "Let there be mass three." And there was mass three. And God saw tritium and tralphium [Gamow's nickname for the helium isotope He-3], and they were good. And God continued to call number after number until He came to transuranium elements. But when He looked back on his work He found that it was not good. In the excitement of counting, He missed calling for mass five and so, naturally, no heavier elements could have been formed.

God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus, being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way.

And God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle… and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.

And Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by supernovae explosions. But in doing so he had to obtain the same abundance curve which would have resulted from nucleosynthesis in ylem, if God would not have forgotten to call for mass five.

And so, with the help of God, Hoyle made heavy elements in this way, but it was so complicated that nowadays neither Hoyle, nor God, nor anybody else can figure out exactly how it was done.

Amen."

Better shots of the "Great Unconformity" of the Grand Canyon, to help the lost little sheep Naturalists see the light... 👁️ 💡

~Sea 🌊

The link is to a review of Hud Hudson's book, The Fall and Hypertime (2014), which I think readers of this subreddit might be interested. In this book, Hudson presents a two-stage argument. First, he argues that a live option is a moderate-realist reading that of a real historical first sin by a small original community of newly rational hominids, after which they lose a preternatural harmony with God and nature. Second, he introduces the Hypertime Hypothesis in which the universe is a growing block, the blocks can be morphed, and in which God can place the relevant hyperplane of Adam and Eve leaving Eden onto the leading edge of a different block whose internal history is the billions-of-years scientific story. If personal identify survives the transplant, later humans can be their descendants, and they have evolved from earlier hominids in the new block, and their full trans-hypertemperal biography can still be described by a literal Gensis. Thus a very strong reading of the Fall need not contradict astronomy, geology, genetics, or evolutionary biology.

Whenever anyone asks where all the vegetation went during the flood they always assume all plant "life" was destroyed. However the purpose of the flood was to destroy all flesh that had the breath of life in it's nostrils.

For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die.
Genesis 6:17 ESV

Of course because they don't believe the written account, I then have to point out that plant matter floats and that's how we have trees older than the flood and how the insects, who were not purposefully brought aboard the ark, survived the flood. Even when you show them video evidence of a floating forest ecosystem they refuse to even consider it. I shared the following video to show how trees can survive floating on the surface of the water.

"A substantial forested floating island of trees has been spotted moving around a reservoir in Northern BC Canada." https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/x5aOvrBQR1

Here is a video of some trees being uprooted and floating upright down the river: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amazing/s/zV9ucf5rdV

Do you guys have better videos or arguments to answer this question?

https://canyonministries.org/great-unconformity-in-the-grand-canyon/

Measured subaerial erosion rates demonstrate that wind, rain, and water run-off wear down continental surfaces at a rate that would level entire landmasses in 10 to 20 million years. Yet, disconformity contact lines assigned age gaps of 30 to 50 million years remain razor-flat and un-eroded across hundreds of square miles. The very time invoked to explain the missing rock layers should have completely destroyed the underlying land. The "Great Unconformity" of the Grand Canyon is claimed to represent roughly "1.2 billion years" of time: What physical evidence demonstrates that the enormous missing interval was actually removed by erosion rather than simply never deposited at this location?

~Mark SeaSigh 🌊

(Edit: Question for Thought)
Let's discuss this fact of Geology: Why do the "Basement Rocks" of the Grand Canyon, at the "Great Unconformity," pass through Many of the sandstone layers surrounding the basement rocks, which are also Majorly deposited above the basement rocks? 🍎

The "Grand Unconformity" is anything but a "flat contact" as observed in the upper sedimentary lenses, that were laid down by hydrogeological processes in flat sheets hundreds of Cubic Miles across...

https://zenodo.org/records/22241582

Before the Ground Dried: Unconformity and Unmasking the Age of the Earth

TABLE OF CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: The Clues Left in the Clay
• PRELUDE: The Drying World: Earth as an Active Post-Catastrophic Sequence
PART I: THE ROCKS & THE LANDSCAPE
• CHAPTER 1: The Razor-Flat Rock Layers
• CHAPTER 2: The Shrinking SeaStacks
• CHAPTER 3: High-Altitude Spillways & Rapid Canyons
PART II: THE FOSSILS & THE SURFACES
• CHAPTER 4: The Shallow Burial Paradox
• CHAPTER 5: Washed-In Vegetation vs. Deep Forests
• CHAPTER 6: Unbroken Biomolecules in Ancient Bones
PART III: THE WATERS & THE SALT
• CHAPTER 7: Desert Evaporites & Subterranean Salt Domes
• CHAPTER 8: The Inland Marine Remnants
• CHAPTER 9: Trapped Sea Life & The Dilution of Inland Basins
PART IV: THE LOGICAL PARADOXES & CONTINENTAL BLANKETS
• CHAPTER 10: The Logical Paradoxes of Unconformities
• CHAPTER 11: Megasequences & Transgressive Sheet Sands
• CHAPTER 12: Radiometrics, the Cores, and the Clock
Final STATEMENT: The Unmasking of the Ground Beneath Us

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Exerpt from the Introduction)
Consider the razor-flat boundaries separating massive geological strata (rock layers). If millions of years elapsed between the deposition of one rock layer and the next, where is the evidence of that passage of time? Why do we find flat contact lines spanning hundreds of square miles with zero topsoil, zero ancient root channels, and zero trickle-erosion channels? How can vast spans of deep time simply vanish without leaving a trace in the physical dirt?

~Mark SeaSigh 🌊

I created a humorous yet respectful video about the Christian experience, loosely using the Darwinian theory of evolution as a metaphor (sort of my version of "The Story of Everything") (I created it quite a few years ago using FLASH - a little primitive, stylistically, but I had fun making it)

Distinguished Scientist Rob Stadler shows why evolutionism would need miracles indistinguishable from special creation to make common descent work! Rob briefly shows some work by Salvador Cordova. YAY!

Rob Stadler and the Conversations crew examine protein sequence space, experimental evolution, and orphan genes—genes with no clear evolutionary family history—to argue that universal common ancestry does not adequately explain many biological innovations. They evaluate proposed explanations including de novo gene birth, gene duplication, and horizontal gene transfer against a separate “forest of life” model.

References, projects, tools, and websites mentioned:

“Descent from a Common Ancestor Restricts Exploration of Protein Sequence Space” — Lada H. Isakova et al., PNAS, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2532018123

“Phenotypic and Molecular Evolution Across 10,000 Generations” — Johnson et al., eLife, 2021

Real Science Radio
https://kgov.com/real-science-radio

​

Mainstream conservation is built around named species and ever-finer subunits (subspecies, evolutionarily significant units, distinct population segments). The more genetic or geographic distinction that can be documented, the more justification there is for treating that group as its own unit that must be saved. The result is an expanding list that is practically impossible to manage.

A creationist framework suggests a clearer alternative.

Life is organized in kinds — created types that can produce a range of variation without becoming a different kind. New varieties keep appearing inside a kind; that is expected. The critical loss is not every local form, but the elimination of the kind itself or of the functional capacity the kind provides in its environment.

Conservation decisions would then ask two practical questions:

1. Is this a distinct kind, or is it variation within a kind that still has viable populations elsewhere?

2. What ecological roles does this kind (or this particular population) actually perform — pollination, seed dispersal, nutrient cycling, habitat structure, controlling other species, etc.?

Priority goes to preserving the kind and the functions it carries, not to freezing every temporary local variety. That is more realistic, more measurable, and less driven by taxonomic inflation.

This is one concrete place a creationist perspective can contribute something useful: a coherent unit of conservation that matches how variation actually works, instead of an ever-growing list of named slices that no one can fully protect. Curious how others here would refine or apply this.

In the Summer of 2020 Creationist and Intelligent Design proponent Salvador Cordova defeated Rutgers University Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Daniel Stern Cardinale with a simple question: "Can you name anyone [of good reputation and qualification] who thinks the human genome is improving?"

After a pause like deer frozen in headlights, Dr. Cardinale admitted the answer is "NO"!

Six years later, the data in favor of Salvador Cordova's claim that there is genetic entropy has only gotten stronger in the era of cheap and highly abundant DNA sequencing.

Sal attempts to frame the genetic entropy debate in terms of "Survival of the fittest at best Survival of the Least Damaged" and random variation/mutation erodes function and capability for the reason that for complex systems, "it's easier to break than make" when we make random changes to such systems. This now painfully obvious as the emerging fields of Bio Physics, and Bio Inspired Design are ascending in the modern technological culture.

Here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AKzSMyaY3w

I'm a YEC, and my usual haters tried to discredit my thread regarding the explanation of the appearance of age in Radiometric Dating.

The prevailing (and likely wrong) YEC view is there was accelerated nuclear decay in the past. I have protested frequently that YEC using bad arguments only hurt the YEC case, it doesn't help it. Accelerated Nuclear decay to explain the appearance of age has MANY problems, starting with the fact there is ZERO evidence Accelerated Nuclear decay on the required scale will actually work, and there is no theory on it's affect on nuclear structure around the universe.

I was at a creationist conference when a well-respected YEC Nuclear Physicist Eugene Chaffin suggested changed in the nuclear force was a possible mechanism. I stood up and politely objected by pointing out such an universe-wide change (isotropic) would affect the nuclear processes in stars, and what evidence do we have for that. To his credit, Dr. Chaffin said I made a really good point! Well, DUH!

As an alternative to the problem of appearance of age in Radiometric dating, I suggested that the emerging research into into the field of quasi particles (which has won at least 4 Nobel Prizes shared among 11 individuals so far) offers a clear path. An now experimental evidence from a credible lab has come in as reported in Nature Communications.

It was once believed nuclear Fusion happens only at insane temperatures (like that inside the Sun), but we have now credible evidence from a prestigious University (UC Davis) that the phenomenon can happen at low temperatures in solids (ahem, cold fusion).  This was actually confirmed in what is known as Muon-catalyzed fusion that happens at near absolute zero (see below), but now we may be able to generate the phenomenon without muons.  The experiments still need a lot of fiddling, but it is entirely possible simple compression of rocks can generate the phenomenon, and thus the tectonic activity during Noah's flood might have been able to cause nuclear by products that look like radio active decay!

The report of the UC Davis Experiment is here:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/when-it-comes-fusion-materials-matter

"Their approach sets up a way to study and engineer nuclear reactions within SOLID materials, opening a new field of “materials-driven fusion.”

The biggest effect was at the lowest energies, below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV), where theory predicts fusion rates drop off sharply. Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.)

Fusion was demonstrated at near absolute zero using Muons.  See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

An alternative to Muons is quasi-particles.  At least 11 people shared 4 Nobel prizes in the field of quasi-particle research.  One of the most bizarre Nobel prize-winning experiments "decomposed" an electron into 3 particles:  "spinon", "orbiton", "holon".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin%E2%80%93charge_separation

This raised the fundamental question of whether there are any actual particles at all, or are they just aggregates of quantum phenomenon.  See Laughlin and Pines (laughlin won Nobel Prize in Physics):

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.97.1.28  

We use quasi particles in everyday electronics.  LEDs use excitons, and semiconductor chips use positively charged electron holes.  Excitons are used by plants, and plants transport excitons more efficiently than any human devices (even our best solar cells).

Of interest is the quasi particle known as the Heavy-Electron quasi particle that is up to 1000 heavier than a conventional electron!  Heavy electrons are postulated to mimic the behavior of muons in fusion reactions.  Respected  nuclear physicist Anthony Zuppero postulated heavy electrons as the catalyst for both FUSION and FISSION reactions in the solid state and postulated that even simple compression of rocks can create nuclear reactions.  The theoretical outline of Zuppero's postulation his here:

Catalysis of Transmutations by Heavy Electron Quasiparticles in Crystallites

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05603

Relevant compression experiments that were conducted by distinguished professor of Physical Chemistry, JMO Bockris, were conducted at Texas A&M.  Unsurprisingly, he was subject to intense persecution for his heretical ideas.  But I realized, why would such a distinguished scientist risk his life-long reputation for a lie???  In retrospect it seems he was right, and new experiments should be conducted with compression of rocks and dirt!  Here was a riveting account of his experiments with compression of dirt (aka coffee pot explosions):

The History Of The Discovery Of Transmutation At Texas A&M

University

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BockrisJthehistory.pdf

[I'm sorry I don't visit my friends at reddit very often anymore. Reddit is a highly toxic environment, and I only visit on occasion to say hi to my friends who are still here. God-willing there will be other venues where we all can connect outside of reddit.

And a word to my haters and detractors. I've grown tired of dealing with people who "multiply words without knowledge". Some of my detractors claiming knowledge of science can't even get basic biochemistry right, much less more sophisticated issues. For example:

Dr. Dan's promoter, Special Edward "sweary" biochemist, gets humiliated on racemization in proteins

https://youtu.be/OyuqfkuVTMM?si=JRryZ7Gunw-XsybO

]

Hello!

Just wanted to ask your opinion on this Donny Budinsky fellow.

He seems to be the only one producing creationist content on a variety of subjects, including ERVs. Like, he has a complete monopoly on these subjects for the past several years.

Does anybody take him seriously?

I'm thinking about refuting some of his arguments, but if nobody expects him to get things right in the first place, then there's no point, I guess.