Then someone can link to me how exactly they detected the small RNA particles they did in the lab experiments. They didn't know if they would form and they didn't know what they would look like but they detected them so they obviously have a way of detecting RNA by some means. Otherwise those labs are just flat out lying which I highly doubt they are.
It's easy, you start in an entirely sterile environment and sterile reagents and you try to copy possible early earth conditions and you get short DNA fragments. This is an entirely different thing than taking environmental samples and trying to detect spontaneously generated RNA fragments because we cannot differentiate those fragments from bacterial RNA's. Spontaneously generated RNA would be indistinguishable from unknown bacterial RNA's, and even if we know every single RNA that every bacteria had we couldn't rule out that an unknown sequences wasn't from a mutated bacteria or a degraded RNA segment. A spontaneously generated RNA fragment would have a random sequence.
A common and easily made criticism of these lab created short fragments is that they were created in a lab and not nature, I'm sure you yourself use the same argument if someone asks you if the creation of these short fragments of RNA in a lab is evidence that spontaneity generation is possible. Creation of fragments in a lab under sterile conditions is an entirely different beast than detecting such fragments in the environment. There is no way to separate spontaneously derived RNA and bacterial RNA in a sample because there would be no chemical difference between those RNA fragments. A single strand of spontaneous RNA would have it's signal overcome by environmental RNA's in PCR machines and Gels.
I have read umpteen articles including the one linked to the Harvard Gazette that state that DNA abiogenisis has in fact fallen out of favor to RNA or other methods. I am assuming that he hasn't been in the field for a few years because if he was still active then he would be aware of that.
There are dozens of hypothesis, all very very difficult to prove, and very few have been eliminated. I think that within my lifetime we will have a full theory of abiogenesis. That you don't like the RNA world hypothesis for poor reasons doesn't have any relation to my knowlege of these different hypothesis or which one is currently en vogue. The argument that are inability to detect spontaneously generated RNA fragments in nature is a terrible argument against the RNA world hypothsis because we cannot currently test for such RNA sequences in nature. I don't think we will ever actually be able to detect them on earth occurring in nature because of the nature of such RNA fragments.
Also, the popularity of a particular hypothesis has nothing to do with anything, only the actual evidence to back them up matters. The evidence suggests that RNA's are more stable than DNA outside of a cell, and thus RNA's likely preceeded DNA. (there are a variety of other sources of evidence that RNA preceeded DNA) That is way the DNA first hypothesis has fallen away to the RNA first hypothesis, because RNA's are simply more stable.
I am not a scientist but I do have critical thinking skills. Claiming that every time a RNA molecule its formed its eaten is silly because that assumes a 100% consumption rate which is impossible especially in the microscopic world where you have millions of organisms in a small volume. I have taken a few physics classes. Every system has inefficiency in it including ecosystems. RNA molecules are not small, they are huge and complex.
Not every single one would get eaten no, but that is not the main reason I have given you for our inability to detect them. We cannot create a probe to find them because we don't know their sequence, a spontaneously generated RNA would have a random sequence. We also cannot differentiate a spontaneous RNA from an unknown, mutated, or degraded segment of bacterial RNA if we just try to look at all the RNA sequences in a sample.
As I said if someone could link me to an article explaining my questions I have an open mind. Right now those questions remain unanswered though even from other scientists I have asked on sites like phys.org.
The limitations of RNA detection techniques are not something you are going to find easily outlined on a website, they are technical and involved. The few academic articles discussing them are behind paywalls. These are techniques and technologies that can take weeks to learn how to preform and years of study to understand. It's one thing for you to look at a page about a northern blot and say "well why don't they just use that to detect them?" These techniques are not foolproof, you can spend weeks repeatedly doing the same procedures over and over trying to figure out what's wrong with it, months trying to do it well enough to eke out significant results. these things have margins of error, and are inexact. It's not even something you can learn in a class, you cannot really appreciate the limits of these types of laboratory techniques without actually doing them yourself. I cannot fully think how to explain to you the incredible frustration that doing these sorts of things can give you. Even minor errors in your technique can completely destroy any useful data, and that is when you know what to look for.
You are demanding that scientists just whip out their magic box and do science at it till you get clear cut and beautiful data that totally proves that RNA's spontaneously develop in nature. It just doesn't work like that. It can take weeks to run even a tiny amount of data out of an RT-PCR machine when you know exactly what your looking for. It can take a year to get enough data to make a single paper out of it. Scientists are not magicians able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and identify an RNA that looks like every other RNA when that scientist has no idea what it looks like or how it could be differentiated from regular RNA even in theory, which is vastly easier than actually doing in practice. You don't seem to even come close to understanding the ridiculous amount of effort it takes to actually run even a minor and straight forward experiment, much less such a complex and daunting task as trying to find something that you don't have any way of knowing what it looks like, that exists on a scale that is impossible to directly see, using imperfect equipment, and with the human error that is inherent in every scientific endeavor.
Science is hard work, you have to do it mostly by hand, you work with microliters at a time using micropippets and you just have to hope that your hand was steady enough and you were accurate enough along a series of dozens of steps in a process that you have to do dozens of times that you didn't contaminate or loose an invisible molecule, that your machine isn't miscalibrated, that a piece of dust didn't fall into your tube, that you designed this entire process correctly, that the data has enough statistical significance, that the hypothesis you spent months of your life testing isn't just entirely wrong. It can take years to do even basic straight forward research.
You cannot haughtily demand that scientists just hurry up and hand you the positive results of a project that is probably impossible and would take a decade to complete even if someone just happened to be creative and clever enough to figure out a way to do it. One of the most mindbogglingly difficult part of science is that creative spark of inspiration that even starts a scientist to see a new hypothesis or experiment that would discover something new. The great scientists who proved that electrons and atoms existed, or that first discovered some law of physics, or discovered the shape of DNA are not lauded because they did a few quick experiments, they were lauded because they had a spark of creative insight that just doesn't pop up on demand. It's like demanding an author write the next great epic that will be taught in classes a thousand years from now. That initial creative insight doesn't happen just because we simply desire to prove something.
Edit:Well that turned into a rant.
TL;DR Science isn't magic, it's not that easy.
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