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Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger
Note also, for the record, that it's an incredibly dishonest argument, since in the essay, Asimov was writing about how the structure of hemoglobin was worked out by biochemists. And his entire point was that the structure of hemoglobin couldn't have been worked out [by biochemists] via a trail-and-error method. [Similarly, though this wasn't his point, it couldn't be the result of amino acids just coming together randomly.] His point was that there are non-random means of working out the structure.
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Originally Posted by Isaac Asimov
How did the biochemists do it?
The fact is that straight trial-and-error technique would have been an unbearable trial and a colossal error. So they used other methods. There are other methods, you know.
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The original article ["Hemoglobin and the Universe"] first appeared in the February, 1955 issue of Astounding magazine; it was anthologized in 1957 in Only A Trillion. One of the points was that -- at the time of the writing -- nobody knew how proteins were made, because Watson and Crick had just worked out the structure of DNA, and it wasn't yet understood how the arrangement of nucleotides in DNA specified the arrangement of amino acids in proteins.
We have, of course, learned a lot since then. As Asimov noted in a 1976 note regarding the original 1955 article:
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Originally Posted by Isaac Asimov
Since this article was first written in July, 1954, chemists have discovered many details about the hemoglobin molecule.
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There is no longer any basic mystery as to how the body manufactures hemoglobin molecules, with all the amino acids correctly in place. In 1953, the year before this article was first written, James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the way in which the nucleic acid molecules of the chromosomes duplicated themselves. Other chemists went on to discover how the structure of the nucleic acids was used to guide the formation of chains of amino acids in a particular order. The basic details of all this you can find in my book The Genetic Code.
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Thanks, Mr. Ranger.
I will now dutifully link these posts and any future posts to the troll. It's an amusing thread; read when you have time.