Originally posted by Yorzhik
I’m not a biologist, so I had to ask someone with a degree in biology about this.
Hydrogen is an atom, not a molecule. But let’s assume you are talking about H2, it has nowhere near as much energy as a DNA molecule.
We know this because of the amount of energy it takes to take apart and put together an H2 molecule as opposed to a DNA molecule are vastly different. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to take apart and put together a DNA molecule. In fact, if it were not for enzymes, DNA could not be manipulated because the energy required to do the job would destroy the DNA. So, Barbarian, are you willing to say that H2 requires enzymes because of its energy requirements?
The DNA molecule tends to break down easily if it is removed from its cell. Even organisms that have no cell wall still require a pool to protect its DNA.
As Stanley Miller's experiments showed, raw energy can indirectly create some building blocks of life. Miller would have loved for the process to have made more progress. The process involved adding energy to a chemical soup and in their high energy states; some of the chemicals came down to form those building blocks. So the actual bonding of the building blocks of life are going from high energy to low energy, but the “building blocks of the building blocks” had to have energy added to them so they had somewhere to come down from.
But to get to the *next* bigger building block, one has to add energy to the smaller building blocks so they can come down into place. They already have a great deal of the original energy they were constructed with (even though it was a downhill process) and the amount of energy to get to the next bigger molecule is even greater, and will contain a greater amount of energy together than the building blocks had alone.
It is not that Miller could not provide the energy necessary to build the molecules. It is not that DNA can somehow avoid using the energy Miller was trying to put into the process. It is that the energy cannot be raw energy, and much of that energy is still left in the molecule once construction is finished.
