RE: Scientist Makes Organic Matter out of Inorganic Matter
June 28, 2010 at 1:36 am
(This post was last modified: June 28, 2010 at 2:16 am by The_Flying_Skeptic.)
(June 25, 2010 at 10:00 am)Welsh cake Wrote:(June 24, 2010 at 5:14 pm)The_Flying_Skeptic Wrote: An organic compound simply contains carbon excluding compounds that are composed of solely carbon such as diamond or graphite.Correction, the allotropes of carbon (Diamond, Graphite, Lonsdaleite, C60 Buckminsterfullerene/buckyball, C540, C70, Amorphous carbon, and single-walled carbon nanotube/ buckytube) are all considered inorganic, not of biological origin.
i guess i made a mistake by saying 'simply' carbon but i did not mean 'solely' carbon i meant 'nothing more than' a molecule 'containing' carbon. I think I even added some examples of inorganic carbon containing molecules. I'd correct you slightly on suggesting that all organic substances have' biological origin' because organic substances are known also to form independently of biological processes (living organisms).
Quote:TFS: Are organic substances sometimes produced independently of living things (and their by-products) in nature?
Quote:Welsh: At which point its no longer an organic compound you're dealing with, its inorganic. These are the useful yet arbitrary distinctions between "organic" and "inorganic", "natural" and "synthetic" that were established and accepted today when the theory of Vitalism was disproved.
organic chemistry studies organic molecules and organic molecules contain carbon excluding the allotropes of carbon. I'm sure proteins would be considered an organic molecule no matter if it was produced synthetically, by an organism, or on an meteorite (independent of biological processes).
"Proteins (also known as polypeptides) are organic compounds made of amino acids arranged in a linear chain and folded into a globular form." - wiki
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound edit: i see that this link was your source mostly but you forgot to mention other details mentioned in this article "even though many of the "organic compounds" known today have no connection whatsoever, material or structural, to any substance found in living organisms."
hm, you'd done better to bring up Wöhler's 1828 synthesis of urea from the inorganic salts potassium cyanate and ammonium sulfate demonstrating that inorganic substances may indeed produce an 'organic substance' disproving the claim that organic substances have never been created out of inorganic substances. you have to understand, welsh, that the whole point of this thread is to make people aware of the true meaning of these words.
