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| Chapter 2. Miller’s Experiment And Other Origin Of Life Experiments B. Setting the Stage: Miller’s Experiment The chemicals used in and produced by living organisms tend to be different from those found elsewhere in nature. Among many other things, living systems are characterized by a prevalent use of enzymes and proteins. Enzymes and proteins are both made up of long chains of what are called amino acids. Therefore, amino acids may properly be thought of as the building blocks of life. See Appendix A. Section 2. for a discussion on amino acid structure and Appendix A. Section 3. for a discussion on enzyme structure. The simplest amino acid is called glycine. It is chemically equal to a molecule of vinegar combined with a molecule of ammonia. Glycine is inherently a simple chemical combination, yet it does not form naturally and spontaneously anywhere on the earth apart from the action of living organisms. Besides glycine, there are 19 other amino acids coded for by the DNA in a living cell. How did physical life originate? Is it truly a natural product of the normal laws of science? Or, is it the result of the creative efforts of a Living God? Can the things we scientifically observe from nature shed any light on these questions? Most professors in most universities today are secular humanists. It has been this way for much of the past 100 years. A secular humanist believes that physical life formed as the natural result of the normal laws of nature working over long periods of time. He believes that these laws are adequate to account for everything we observe around us today. He rejects any claims to the existence of a Living God who has worked and still works within the domain of a creation that He brought into existence. However, the origin of life has always been a thorny problem for evolutionists and humanists. The kinds of chemicals appearing in living systems are frequently extremely complicated and are not typical of those found outside of living systems. Thus, these chemicals do not seem to appear spontaneously. So, where did life come from? In 1953, a young graduate student at the University of Chicago named Stanley Miller appeared to solve the problem. He assumed that the atmosphere on earth in the earliest days of its history might have been similar to that of the planet Jupiter today. Jupiter contains an atmosphere of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water. Jupiter also has large storms that produce lots of lightning. So, Miller designed an experiment in which he mixed methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water in a spark chamber. He then zapped the mixture with a spark. His experiment paralleled what is taking place on Jupiter today. His results startled the world. He produced amino acids! The four simplest amino acids are called glycine, alanine, glutamic acid, and aspartic acid. Miller produced all four of these simple amino acids while running his experiment. Altogether, about four percent of the carbon that Miller introduced into the spark chamber was converted into these four amino acids. This experiment opened up a new branch of science, that of studying in a laboratory how life might have formed on earth using various assumed initial conditions. So, for instance, in the various different experiments the initial, starting mixtures would sometimes contain formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, or cyanide as well as some of the raw materials Miller used. Different energy sources such as ultraviolet light or even hot water were used. The results of running these experiments showed that some raw materials and energy sources favored the formation of sugars. Others favored the formation of certain kinds of amino acids. Yet others favored various components used in making RNA or DNA. Things seemed to be going well at first. It seemed that there was some combination of energy and raw materials that could be used to form almost any desired building block component for a living cell. However, each one of the experiments, no matter what conditions were tested, invariably reached dead ends. After an initial period of excitement, very little new progress has been made in this area during the last thirty years. One major problem was tar formation. The various experiments tend either to produce nothing or produce lots of tar.1 However, they do not produce living cells, they do not produce enzymes. They do not produce RNA. They do not even produce self-replicating molecules. Worst of all, they do not even produce the hypothetical “pre-life soup” of a rich concentration of cellular building block molecules. This soup is typically presented as historical fact. However, even under the controlled conditions of a laboratory where the most brilliant scientists in the world can manipulate conditions at will, no satisfactory “soup” has ever been produced. Surprisingly enough, Miller’s original experiment is actually the closest anyone has come to forming such a soup. This was due to the high amounts of hydrogen he included in his initial atmosphere, but which has since been acknowledged to have been unrealistic—hydrogen is so light that it very rapidly escapes earth’s gravitational pull and becomes lost to outer space. Miller’s experiment produced more products at closer to a usable concentration than any that have followed after him. In Miller’s own words, talking in an October, 1996 interview about his early experiment, he said, “The surprise of the experiment was the very large yield of amino acids. We would have been happy if we got traces of amino acids, but we got around 4%. Incidentally, this is probably the biggest yield of any similar prebiotic experiment conducted since then.”2 So, no one has really improved on his original experiment. Yet, we shall show that his products were not even close to providing an adequate starting point for the formation of life. It is amazing that when one cuts through all of the empty rhetoric about a pre-life soup that evolutionists so proudly proclaim to be fact, he finds that there is essentially no substance to the claims. After more than fifty years of effort, with lots of fame at stake for anyone who could be successful, no scientist has ever been able to form a useful soup starting with reasonable pre-life conditions of any kind. Talk about dead ends. No one has ever been able to improve on the results of Miller’s original experiment. All known experiments that start with raw, basic building block chemicals such as methane and ammonia eventually run into dead ends. No matter how long an experiment is allowed to run, it never forms a soup with a useful concentration and useful variety of chemicals. It forms either nothing or it forms lots of tar.5 This is observation, consistent observation. This is what scientists should present as the results of pre-life experiments. It is our thesis that these dead ends are the inevitable result of the normal laws of science acting normally. The laws of science work against a natural formation of life, they do not promote it. The dead ends reached by these experiments are exactly what we would predict based on applying certain basic principles of chemical behavior. Hence, our predictions are confirmed by experiment. Science teaches that a natural origin of life is impossible. We will discuss many of these problems which lead to dead ends in our section on the 16 Fatal Roadblocks Against A Natural Origin Of Life. First though, for the sake of the discussion, it will help to have a reference point. We will use Miller’ s experiment as that reference point. Most of the essential products necessary to form a living cell were NOT produced by Miller’s experiment. Although various other experiments were able to produce some of the missing products, these other experiments invariably gave smaller yields than did Miller’s, both in concentration of product formed and in the number of different products produced. Hence, for our discussion, we will focus on Miller’s experiment. It is the best known of all similar experiments, its results are readily available with a simple Internet search, and it gave the best results. I once was dialoging in an Internet discussion group with some people about these issues. A certain individual was constantly criticizing my use of Miller’s experiment. He said he had in his files copies of over 200 other experiments that he claimed gave better results than did Miller’s. Much of my discussion had featured certain mathematical calculations based on Miller’s results, similar to what we will also be looking at later on in this pamphlet. Finally, I challenged the individual to use the results from any of these other 200 experiments, substitute them in the calculations, and show how they invalidated any of the calculations or conclusions. My claim was that it would not matter which experiment he used as a basis for the calculations, he would still ultimately end up with effectively the same results. The reason was that the results were due to underlying principles of chemistry and that these principles were solid. Interestingly enough, he never brought up the issue again. It is these principles and calculations that we will present in our discussion of the sixteen fatal roadblocks. |