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| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
| Chapter 3. Sixteen Fatal Roadblocks against a Purely Natural Formation of Life. Fatal Roadblock Number 1. Tar Formation. As we mentioned, the number one product Stanley Miller produced was tar. This was not because of some peculiarity of Miller’s experiment, rather it was simply the outworking of basic scientific principles. It was what we should expect if we think through the process. Indeed, since 1953 when Miller first published his results, there have been hundreds of other experiments performed. These various experiments have used numerous variations of raw source materials, energy sources, and operating temperatures. Scientists have essentially exhausted their creativity in trying to improve on Miller’s results. Yet, the major product of all of them is tar. Sir Fred Hoyle, the British Royal Astronomer, summarizes the situation with these words: “Nothing happens when organic materials are subjected to the usual prescriptions of showers of sparks or drenched in ultraviolet light, except the eventual production of a tarry sludge.” 3 This is important: During the past 50 years scientists have exhausted their creativity in attempting to create a truly useful soup using assumed natural conditions. Yet, all they produced was tar and a few incidental products on their way to becoming tar. These results contradict the folk-lore of evolution, i.e., that the laws of science favor a spontaneous formation of life. The idea behind spontaneous formation is that origin-of-life processes are not critical, that they can tolerate wide variations in conditions and still be effective. In fact, they are so uncritical that random conditions in a pre-life world will be adequate to make the eventual appearance of life inevitable. Experimentally, we observe the exact opposite to be the case. A laboratory allows a scientist to have precise control of an environment. Slight changes of any desired parameter can be introduced at will. However, no matter how the conditions are varied, all anyone ever gets is tar. This raises a truly significant issue: if satisfactory results are not possible in a controlled environment, how could they be inevitable in an uncontrolled environment? Since tar is the primary product of pre-life scenarios, it is worth discussing a little bit. There is a primary problem caused by tar formation, that of isolation. The molecules internal to the tar goo are isolated from the raw source chemicals that would be needed to continue their progress towards becoming a useful enzyme or some other structure. The interior molecules are randomly joined together in an inert, useless hodge-podge. Thus, once a molecule becomes part of the goo, it becomes useless for anything productive. In a growing glob, the molecules at the surface one minute are part of the inert interior soon afterwards. If the true goal is to produce some kind of enzyme, or even just something that even remotely resembles any kind of enzyme, the tar problem is serious. Why is the tar produced? The answer is not really that difficult to understand. Living cells require an internal liquid water environment to function properly. In fact, a long chain of amino acids will not acquire the shape of a target enzyme unless it is in a water environment. Furthermore, water, as a universal solvent, acts as a transport mechanism to allow the various different molecules in a cell to find each other and then interact with each other. However, a molecule of water has an interesting structure. It is composed of two hydrogen atoms combined with one oxygen atom. Each hydrogen atom has a single positive charge. By contrast, the oxygen atom has two negative charges. Thus, the positive charges on the hydrogen atoms cancel out the negative charges on the oxygen atom. However, there is a weird characteristic of water. Both of the hydrogen atoms stay close to each other on the same side of the oxygen atom. So, if another molecule gets close to the hydrogen atoms, it will sense the positive charges on the hydrogen atoms more effectively than it does the negative charges on the oxygen atom. So, that portion of the water molecule near the hydrogen atoms appears to have a positive charge. Likewise, if a molecule is closer to the oxygen atom than the hydrogen atoms, it will sense the two negative charges on the oxygen atom more strongly than the positive charges on the hydrogen atoms. In this case the water molecule will appear to have a negative charge. So, even thought the overall water molecule is electrically neutral, the hydrogen end seems to be positive and the oxygen end negative. This characteristic is called polarity. So, water is an electrically polar molecule. Electrical polarity has a huge impact on the behavior of water molecules. The positive end of one molecule will attempt to get as close as it can to the negative end of another molecule. This attraction produces a force called “surface tension.” It is why wet sand at the beach is stiffer and easier to walk on than loose, dry sand. The surface tension in a thin coat of water acts as a weak cement bonding the grains of sand together, producing a stiffer surface for walking. In a solution of organic chemicals dissolved in water, the electrical attraction between water molecules for each other is strong enough to cause them to try to push aside any unpolarized molecules in their vicinity. Most carbon-based molecules are non-polar. These non-polar molecules are unwelcome guests in a water-molecule party, and the water molecules rudely try to push them aside as they squeeze past them to find other water molecules. The result is that if there are several non-polar molecules near each other and if they accidentally come in contact with each other, the water’s surface tension will cause them to tend to stay together instead of drift apart. So, the first step in making tar is the very natural process of water molecules pushing together unpolarized molecules. This is one of the more fundamental, basic characteristics of chemical behavior. Indeed, we have all heard of why oil and water do not mix. This is why. The next step has to do with the various kinds of bonds between atoms. The strongest and most- well known are ionic bonds and co-valent bonds. These bonds form crystals and molecules. There are also three weaker kinds of bonds. They are known as hydrogen bonds, Van Der Wals forces, and London-disbursion forces. Non-polar molecules can lightly bond to each other because of these weaker bonds. The larger the molecules are, the more effective these bonds become and the more likely they are to bond to each other. A group of weakly bonded molecules is called an aggregate. If the aggregate becomes large enough, it can precipitate out of solution. A precipitated aggregate of unspecified, weakly-bonded molecules is what Miller referred to as tar. Methane is a non-polar molecule. In an origin-of-life environment, one of the more common ways that molecules can be made more complex is by the addition of methane molecules. The larger a randomly formed molecule becomes and the more locations it has within itself of methane molecules grouped together, the greater the tendency of the molecule to aggregate. The natural tendency is for aggregates to get added to the tar goo. Our point here is that it is not an accident that so much tar is formed in the various origin-of-life experiments. This is a natural process. It is exactly what one should expect when basic principles are applied to the situation. A fully developed, living cell has means to deal with the tendency to form tar. This goes so far as to include the existence of extremely complex mechanisms called chaperones. However, a random combination of chemicals in a pre-life environment does not have these means. The result: origin-of-life scenarios produce tar, not enzymes. They produce tar, not long chains of RNA. They produce tar, not living cells. When theory leads one to predict certain observed results in a given set of conditions and when observed, experimental results are in agreement with the prediction, then it is reasonable to say that the rules of science demonstrate the predicted behavior. The rules of science lead us to predict that tar would be formed by “origin-of-life” processes—not enzymes, not self-replicating molecules, and not living cells. A wide-ranging variety of experiments are all in agreement with these predictions. Hence, it is reasonable to say that the natural tendency for organic chemicals combining under pre-life conditions is to form tar, not physical life nor even the more complex molecules required for physical life. The principles behind the strong tendency for tar formation present a fatal roadblock against a natural origin of life. |