By Michael David Rawlings
http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2011/03/years-of-experience-have-shown-me-that_06.htmlExcerpt:
I recently posed a question on Yahoo! Answers and prefaced it with a brief summary of the results derived from the Miller-Urey experiments of 1952 in the light of current science. Of course, the underlying hypothesis on which the experiments were originally based has been falsified, but we learned plenty. While I discussed a number of the problems associated with it, I neglected to emphatically state what that hypothesis was . . . just to see what sort of fish I might catch.
The following is the full version of the necessarily condensed one that appeared on Yahoo! Answers. . . .
A Yahoo! Answers resident, Lord Fluffy Tail, recently offered up the following quote in answer to a question about origins:
In 1951, the American Miller succeeded to form organic matter out of a mixture of ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water (H2O) by exposing this mixture to an electric current. During the experiments different organic mixtures were formed, among them amino acids and nucleic acids. These acids are essential for the building of proteins and chromosomes. —ORACLE ThinkQuest
Miller-Urey has been falsified for years; that is to say, the experiments' parameters and conditions were shown to be incongruent and the results, negative. The reasons for this are legion and very complex, yet textbooks continue to relate these experiments with the same sort of blurb in the above as if they were still something more than an historical footnote. An avalanche of innumerable Internet sites—most of them put up by atheistic, know-nothing layman—continue to tout them as being something that still matters along with theory that is years, even decades, behind current science.
For example, it doesn't appear that the author of Lord Fluffy Tail's source knows that the atmosphere of the primeval world was more oxygen-rich even earlier than he supposes and was generally more oxidizing than reducing—necessary for life, but not friendly to the formation of amino acids. In other words, the actual conditions were considerably more hostile to the prospects of abiogenesis than those of the Miller-Urey experiments. The primordial soup keeps getting driven deeper and deeper into the ocean where, once again, another battery of problematic conditions confound the imbecilic notions of chemical evolutionists.
Also, the author of this source writes that the "origin of life out of lifeless matter is called biogenesis." Uh . . . no. But that's probably just a typo. Biogenesis pertains to the Pasteurian theory that
omne vivum ex vivo, i.e.,
all life is from life. The idea that life may arise from non-living matter goes by the name of spontaneous generation or, in accordance with contemporary theory, abiogenesis.
But the most startling bit of information divulged by this author—which is not a typo, but a UFO—consists of the claim that the Miller-Urey experiments produced nucleic acids.
What? Stop the presses! News flash!
Trust me. They did not produce nucleic acids or anything else like them.
What the published Miller-Urey experiments did produce were small concentrations of at least 5 amino acids and the molecular constituents of others. The dominant material produced by the experiments was an insoluble carcinogenic mixture of tar—large compounds of toxic mellanoids, a common end product in organic reactions. However, it was recently discovered that the published experiments actually produced 14 amino acids (6 of the 20 fundamentals of life) and 5 amines in various concentrations. In 1952, the technology needed to detect the even smaller trace amounts of prebiotic material was not available. But the unpublished Miller-Urey experiments conducted in that same year show that a modified version of Miller's original apparatus, which increased air flow with a tapering glass aspirator, produced 22 amino acids (still only 6 of the fundamentals) and the same 5 amines.
The significance of the recently uncovered results produced by the altered apparatus does not go to the synthesis of proteins as a result of the inherent chemical properties of their molecular precursors within atmospheric conditions that entail a more vaporous, volcanic-gas-like mixture of steam. It goes to the more impressive results that are derived under these simulated conditions coupled with the potentialities of the RNA-world hypothesis and its obligatory molecular precursors. Hence, Senior Correspondent Stephen K Ritter misses the target when he assumes that the team of researchers who analyzed the results of the unpublished experiments "speculate that amino acids formed in volcanic island systems could have been polymerized by carbonyl sulfide—volcanic gas—to form peptides leading to proteins" (Stephen K. Ritter; Oct. 16, 2008; "Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited"; Chemical and Engineering News-Prebiotic Chemistry).
They could not have sensibly speculated any such thing, as it is well known that amino acids do not form lasting peptide bonds (much less proteins) under any natural conditions outside living organisms. And this is true under laboratory conditions as well, whether their mixtures be racemic, as is always the case in nature on Earth, or even if they be artificially homochiral.
The original apparatus of the published experiments simulated a strictly reducing atmosphere consisting of hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water, but as Ritter in the same article observes "scientists who have analyzed Miller's experiments doubt that the highly reducing reaction conditions he used existed on early Earth"; however, the apparatus equipped with the aspirating mechanism simulated the more "intense conditions of a lightning-laced volcanic eruption." Hence, the researchers aver that "[t]he volcanic apparatus experiment suggests that, even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective". Precisely! But what the researchers mean by the word "effective" goes to the formation of amino acids only, and only within the domains of semi-reducing, carbonyl-sulfide-producing atmospheres of "volcanic island systems", as the more generally oxidizing atmosphere beyond would prevent their formation.
The problem with this scenario is that under natural conditions the newly created precursors could not have stayed inside these atmospheric enclaves for long, for unlike the artificial conditions calculatedly arranged within the apparatuses of laboratories, which artificially remove biotic materials from the synthesizing medium once they are formed, nature would have continued to bombard them and thusly would have destroyed them with the very same source of energy it used to create them. Worse, the vastly more copious abiotic materials that would have also been produced would have continued to react with the racemic mixtures of the biotic materials within the synthesizing medium and would have readily incorporated the latter into compounds that would have been utterly useless for life.
Miller's experiment did produce . . . amino acids, but only by continuously circulating the reaction mixture and isolating products as they were formed. The quantities were still tiny and not in the same proportions as found in nature.
One of the causes of the low yield has been identified by [Edward] Peltzer who worked with Miller. As the amino acids were formed they reacted with reducing sugars . . . forming a brown tar around Miller's apparatus. Ultimately, Miller was producing large compounds called mellanoids, with amino acids as an intermediate product. —J. H. John Peet (Oct. 2005), "The Miller-Urey Experiment", Truth in Science
But the real problem for the synthesis of amino acids in a reducing atmosphere is that in spite of the latter's abundance of free electrons, it would not have provided an ozone layer to protect the amino acids it produced. If the electrical energy that induced their synthesis in one instant did not reduce them to their basic elements or induce harmful reactions in the next, the entire range of UV light's wavelengths would have slapped them silly. And biologically useful organic compounds do not form in oxidizing atmospheres.
Perplexing.
That is why the out-gassing calculations based on chondritic models of planetary formation, which support a reducing atmosphere for the primordial world, do not solve the initial problem of an abiogenic account of life's origins.3 Indeed, chondritic models, in spite of their apparent credibility and that of their inherent calculations, do not explain away the equally compelling and essentially incontrovertible geological evidence that supports an early oxidizing atmosphere.
Perplexing.
It would appear that the problem of resolving the nature of the primordial world's atmosphere requires some sort of synthesis of the two possibilities. But even if the constituents of abiogenesis were profitably given over to the thralls of a semi-reducing atmosphere all those many years ago, we see no evidence of that today. The geological record should contain an overflowing abundance of nitrogen-rich mineral deposits. It doesn't.
Still, despite the paltry concentrations of organic materials produced relative to the energy expended, the best bet for abiogenesis would have been a semi-reducing atmosphere akin to the model simulated by the altered apparatus in the unpublished experiments. At least the organic materials produced in those were slightly more voluminous and diverse. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that the dynamics of the altered atmospheric model would have moved the materials away from the lingering dangers inside the synthesizing medium, past the threats beyond, and into the primordial soup of the oceans below more rapidly.
It's all pie-in-the-sky nonsense, of course, but as long as we're already suspending disbelief far above any reasonable altitude, we might as well go along with the tale forever: never mind the threats beyond the synthesizing medium, never mind the ubiquitous cross-reaction contaminants, never mind that water pushes peptidyl bonding backward, not forward, would disperse the constituents of proteins and condemn most of them to the whims of a churning and lonely isolation, and never mind most of all that the total amount of organic compounds on Earth today is less than a fraction of the lofty concentrations that would be reasonably favorable for the inscrutable processes of abiogenesis. After all, the other precursors of life, which improbably braved and overcame the same obstacles, have need of their prebiotic cousins. The long and arduous journey toward self-awareness must go on by way of an even more implausible series of elaborately complex and fortuitous accidents.
The Miller-Urey experiments showed that under the right conditions nature might be able to build some of life's amino acids; later discoveries in space and here on Earth confirmed that. But that in and of itself was not the rhyme or the reason of the experiments' underlying hypothesis, and beyond that, what have these experiments shown us? Well, not much about that which was expected, but plenty more about that which is obvious.
The natural occurrence of amino acids is light years away from life, and there exists no coherent or demonstrable explanation for how they aggregated and combined by mere chance in the exact sequences we find in life. And even if such a thing were possible, we'd still not be there.
How did the many hundreds of thousands of mindless proteins and other molecular components, which can only function within a very narrow range of conditions, aggregate and combine in the exact sequences required to build the thousands of intricately complex and interdependent pieces of machinery minimally required by a viable, functioning cell? The process could not have been accumulative, but had to have been instantaneously synchronous for obvious reasons. All these things evince a certain set of preconditions and necessities which stupid materialist layman will never understand and agenda-driven scientists will never acknowledge.
(As for those still operating under the sleight-of-hand illusion that the refutation of Behe's flagellum argument overthrows the classic construct of irreducible complexity, see "Labsci and I Discuss Evolution" and "The Debate with Labsci Continues. . . .".)
If one allows that an intelligent agent was required to create the simplest form of life, one opens the door to a world where the regnant theory for the development of life might unravel. If an intelligent agent did it once, what would prevent him from creating other and even more complex forms of life again and again?
We now know that life arose much earlier than was ever thought possible, and the ramifications of this are devastating for abiogenesis, which just keeps running into wall after wall after wall. And the more apparent the complexity of the genome and the infrastructural machinery and processes of the cell becomes, the denser the walls become.
We really don't have a clue about how to explain any of this without considering the necessity of a preexistent intelligence, which is precisely why more and more evolutionists are hesitantly going where they don't want to go. . . . While it still would not resolve the matter of origins, at the very least the evidence points to intelligent extraterrestrials. And that is precisely the point ID scientists have been making for years.
Atheism is poisoning science. Intellectual fascists are arbitrarily asserting a metaphysical naturalism against the evidence. . . .
http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2011/03/years-of-experience-have-shown-me-that_06.html