Chemical evolutionists believe that the atmosphere of the pre-biotic earth was very different from that which we have today. They believe that this atmosphere was subjected to external forces, such as the sun’s radiation and cosmic ray bombardment, as well as internal effects, such as thunder storms with their associated electrical discharges (in the form of lightning). As a result, chemical evolutionists believe that the simple inorganic compounds in that atmosphere reacted together and formed, among other things, simple organic compounds called amino acids.
Amino acids are the basic building blocks of proteins, which, in turn, are the building blocks of living things. Chemical evolutionists believe that, as well as amino acids, other chemicals that are found in living organisms also formed—chemicals such as sugars and compounds called nucleic acid bases, which are the building blocks of DNA. Chemical evolutionists then argue that these newly formed chemicals fell into the earth’s primeval ocean over a period of hundreds of millions of years and eventually gave rise to a solution of organic matter which is commonly referred to as the ‘primeval soup’.
Chemical evolutionists would have us believe that these basic organic compounds then assembled themselves, in the course of time and by chance natural processes, into rather complex organic compounds which were capable of self-replicating—that is, capable of producing exact copies of themselves. We are told that these compounds eventually assembled themselves, again by chance, into a living cell. It must be remembered, however, that the simplest living cell is incredibly complex—even more complex than the largest modern industrial manufacturing plant, with all its suppliers, sub-contractors and retailers as well as accountants. It is this enormous gap between the simple organic compounds and a living cell that is bridged by the chemical evolutionists’ speculations regarding the chance natural processes in the primeval soup. In other words, their speculations are designed to explain, in evolutionary terms, the origin of life itself.
It should be noted, however, that, at the time of writing, no one has yet synthesized anything remotely resembling a living cell in the laboratory. Using the basic components which chemical evolutionists maintain would have been present in the primeval soup, scientists have not been able to synthesize what might be called a ‘proto-cell’ which has some basic properties of life. Without such a ‘proof of principle’, explanations for the origin of life from non-life tend to be short on specifics, as we shall see.
No intelligence necessary?
One of the problems that we may face when we consider chemical evolution is that we are struggling with chemical names and chemical processes that are unfamiliar to us. This can sometimes confuse us and lead us to think that, because it is chemistry, these things can and will happen. In this chapter, we will see that the probability of natural processes alone producing a living organism from non-living chemicals is zero. However, evolutionists say that, since we are here, it must have happened in the way they describe—by chance natural processes without the intervention of any supernatural agent whatsoever. Because of this, we are sometimes tempted to believe that chemical evolution has taken place. But what if I asked you to believe that a completed jigsaw was the result of my throwing all the pieces of the jigsaw up into the air and their landing on the table in their correct positions, without the intervention of any intelligent dexterous person? You would not believe it, and quite right, too! So why are we tempted to believe the fairy stories of chemical evolutionists?
Interestingly, the philosophy of the chemical evolutionists can be summed up as follows. They think that, if they can synthesize life in the laboratory, they will have proven that no intelligence was necessary to form life on the pre-biotic earth. They seem to forget that, if they make a self-replicating system or living organism in their laboratories, it will have been as a result of their own cleverness. Their intelligence would have been responsible for the outcome of the experiment—from the design of the apparatus, the chemicals used in the experiment, the temperature and pressure under which the chemicals react and so on. However, they think that their carefully designed experiments reflect the random conditions that are supposed to have existed on the earth billions of years ago. They also believe that their carefully designed experiments reflect the chance natural processes that supposedly occurred on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth.
Undeterred, chemical evolutionists refer to one of the most famous chemical evolution experiments that has ever been carried out—famous, because it was the first. In 1953, Stanley Miller performed an experiment in the laboratory that allegedly showed that life had indeed evolved from non-life chemicals on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth.1 Miller circulated a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour around an apparatus that had two important components. The first was an electrical-discharge chamber—a place where the gases were subject to high-energy radiation. The other was a cold trap—a place where any organic compounds that formed in the electrical-discharge chamber could be trapped out and so could no longer be involved in the experiment. After circulating the gases for about a week, Miller showed that he had produced a mixture of amino acids—glycine, α-and β-alanine, aspartic acid and α-amino-butyric acid. Some sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed. As amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and as proteins are the building blocks of living systems, this experiment was hailed as proof that life had arisen from non-life chemicals on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth.
Since Stanley Miller’s experiment, other chemical evolutionists have manufactured, under a variety of conditions and using various gases, a variety of amino acids and sugars as well as other compounds that are found in living systems. Evolutionists have generally accepted these results uncritically, hailing them as incontrovertible evidence that life arose from non-life chemicals in the hypothetical pre-biotic earth’s ‘primeval soup’ billions of years ago.
These experiments, however, do not prove that chemical evolution occurred. All that such experiments show is that, under certain conditions, inorganic compounds can be converted into organic compounds—nothing more, nothing less! Furthermore, it can be shown that these experiments have nothing to do with the origin of life as they do not reflect the conditions that are thought to have existed on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth. In the next three sections of this chapter, we shall look carefully at this. In the first section we shall see why the construction of the apparatus used by Miller does not reflect the configuration of the atmosphere, and why the gases in the apparatus did not reflect the composition of the earth’s pre-biotic atmosphere as proposed by the chemical evolutionists. In the second section we shall consider the problems of synthesizing proteins. Then, in the third section, we shall look at the so-called ‘handedness’ of the amino acids and the nucleic acid sugars that we find in living systems.
The earth’s atmosphere
The first problem with Miller’s experiment is that the amino acids that were formed in the reaction chamber, where the gases were bombarded with high-energy radiation, were removed by means of a cold trap. This, however, does not reflect the configuration of the earth’s atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere does not have any such cold trap anywhere you care to look—either today or in the past, for that matter. There is nowhere where any simple organic compounds that exist (or have existed) in the atmosphere can be removed by being ‘frozen out’ by a cold trap. All the gases that are found in the atmosphere form a homogeneous mixture with no mechanism for any of the gases to be frozen out and therefore removed.
Because of the absence of such a cold trap in the atmosphere, the formation of simple organic compounds, such as amino acids, would not occur as readily as it does in laboratory experiments such as Miller’s. The reason for this is that the ultra-violet radiation which causes the amino acids to form from the methane-ammonia-hydrogen-water-vapour mixture also causes their decomposition. This means that, as soon as the amino acids form, they would begin to be destroyed by the ultra-violet
radiation. In laboratory experiments, this problem is overcome by the use of a cold trap which immediately removes the newly formed organic compounds out of the system, thus preventing their decomposition. Such a cold trap was not present on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth, hence any organic compounds that formed in the hypothetical atmosphere of the supposed pre-biotic earth would soon have been destroyed.
There is yet another problem with the hypothetical pre-biotic atmosphere. Its proposed composition is based upon the argument that this atmosphere must have been reducing; this means that it contained no oxygen. This is because it is impossible to produce the organic compounds that are found in living organisms in what is called an oxidizing atmosphere—that is, one in which oxygen is present. Initially, the idea that the hypothetical pre-biotic earth’s atmosphere was oxygen-free and composed of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour was widely accepted by chemical evolutionists. Recently, however, doubts have been expressed about this proposed composition of the earth’s pre-biotic atmosphere: ‘It is widely accepted that the gases Miller used did not accurately recreate conditions on early Earth—carbon dioxide and nitrogen were probably the main components of the atmosphere.’2
In fact, there does not seem to be any agreement among chemical evolutionists concerning the composition of the pre-biotic earth’s atmosphere; opinions vary from ‘reducing’ (that is, an atmosphere either composed of methane, nitrogen, ammonia and water vapour or of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen) to ‘neutral’ (that is, an atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapour).3 Other chemical evolutionists have suggested that the atmosphere was rich in carbon monoxide and sulfur compounds (such as hydrogen sulfide) as a result of volcanic eruptions taking place on the supposed pre-biotic earth.4 Other chemical evolutionists, however, have proposed that the atmosphere was rich in hydrogen cyanide.5
The one thing that is common to all these proposals, however, is that, in order to synthesize organic compounds from any of the mixtures of gases that are proposed by chemical evolutionists, oxygen must be absent. When oxygen gas is added to any of these mixtures, no organic molecules are formed. Herein lies a conundrum. When oxygen is present, no organic compounds are formed. However, on the hypothetical pre-biotic earth, if oxygen was absent, the ozone layer would not have formed. If there was no ozone layer, there would have been no protection from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation that causes organic compounds (particularly amino acids) to decompose quickly. Hence the conundrum for chemical evolutionists is this: with oxygen, organic compounds do not get synthesized; without oxygen, the organic compounds that are formed decompose quickly, so no organic compounds remain.
There is, however, no geochemical evidence for an atmosphere with the composition used in Miller’s experiment ever having existed on the earth—in fact, there is much evidence against it. One factor is that large quantities of hydrophobic organic compounds would have been formed by the irradiation of the large amounts of methane supposedly present in the pre-biotic atmosphere. These compounds would have been absorbed by the sedimentary clays being deposited at the time. The supposedly early rocks should therefore contain large quantities of organic compounds—but they do not! In fact, the iron-ore bodies found in the supposedly ancient Pre-Cambrian rocks are oxidized, showing that the atmosphere of the earth was oxidizing (it contained oxygen) when these bodies formed—a time when the atmosphere should have been reducing (i.e. oxygen-free) according to chemical evolutionists. Furthermore, the presence of uranium in sediments in the Pre-Cambrian rocks indicates that it was transported in solution by oxygenated water—otherwise it would have precipitated out. It turns out that all the geological evidence suggests that all sedimentary rocks were deposited on an earth which had an atmosphere with a similar composition to the one that exists now.
There are also three additional problems concerning the composition of the earth’s hypothetical primitive atmosphere as proposed by Miller. Firstly, the reducing nature of the atmosphere would very soon disappear, due to oxygen being formed as the water vapour was decomposed by the ultra-violet radiation coming from the sun. Secondly, the ammonia would be completely disintegrated by the ultra-violet radiation in about 30,000 years, yet a billion years is required for chemical evolution to occur. Thirdly, because of their lightness, large amounts of the hydrogen and methane would be lost to space very quickly—certainly in less than a billion years. Hence the composition of this hypothetical atmosphere would have changed very quickly—it certainly would not have remained essentially the same for the billion years needed for the formation of the organic compounds required for chemical evolution to have occurred.
A dry soup?
It is very illuminating to look at the mechanisms proposed by chemical evolutionists in order to build from amino acids to proteins to self-replicating systems to living cells. Proteins are polymers of amino acids; in other words, a protein consists of many different amino acids joined together. It turns out that proteins are quite difficult to synthesize from their amino acid constituents. In the 1960s, the famous chemical evolutionist Sydney Fox managed to polymerize amino acids in his laboratory by heating a mixture of dry amino acids at 175°C for six hours.6 When water was added and the resulting mixture allowed to cool down, the polymers formed spherical globules or micro-spheres. Although these micro-spheres have properties similar to proteins, they are not proteins, but are called ‘protenoids’. Incredibly, Sydney Fox concluded that, as a result of such an experiment, the problem of how the first primitive cell could have arisen had been solved! However, the creationist Duane Gish has pointed out that there is an enormous difference between one of these so-called ‘Fox’s micro-spheres’ and a simple living cell: ‘Their contents, however, can consist only of random polymers of amino acids. There can be no information content nor information transfer systems, no organized elements, no enzymes, no coenzymes, no energy-forming systems or energy-utilizing systems, certainly no nucleic acids, no replicating system, in fact, they can contain nothing but a mixture of random polymers of amino acids.’7
When we consider the results of Fox’s experiments and the plausibility of such reactions having occurred naturalistically in the hypothetical primeval soup on the pre-biotic earth, we are faced with a number of problems. The first problem is that the temperature required (175° C) is well above the boiling point of water (100°C) and well above the boiling point of the hypothetical primeval soup. In order to overcome this problem, it has been suggested that a temperature of 175°C or so would have been found on the edges of volcanoes and that this is where the evolution of living structures from simple amino acids occurred. But this raises another problem, as we shall see later.
The second problem is that in Fox’s experiments pure, dry amino acids were used. In the hypothetical primeval soup, however, the amino acid mixture would not have been pure—the amino acids would have been contaminated with other organic (and even inorganic) compounds which would have prevented any polymerization taking place. Furthermore, it cannot be overemphasized that conditions have to be dry. How it is possible to have dry conditions in a primeval soup is beyond imagination—unless, of course, it is included in one of those six impossible things that the Queen thought about before breakfast in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Dry conditions would certainly not be present in the primeval soup which was 99 per cent water, according to chemical evolutionists! Even if these reactions occurred at the edges of volcanoes (as, we have seen, is suggested by chemical evolutionists), dry conditions would still be difficult to find as volcanic gases often contain up to 70 per cent water. It is interesting to note that, if water is included in the laboratory experiments, a charred mess, not proteins, is the end product.
The third problem is that in laboratory experiments, a high proportion of glutamic and aspartic acids or of lysine has to be used in order to get the amino acids to polymerize. These compounds would not necessarily have been present in such high proportions on the hypothetical pre-biotic ea
rth.
The fourth and final problem is that, in order for polymerization to occur, an energy source is required—that is, heat. Now, the problem of heat is twofold: firstly, many amino acids are destroyed by heat; and secondly, proteins are destroyed by heat. So this problem can be summarized as follows: without heat, the amino acids will not polymerize and form proteins; with heat, the amino acids are destroyed and any proteins that form are also destroyed. The end result is the same: no heat, no proteins; heat, no proteins!
Origin of life and probability
But there is yet another problem with the hypothesis of life having originated by chance natural processes from lifeless organic molecules, and this can be seen by using the laws of probability, because the frequency of occurrence of any given amino acid in naturally occurring protein chains which have been sequentially analysed has been shown to be random.8
Let us suppose that we have twenty different amino acids and from these we wish to construct by chance one molecule of a small protein that is 100 amino acids long and has a particular amino acid sequence. There are 20100 or 10130 possible different configurations of this protein. Now let us suppose that the primeval soup contained only these twenty different amino acids. The chance of this protein molecule forming in the hypothetical primeval soup is 1 in 10130 (which is 1 followed by 130 zeros 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). To give you some idea of how enormous this number is, it is estimated that there are something like 1080 atoms in the universe. The number 10130 is actually the number of atoms that would exist in 1050 or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 universes! The probability of this protein molecule forming by chance is therefore, to all intents and purposes, zero. Yet despite such overwhelming odds against protein formation from amino acids having occurred by chance in the primeval soup, chemical evolutionists still maintain that it happened.
What About Origins? (CreationPoints) Page 16
