In
1953, graduate student Stanley Miller used a closed loop apparatus to
continuously cycle the gases of a hypothetical primitive atmosphere past an electric spark.
Reaction products were condensed out and trapped. Analysis showed the presence
of amino acids - the building blocks of protein. The experiment was heralded as a
great milestone toward proving that life had evolved by natural processes
from non-living matter.
"Traditional approaches that fail to take account of new findings in molecular cell biology cannot survive the present day."
Empirical science fails to lend credibility to the popular evolutionary assumption that life could have arisen as a product of purely natural processes.
Demonstrates that producing a few chemical ‘building blocks’ lends far less credibility to the ‘naturalistic origin of life’ (abiogenesis) hypothesis than popularly imagined.
Summarizing just a partial list of fatal flaws in chemical evolution scenarios, Gish quips, "In fact, if origin of life theorists carefully considered proven scientific principles, there would be no origin of life theorists."
This
article consists of Chapter 3 (from which it takes its name) and
Chapter 4, The Origin of Life - The "Software," from the
book, The Creator Beyond Time and Space by Eastman and Missler.
Even if neo-Darwinian theory could explain the "hardware" of life in terms of mutations and natural selection, (which it cannot - Eastman points up multiple fatal flaws in the evolutionary scenario), any naturalistic explanation for life falls flat when faced with the origin of vastly complex biological algorithms and the redundant, self-correcting digital code in which they are programmed - all residing on that inexplicable hardware!
Click on the book for information about it and other products available from MARSHILL.ORG.
Wald, George, "The Origin of Life," in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1955), 270 pp.
p. 9
"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the
spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as
a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."
Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 176 pp.
p. 148
"No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a
random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters
could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the
whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey
hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets
required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living
material."
"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it…. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."
Yockey, Hubert P., Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge University Press. 1992) 342 pgs.
p.215
Among Sir Fred's other objections to a universe with a 'short age' is a
speculation he made of the probability that an enzyme could have occurred by
chance, namely between 10^ -15 and 10^ -20. From this he proposed that the
probability that a set of enzymes necessary for life could be produced by random
shuffling (sic) of amino acids to be 10^ -40,000 (Hoyle, 1980). Since he
believed that the origin of life could have happened with such a probability
only in a universe with infinite age he regarded that figure as a reason to
disbelieve in all universes with a 'short age'. The correct method of making
this calculation is given in Chapter 9 where it is found that Sir Fred was
wildly optimistic. What this means, of course, is that life did not originate by
chance in a primeval soup. It has no bearing on the age of the universe.
p.257
"The Origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in
probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is impossible in
probability."
Yockey, Hubert P., "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 67 (1977)
p. 396"The ‘warm little pond’ scenario was invented ad hoc to serve as a materialistic reductionist explanation of the origin of life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will remain ad hoc until such evidence is found…. One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written."
Orgel, Leslie E., "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), pp. 77-83.
p. 78
"It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which
are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same
time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at
first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have
originated by chemical means."
p. 78
"We proposed that RNA might well have come first and established what is
now called the RNA world…. This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if
prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: a capacity to replicate
without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of protein
synthesis."
p. 83
"The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have
seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each
of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life,
emerged may not be revealed in the near future."
Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, Ltd., 1985), 368 pp.
p. 324
"Even today we have no way of rigorously estimating the probability or
degree of isolation of even one functional protein. It is surely a little
premature to claim that random processes could have assembled mosquitoes and
elephants when we still have to determine the actual probability of the
discovery by chance of one single functional protein molecule."
p. 329-30
"Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms.
Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million
times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a
tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it
would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with
would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter,
with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid."
p. 330
"Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches
1015 or a thousand million million. Numbers in the
order of 1015 are of course completely beyond comprehension. Imagine an area
about half the size of the USA (one million square miles) covered in a forest of
trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile. If each tree contained one
hundred thousand leaves the total number of leaves in the forest would be 1015,
equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain."
p. 334
"The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other
known system; it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an
organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram.
The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms
which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G. G. Simpson of
approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon and there would
still be room left for all the information in every book ever written."
p. 342
"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we
look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an
absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance.
Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality,
the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond
our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance,
which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?
Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular
machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy."
Dose, Professor Dr. Klaus, "The Origin of Life; More Questions than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 13, no. 4 (1988), pp. 348-356. Dose is Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Johannes Gutenberg University, West Germany.
p. 348
"Abstract. More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of
life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better
perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather
than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and
experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of
ignorance."
p. 348
"Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed
evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes
from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation
and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are
not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of
all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic
acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in
modern cells came into existence."
p. 349
"It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate, a stage in
which hypothetical arguments often dominate over facts based on experimentation
or observation."
p. 352
"In spite of many attempts, there have been no breakthroughs during the
past 30 years to help to explain the origin of chirality in living cells."
Urey, Harold C., quoted in Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 1962, p. 4 [Quoted from www.Anointed-One.net]
H.J. Lipson, F.R.S. Professor of Physics, University of Manchester, UK, "A physicist looks at evolution" Physics Bulletin, 1980, vol 31, p. 138 [Quoted from www.Anointed-One.net]
"If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces and radiation, how has it come into being? I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it."
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