Evolutionary Claim: 

Forming in a reducing atmosphere over eons of time,  life's chemical building blocks rained into primitive oceans, creating a "thin organic soup". Here, simple building blocks linked into complex macro-molecules, eventually forming the first self-replicating cell. 

For a colorful sample of evolutionary storytelling,  click here.  But be sure to come back and find out why such storytelling contradicts science.

Reality Check:

(Unless otherwise noted, quotations below  are from the book by Henry Morris, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, available from the Institute for Creation Research. Links are to articles and papers on the World Wide Web.)

Yockey, Hubert P., Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1992) (Quoted directly from the referenced source) 

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."

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."

— evidence for and problems with prebiotic evolution:  amino acid synthesis, stereochemistry, polymerization, and nucleic acid synthesis

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."

 

First published in: Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(3):281–284, 1998

First published in:  Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(3):281–284, 1998

Cohen, Jon, "Getting All Turned Around Over the Origins of Life on Earth," Science, vol. 267 (March 3, 1995), pp. 1265-1266.

p. 1265

"Why do the sugar molecules in DNA and RNA twist to the right in all known organisms? Similarly, all of the amino acids from which proteins are formed twist to the left. The reason these molecules have such uniform handedness, or ‘chirality,’ is not known, but there is no shortage of theories on the subject. And, as was clear at a recent meeting on the topic in Los Angeles, there is also no shortage of passion, which is understandable, because the question of homochirality speaks to the mother of all scientific mysteries: the origin of life."

p. 1265

"The meeting participants did agree on one thing: Homochirality—the total predominance of one chiral form, or ‘enantiomer’—is necessary for present-day life because the cellular machinery that has evolved to keep organisms alive and replicating, from microorganisms to humans, is built around the fact that genetic material veers right and amino acids veer left."

p. 1265

"One division came over a question that resembles the chicken-or-the-egg riddle: What came first, homochirality or life? Organic chemist William Bonner, professor emeritus at Stanford University, argued that homochirality must have preceded life."

p. 1265

"Bonner argued that homochirality is essential for life because without it, genetic material could not copy itself. Specifically, studies have shown that the two complementary strands of genetic material that make up DNA cannot bind with each other if they are in a ‘racemic’ mixture, a state in which there is an equilibrium of left-handed and right-handed enantiomers."

 

by Jonathan Sarfati

First published in:  Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 14(3):9–12, 2000

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."

 

First published in: Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 13(2):5–6, 1999

First published in: Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 11(1):4–6, 1997

Eigen, Manfred, William Gardiner, Peter Schuster, and Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, vol. 244 (April 1981), pp. 88-118.

p. 88

"It was therefore necessary for the first organizing principle to be highly selective from the start. It had to tolerate an enormous overburden of small molecules that were biologically ‘wrong’ but chemically possible."

pp. 88-89

"The primitive soup did face an energy crisis; early life forms needed somehow to extract chemical energy from the molecules in the soup. For the story we have to tell here it is not important how they did so; some system of energy storage and delivery based on phosphates can be assumed. Nonmetabolic replenishment of the phosphate energy reservoir … had to last until a mechanism evolved for fermenting some otherwise unneeded components of the soup."

p. 91

"One can safely assume that primordial routes of synthesis and differentiation provided minute concentrations of short sequences of nucleotides that would be recognized as ‘correct’ by the standards of today’s biochemistry."

p. 91

"The primitive RNA strands that happened to have the right backbone and the right nucleotides had a second and crucial advantage. They alone were capable of stable self-replication…. Which came first, function or information? As we shall show, neither one could precede the other; they had to evolve together."

For a fine example of hand-waving and story-telling, see: 

Leslie E. Orgel, The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1973), pp. 230-231.(Quoted from A Science Kit About Science http://www.parentcompany.com/science_kit/sk3f.htm).

"The major intellectual problem presented by the origins of life is concerned with the next stage, the evolution of biological organization. How did a complex self-replicating organism evolve from an unorganized mixture of polymeric molecules? Little experiment evidence is available, so one is forced to attempt a speculative reconstruction of this phase in the origins of life.

"The key to the understanding of the evolution of biological organization is the theory of natural selection. Before the evolution of complicated self-replicating organisms, natural selection must have acted on something much simpler, probably on polymeric molecules resembling nucleic acids. It is believed that nucleic acid-like molecules were formed in the prebiotic soup and were able to reproduce without the help of enzymes. The theory of natural selection then shows that those molecules that could replicate fastest would have become dominant in the prebiotic soup.

"As the competition became fiercer, the more successful families of self-replicating molecules must have 'learned' to make use of small molecules in their environment to help them to replicate even faster. The most important of these adaptations involved the amino acids; ultimately a family of self-replicating nucleic acids evolved to the point where they could begin to control the synthesis of polypeptide sequences that had useful catalytic properties. This adaptation led ultimately to the evolution of protein synthesis and the genetic code.

"The evolution of protein synthesis is not understood in detail. One of the great challenges of the problem of the origins of life is to demonstrate in the laboratory how polynucleotides, without the help of preformed enzymes, could have replicated and begun to control the synthesis of peptides with determined sequences. Once this has been done we shall be well on our way to understanding the origins of the first living cells."

First published in: March 2000, Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 4

—Empirical science fails to lend credibility to the popular evolutionary assumption that life could have arisen as a product of purely natural processes.

Orgel, Leslie E., "Darwinism at the Very Beginning of Life," New Scientist, vol. 94 (April 15, 1982), pp. 149-152. Orgel is at UCSD, one of the top biochemists in the world and of special repute in origin-of-life studies.

p. 151

"We do not yet understand even the general features of the origin of the genetic code…. The origin of the genetic code is the most baffling aspect of the problem of the origins of life, and a major conceptual or experimental breakthrough may be needed before we can make any substantial progress."

p. 151

"Since the time of Louis Pasteur, the origin of optical activity in biological systems has attracted a great deal of attention. Two very different questions must be answered. First, why do all amino acids in proteins or all nucleotides in nucleic acids have the same handedness? Secondly, why are the animo acids all left-handed (L-) and the nucleotides all right-handed (D-)? We do not know the answer to either question, but we can make a number of plausible suggestions."

Green, David E., and Robert F. Goldberger, Molecular Insights into the Living Process (New York: Academic Press, 1967), 420 pp.

p. 403

"The popular conception of primitive cells as the starting point for the origin of the species is really erroneous. There was nothing functionally primitive about such cells. They contained basically the same biochemical equipment as do their modern counterparts.

"How, then, did the precursor cell arise? The only unequivocal rejoinder to this question is that we do not know."

pp. 406-7

"Although seven steps are shown, leading from atoms to ecosystems, there is one step that far outweighs the others in enormity: the step from macromolecules to cells. All the others can be accounted for on theoretical grounds—if not correctly, at least elegantly. However, the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet."

Haskins, Caryl P., "Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970," American Scientist, vol. 59 (May/June 1971), p. 298-307.

p. 305
"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve, though dim and narrow pencils of illumination already play over them. The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery…. Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation."

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." [Emphasis added]

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."

Yockey, Hubert P., "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 67 (1977), pp. 377 - 398.

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."

Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 192 pp.

p. 51-2
"If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?

"This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros.

"… Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense…. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time."

p. 88
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."

Viewer Feedback:-  contact@darwinisdead.com

Please check back often. These pages are ...

A CONTINUAL WORK IN PROGRESS

[TOP]