Evolutionist: OOL is a Fact

High Confidence

The one thing evolutionists agree on is that evolution is a fact. And when they say “evolution” they mean the strictly naturalistic origin of, well, pretty much everything. The species, life, consciousness, the Earth, the solar system, the universe and natural laws. Such all encompassing truth claims are what distinguish evolutionary theories from other scientific theories which are usually more tentative and circumscribed. This high confidence is again evident in a new peer-reviewed paper by David Penny and coworkers which begins:

There are some areas of science where there is still strong resistance to basic scientific conclusions: anthropogenic climate change, the reality of long term evolution, the origin of life, and the safety and efficacy of vaccination programs are well-known examples.

In 1924 the father of origin of life (OOL) research, Alexander Oparin, wrote that “very, very soon” the last barriers between the living and the dead will crumble. That prediction failed but what did happen was that OOL attained fact-hood.

Oops, Evolution Forgot About the Eukaryotes

Still a Fact Though

In their honest moments evolutionists say all kinds of interesting things. How about this 1998 paper in which the evolutionists admit that “One of the most important omissions in recent evolutionary theory concerns how eukaryotes could emerge and evolve.” Evolution omitted how eukaryotes could emerge and evolve? That would be like physics omitting gravity, politics omitting elections or baseball omitting homeruns. Yet this paper came more than a century after evolutionists began insisting that it is beyond all reasonable doubt that the species, and that would be all the species, arose spontaneously.

How could the spontaneous origin of all the species be beyond all reasonable doubt if the theory had omitted the eukaryotes which, as you learned in biology class, are the more complicated cells with a nucleus and make up the, err, plants and animals?

We don’t know how the plants and animals evolved, but we know that they did evolve?

Well, yes. For the origin of eukaryotes, and everything else for that matter, is merely a research problem, not to be confused with the fact of evolution. You see there is the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution. The fact of evolution assures us that the species arose spontaneously, but it doesn’t tell us how. That’s for the theory of evolution to figure out.

This all makes sense to evolutionists because the fact of evolution does not come from science.

Evolutionists Lose Again: “There's Not Even a Consensus on How to Approach the Problem”

Remember when evolution was a fact? Remember when your high school biology teacher explained the origin of life from a muddy pond (or maybe ocean vent) was beyond any doubt? Remember when the National Academy of Science declared that “For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells”? [1] Remember when Carl Zimmer wrote that scientists “have found compelling evidence that life could have evolved into a DNA-based microbe in a series of steps.”

Well, err, that was all wrong. Truth be told, there never was any such compelling evidence. There never was any proof that life arose spontaneously—from a warm little pond, ocean vent, or anywhere else for that matter.

In fact, as one evolutionist admitted, “there's not even a consensus on how to approach the problem.” That doesn’t exactly qualify as a fact.


1. National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999) 6.

Err Oops, Evolutionists Are Getting Slammed Again With Their Lunacy

One little problem with that new/old warm little pond idea is that, well, there wouldn’t have been any land, at least any land with sufficient stability, way back in those “primordial” days (remember those colorful evolutionary posters in your second grade with all the lightning, earthquakes and volcanoes going off?) to begin with. And without any land, there’s going to be a little bit of a problem making those warm little ponds—oops I mean “inland geothermal systems”—Darwin and the evolutionists had planned on. The pond idea seemed like a good one because the contents of living cells aren’t anything like those deep sea hydrothermal vents. And as for their ET idea, evolutionists were finally getting tired of all those B-grade movies their stupid idea spawned.

The warm little pond idea—there I go again, I mean “inland geothermal systems”—solves the problem because evolutionists can claim such “systems” can have a chemical composition similar to that of living cells. But then they have yet another problem. You see living cells don’t live in environments that match their composition. Quite the opposite. As one evolutionist points out:

To suggest that the ionic composition of primordial cells should reflect the composition of the oceans is to suggest that cells are in equilibrium with their medium, which is close to saying that they are not alive. Cells require dynamic disequilibrium—that is what being alive is all about.

Yes indeed. Problem is, life’s dynamic disequilibrium is maintained by an army of unbelievable molecular machines which don’t appear on demand, whenever an evolutionist draws a new poster. So either you don’t have dynamic disequilibrium, in which case you’re not alive. Or you have dynamic disequilibrium, in which case you didn’t evolve.

Fortunately evolution is a fact. Otherwise, there could be problems.

It's Baaaaack: The Warm Little Pond

Even in evolution, what goes around comes around. Remember when Darwin posited his “warm little pond” thought experiment. “But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond …” So began the homily. Realizing the absurdity Crick switched the narrative to extra terrestrials. That’s where those unlikely seeds of life came. Then it was comets, and then it was deep sea hydrothermal vents. One way to avoid criticism is to keep switching the theory. But what happens when you run out of ideas? No problem, just start over. Of course you must disguise the shell game with newer, more complicated sounding jargon. And so we present, without further ado, “Inland geothermal systems,” a.k.a., warm little ponds:

All cells contain much more potassium, phosphate, and transition metals than modern (or reconstructed primeval) oceans, lakes, or rivers. Cells maintain ion gradients by using sophisticated, energy-dependent membrane enzymes (membrane pumps) that are embedded in elaborate ion-tight membranes. The first cells could possess neither ion-tight membranes nor membrane pumps, so the concentrations of small inorganic molecules and ions within protocells and in their environment would equilibrate. Hence, the ion composition of modern cells might reflect the inorganic ion composition of the habitats of protocells. We attempted to reconstruct the “hatcheries” of the first cells by combining geochemical analysis with phylogenomic scrutiny of the inorganic ion requirements of universal components of modern cells. These ubiquitous, and by inference primordial, proteins and functional systems show affinity to and functional requirement for K+, Zn2+, Mn2+, and phosphate. Thus, protocells must have evolved in habitats with a high K+/Na+ ratio and relatively high concentrations of Zn, Mn, and phosphorous compounds. Geochemical reconstruction shows that the ionic composition conducive to the origin of cells could not have existed in marine settings but is compatible with emissions of vapor-dominated zones of inland geothermal systems. Under the anoxic, CO2-dominated primordial atmosphere, the chemistry of basins at geothermal fields would resemble the internal milieu of modern cells. The precellular stages of evolution might have transpired in shallow ponds of condensed and cooled geothermal vapor that were lined with porous silicate minerals mixed with metal sulfides and enriched in K+, Zn2+, and phosphorous compounds.

And the evolutionists even have a new method: “Phylogenomic scrutiny.” I have no idea what that means.

An Evolutionist Just Gave Up On a Fundamental Just-So Story (And Then Made Up Another to Replace it)

Which came first the chicken or the egg? In evolution’s case, the question is between DNA or proteins. The DNA stores the data to make the proteins, but proteins do things (like get the data out of the DNA). It is all so circular: proteins operate on DNA to get the data to make … themselves. When a new individual is conceived, the zygote has both already in place to begin with. But how could this whole biological system evolve from a mud patch? And which came first, DNA or proteins? Twenty five years ago evolutionists hit upon a new just-so story to solve this riddle: It wasn’t DNA or proteins, but RNA, that worked the magic. RNA is what the proteins create when they get the data out of the DNA. They create a copy, RNA, which chemically is slightly different. Evolutionists were excited about RNA because it can store data like DNA, and it can do things like proteins. It does both, so in the beginning it was an RNA world. It was common to see evolutionists hail this idea as solving those difficult origins problems. One experiment had evolutionists exclaiming that it was “extremely strong evidence for the RNA world.” Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept:

the RNA world evolved into a world of RNP enzymes, such as the ribosome and ribozymes, before giving rise to the DNA, RNA and protein world of today. DNA is thought to have taken over the role of data storage due to its increased stability, while proteins, through a greater variety of monomers (amino acids), replaced RNA's role in specialized biocatalysis. The RNA world hypothesis suggests that RNA in modern cells is an evolutionary remnant of the RNA world that preceded ours.

All of this is just-so story telling, no different than Antony Flew’s hiker who made up all kinds of silly stories about a mythical gardener. In science we can’t just make up stories about an incredible, never observed, RNA world spontaneously arising, based on religious convictions that evolution must be true. And then say DNA took over this role, and proteins took over that role, due to their vastly superior capabilities.

That would be like saying that the internal combustion engine took over the role of land transportation due to its greater power and versatility, while jet engines took over the role of air transportation due to their greater thrust and reliability.

Eventually this caught up with evolutionists and now a paper is out saying that the RNA World hypothesis doesn’t work. A key molecular machine in the RNA World hypothesis is the ribosome. Not only does it construct proteins, a key function, but it is comprised of both proteins and RNA.

The new paper shows that (if evolution is true) early versions of the ribosome must have included the protein parts. Right there you have a flaw in the RNA World hypothesis. Beyond that, the research suggests that RNA alone cannot construct proteins. As the author explained:

I’m convinced that the RNA world (hypothesis) is not correct. That world of nucleic acids could not have existed if not tethered to proteins. … It appears the basic building blocks of the machinery of the cell have always been the same from the beginning of life to the present: evolving and interacting proteins and RNA molecules.

But the problems don’t stop there. For the results indicate that if evolution is true, then proteins predate the machinery to construct them. Again, evolution makes no sense on these findings. Here is how Russell Doolittle, one of the leading researchers in this area, responded:

“This is a very engaging and provocative article by one of the most innovative and productive researchers in the field of protein evolution,” said University of California at San Diego research professor Russell Doolittle, who was not involved in the study. Doolittle remains puzzled, however, by “the notion that some early proteins were made before the evolution of the ribosome as a protein-manufacturing system.” He wondered how—if proteins were more ancient than the ribosomal machinery that today produces most of them—“the amino acid sequences of those early proteins were ‘remembered’ and incorporated into the new system.”

Ah, yes, that’s a problem alright. Not to worry though, for there is always that next just-so story to save the day. In this case, the evolutionist explains that:

It is therefore likely that the ribosomes were not the first biological machines to synthesize proteins.

There you have it. There was some other fantastic machine, never observed of course, that created proteins before the ribosome came around. Unbelievable. Antony Flew is outdone.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution professor: The Origin of Life Problem is Not a Problem

In our previous two posts we discussed an evolution professor who, in one blog post, makes several fundamental but typical mistakes. But his mistakes don’t stop there. The professor also explains why he thinks criticism of the origin of life problem is unfounded. The problem, according to the professor, is that the critics just don’t understand how life originated. Unfortunately, what the professor forgets is neither do evolutionists.

The assumptions used to make the calculations regarding evolution in the first place are suspect (wrong is a better word, fraudulent is the best word because those making these arguments have had it explained to them before). For example, the assumption in these types of calculations is that there were a bunch of chemicals and then, wham, these chemicals came together to form the first cell. 

So chemicals did not come together to form the first cell?

I don’t want to get into a discussion about the origin of life in this post, 

Because the absurdity of the creation myth would rapidly become apparent. It would be a tremendous miracle—the spontaneous formation of the first cell, and all life thereafter.

Walk into any life science library. See the volumes and volumes of journals and the stacks and stacks of books. All of this subject matter is supposed to have just happened to happen. There just happened to be an Earth and Sun. And there just happened to be land, oceans and yes, chemicals. And these chemicals just happened to come together to form the first cell and everything else in the life sciences. Biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, molecular and cellular biology, millions and millions of species. It all spontaneously formed due to, well, due to nothing. It all just happened to happen.

but I do want to stress that I have never seen the absurd idea that cells just poofed into existence fully formed from scratch 

So the first cell did not form from scratch? What, was there something swimming around in that warm little pond before evolution got going?

Of course, no biologist thinks or suggests that the above happens.

Evolutionists believe that their problem of forming a cell, yes from scratch, goes away if you give it some time. A warm little pond or deep sea vent, a few million years, some sort of selection process, and suddenly the problem is tractable. Of course they don’t provide the scientific details of how this mysterious origin of life process is supposed to have actually happened. But they are certain it must have occurred.

But the problem doesn’t go away, not without those details. And those details would be quite remarkable indeed. For selection doesn’t help—it just kills off the loser designs. You still need to construct one of the most complex designs in the universe, one random act at a time.

Eric Alm: It’s A Plausible Idea

plau•si•ble  /’plôzəbəl/
1. (of an argument or statement) Seeming reasonable or probable.
2. (of a person) Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, esp. ones intended to deceive.

When one thinks of MIT one thinks of engineering and hard sciences. No nonsense academia that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But now MIT Professor Eric Alm tells us that the spontaneous generation of a super progenitor is “plausible.” That’s an interesting choice of words because, in fact, that is precisely what evolution is not and it is difficult to imagine how Alm could have arrived at such a strange conclusion.

As we have discussed before, whereas Darwin absurdly hoped that cells could develop in a warm little pond somewhere, science had other things to say. Not only is the spontaneous generation of cellular life not plausible, so is the subsequent evolution of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Contra evolution, what science has been indicating for decades is that any such evolutionary LUCA would have had to have been a super progenitor. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. As one evolutionist admitted:

We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was.

That wins the understatement of the year award. Here is how one article describes the origin of the LUCA:

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

Unfortunately science will always be vulnerable to such pseudo science. This is because science deals not only with what we do understand, but with what we do not understand as well. Science is constantly exploring and adding to our knowledge, but such explorations take it beyond the realm of the known, and into the realm of the unknown. This will always make it vulnerable to the charlatan.

And so it with sadness that we report that such academic chicanery has infected the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The evolution of the LUCA is, of course, not plausible. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and scientists are well aware of this.

We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means. A hypothesis is plausible if it is reasonable or probable. A LUCA may have evolved, or a LUCA may not have evolved. But such an event is certainly not plausible according to our current scientific knowledge. We can argue about what happened long ago, but the state of our knowledge and its implications for the evolutionary narrative are quite clear. Which brings us to the second definition of “plausible” that unfortunately is also relevent to evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

New Research Continues to Point to a Super Progenitor

Everyone knows biology is full of complicated designs, but evolutionists think it arose spontaneously, as a result of the play of natural laws. In other words, it happened to happen. First there was nothing, then there was something, then that something became very complicated. All this just happened to happen.

There are many problems with this evolutionary narrative. One is that we can’t explain how such complexity could have arisen on its own. Another is that if evolution is true, then complexity must have somehow formed early in evolutionary history. In fact, evolutionists sometimes use this fact to dodge the failure of their idea. They say that immense complexities, such as molecular machines and codes, are not really a problem because they occurred so early in evolutionary history. That early history, these evolutionists say, falls under the origin of life (OOL) phase, not evolution proper. So with a wave of the hand, they dismiss major failures of their idea.

But the failure of the evolutionary expectation of simple beginnings will not go away so easily. One such example in the news is the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) to all life. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. Here is what I wrote ten years ago in my book Darwin’s God:

[T]he next step was to piece together what the progenitor would have looked like by comparing the genetic differences and similarities of the three lineages. But the task became confusing due to the wide variety of genes between and amongst the three lineages. No clear picture of a simple progenitor emerged. Instead the only solution seemed to be a super progenitor that already had most of the highly complex traits found in each of the three lineages. The super progenitor would have been as complex as modern cells yet would have somehow arisen in a short time.

This story has not changed and recent research continues to point to a mythical “super progenitor.”

Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought

New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

The study builds on several years of research into a once-overlooked feature of microbial cells, a region with a high concentration of polyphosphate, a type of energy currency in cells. Researchers report that this polyphosphate storage site actually represents the first known universal organelle, a structure once thought to be absent from bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins, the archaea. This organelle, the evidence indicates, is present in the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, algae and everything else).

The existence of an organelle in bacteria goes against the traditional definition of these organisms, said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Manfredo Seufferheld, who led the study.

"It was a dogma of microbiology that organelles weren't present in bacteria," he said. But in 2003 in a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Seufferheld and colleagues showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria (they analyzed an agrobacterium) was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome (uh-SID-oh-KAL-sih-zohm) found in many single-celled eukaryotes.

Their findings, the authors wrote, "suggest that acidocalcisomes arose before the prokaryotic (bacterial) and eukaryotic lineages diverged." The new study suggests that the origins of the organelle are even more ancient.

So even given evolutionary assumptions, this evidence indicates an early organelle and with it, early complexity.

"There are many possible scenarios that could explain this, but the best, the most parsimonious, the most likely would be that you had already the enzyme even before diversification started on Earth," said study co-author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, a professor of crop sciences and an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. "The protein was there to begin with and was then inherited into all emerging lineages."

But the evolution of even a single protein is astronomically unlikely, even according to evolutionist’s unrealistically optimistic assumptions.

The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

Early complexity is yet another example of evolutionary expectations gone wrong. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Was Early Evolution Genetics or Metabolism Based? Composomes, Environmental Patchiness and Other Evolutionary Imaginings

Yet another failed expectation of evolutionary theory is that early evolution doesn’t make sense. In the twentieth century evolutionists expected that life could be shown to arise spontaneously, but even the simplest microbe is immensely complicated. As a recent paper explains:

Once beyond the abiogenic synthesis and accumulation of a variety of complex organic compounds on Earth took place, the conceivable paths toward life’s emergence have been dominated by two fundamentally different views in origin-of-life research: the genetics- or replication-first approach, and the metabolism-first scenario.

In other words, once upon a time a range of organic compounds spontaneously formed and, in spite of obvious dilution processes, just happened to create a cell. Just how this incredible event could have happened is, of course, unknown, and so as usual evolutionists take sides on equally bizarre hypotheses.

Both schools acknowledge that a critical requirement for primitive evolvable systems (in the Darwinian sense) is to solve the problems of information storage and reliable information transmission. Disagreement starts, however, in the way information was first stored.

Yes there is that minor issue of information storage (not to mention information creation). As the paper explains, there are plenty of problems with both the genetics-first and the metabolism-first hypotheses. But of course evolution is a fact, so the evolutionists confidently proceed with the pseodo-science and speculation:

We think that the real question is that of the organization of chemical networks. If (and what a big IF) there can be in the same environment distinct, organizationally different, alternative autocatalytic cycles/networks, as imagined for example by Gánti and Wächtershäuser, then these can also compete with each other and undergo some Darwinian evolution. But, even if such systems exist(-ed), they would in all probability have limited heredity only and thus could not undergo open-ended evolution.

In other words, we have no idea how life could have evolved, but so what, we have “strong reasons to believe.”

We do not know how the transition to digitally encoded information has happened in the originally inanimate world; that is, we do not know where the RNA world might have come from, but there are strong reasons to believe that it had existed.

Of course these “strong reasons” all hinge on the belief that evolution is true. Without the religious fervor the house of cards falls apart. And as usual, the religion leads to junk science, such as this make believe absurdity:

Template-free systems like composomes could only have had the limited role of accumulating prebiotic material and increasing environmental patchiness.

You may wonder why you don’t remember composomes from your high school biology class. That’s because they are a part of the evolutionist’s make believe. Like Flew’s Gardener they are part of the ever-growing evolutionary fiction that evolutionists insist must be a fact.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolutionary Theory: Just Add Water

As many critics have pointed out, evolutionary theory has biased the life sciences with its view of spontaneity. In this universe, things just happen to happen. And that includes the most complicated, least understood thing of all—life. This is the religiously-motivated “just add water” view of biology that makes little scientific sense. Now an evolutionist has appropriately used this very phrase to describe yet another evolutionary take on how life got its start.

New publications from The Center for Chemical Evolution elucidate how peptides can form bilayer membranes with some interesting properties. Could these structures be enlisted to service Darwin's theory? Evolutionists believe life arose spontaneously and so they search for ideas of how this could have occurred. They require several scientifically unlikely events to occur, one of which is the formation of a microscopic compartment in which to hold and safeguard the unlikely chemical combinations that are needed.

Could not the peptide bilayer membranes have provided the compartment? Furthermore, there is the hint that such a membrane, constructed from protein building blocks, could actually perform some protein functions. Perhaps we’re seeing a new pathway to solve thorny problems of how life originated.

Actually what we are seeing is the same old misappropriation of good research—this time with potential nano machinery applications—to junk science. It is yet another in a long list of absurd speculations of how life arose. Did it come from a warm little pond, from the bottom of the sea, or from outer space? Was it DNA or proteins that started things off. No early evolution must have occurred in an RNA world, except that this new research suggests that peptides were the panacea. As one evolutionist explained:

Our studies have now shown that, if you just add water, simple peptides access both the physical properties and the long-range molecular order that is critical to the origins of chemical evolution.

Did you know the most complex thing of all is a piece of cake? Just add water and everything else spontaneously occurs. Religion drives science and it matters.

More Doubts About Primordial Soup

You were probably taught in high school biology class that life arose from a primordial soup--the twentieth century's rendition of Darwin's "warm little pond." Most textbooks show pictorial-type drawings of the early earth as a dynamic environment, full of activity. Sunlight is beaming through the clouds with its all important energy-bearing ultra violet rays; rain is pouring down as lightning strikes bring more needed energy to the surface; volcanic activity creates hot spots with yet more energy and a few stray comets might be seen bringing their organic chemicals to seed the life-giving processes. The evolution machine is revving up its engines. Another figure might have illustrated an experimental arrangement mimicking those early-earth conditions. A primordial soup of various organic compounds brewed as sparks were set off in a gaseous mixture above steaming water. There's only one problem: it doesn't work.

Charles Darwin had speculated that life may have begun in a warm little pond with protein compounds ready to undergo more complex changes. Strangely enough, a century later experiments were found to confirm this vision. It appeared that Darwin just happened to be right and the headlines proclaimed that scientists had created "Life in a test tube."

But a plethora of problems were ignored in the process which textbooks eventually had to acknowledge. The 2004 version of George Johnson's high school text, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, for instance, includes the primordial soup section but adds a caveat.

In its Principles of Evolution unit, the student reads the usual narrative of organic molecules forming spontaneously in chemical reactions activated by energy from solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and lightning. The text recounts the success of primordial soup experiments in synthesizing certain organic compounds and concludes:

These results support the hypothesis that some basic chemicals of life could have formed spontaneously under conditions like those in the experiment.

But this traditional life-in-a-test-tube narrative is then followed by an awkward caveat. As the next section explains,

Recent discoveries have caused scientists to reevaluate [the experiment]. We now know that the mixture of gases used in [the experiment] could not have existed on early Earth. ... Some scientists argue that the chemicals were produced within ocean bubbles. Others say that the chemicals arose in deep sea vents. The correct answer has not been determined yet.

That's a refreshing admission. Now a new evolution paper goes further. As one author put it, commenting on the paper:

Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings, the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life. But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life.

"It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup," commented another author.

These evolutionists believe deep sea vents are the answer. The vents provide chemical gradients that early life would have used before learning how to create their own gradients. Of course we have no idea, beyond speculation, how this actually could have happened. The cell's energy transfer process (referred to as chemiosmosis), using nutrients to synthesize its own chemical energy (ATP), is astonishingly complex. But no matter, it must have happened:

Far from being too complex to have powered early life, it is nearly impossible to see how life could have begun without chemiosmosis ...

The eighteenth century philosopher and evolutionary thinker David Hume argued that the problem of evil trumped the problem of complexity. Nature may be complex, but it must have evolved because god would not have created this wretched world. Now, two centuries later, complexity is simply dismissed because evolution must have occurred.

Szostak on Abiogenesis: Just Add Water

Evolutionists Jack Szostak and Alonso Ricardo summarize origin of life research in the current Scientific American (Sept 2009). It is a good summary of the problem, which entails a long list of seemingly monumental steps. There is the creation of the chemical components of genetic material, the assembly of the genetic material, the imperfect replication of the genetic material, the sequestering the genetic material into a protocell, cell division, selection, metabolism, and so forth.

The article also summarizes how far along are the solutions to these various steps. In most cases evolutionists working in the laboratory have been able to devise experiments that produce many of the key players. Sugars, phosphates, nucleobases, membranes, nucleotides, RNA sequences, and so forth can all be synthesized given the right experimental conditions. On the other hand, many of these steps have their limitations. For example, only two of the four RNA nucleotides have been synthesized.

While Szostak and Ricardo discuss several of these limitations, many problems are not discussed. For example, how are the needed concentrations of the key chemicals maintained? How finely-tuned are the experiments and could such a disparate collection of conditions work together? How did biology's chiralty arise?

Beyond such basic issues, even if all their problems disappeared Szostak and Ricardo would only be at the point of having some RNA macromolecules inside a water-filled vesicle. In the laboratory such a system would do nothing. Why should we believe things would be different in a warm little pond? Indeed, from here the problems are enormous and here the evolutionist's credulity moves into high gear.

In fact, a high level of credulity seems to be the theme of abiogenesis / origin of life research. True, with finely-tuned experiments ribose can be stabilized, phosphate can be obtained, nucleotides can be synthesized, RNA can be coaxed to polymerize, duplication can be arranged, vesicles can be formed and divided, and so forth. But this is light years from even the simplest of living cells.

The scientific conclusion is that, given our current level of knowledge, abiogenesis is not likely. Perhaps future findings will change this, but we cannot change this conclusion with bed-time stories of warm little ponds teeming with activity that just happen to lead to the most complex nanomachines we know of.

While Szostak and Ricardo may sound scientific with their summary of the abiogenesis research, the article is firmly planted in the non scientific evolution genre, where evolution is dogmatically mandated to be a fact. Consequently, the bar is lowered dramatically as the silliest of stories pass as legitimate science. As Szostak and Ricardo conclude:

There could be pools of cold water, perhaps partly covered by ice but kept liquid by hot rocks. The temperature differences would cause convection currents, so that every now and then protocells in the water would be exposed to a burst of heat as they passed near the hot rocks, but they would almost instantly cool down again as the heated water mixed with the bulk of the cold water. The sudden heating would cause a double helix to separate into single strands. Once back in the cool region, new double strands--copies of the original one--could form as the single strands acted as templates.

As soon as the environment nudged protocells to start reproducing, evolution kicked in. In particular, at some point some of the RNA sequences mutated, becoming ribozymes that sped up the copying of RNA--thus adding a competitive advantage. Eventually ribozymes began to copy RNA without external help.

It is relatively easy to imagine how RNA-based protocells may have then evolved. Metabolism could have arisen gradually, as new ribozymes enabled cells to synthesize nutrients internally from simpler and more abundant starting materials. Next, the organism might have added protein making to their bag of chemical tricks.

With their astonishing versatility, proteins would have then taken over RNA's role in assisting genetic copying and metabolism. Later, the organisms would have "learned" to make DNA, gaining the advantage of possessing a more robust carrier of genetic information. At that point, the RNA world became the DNA world, and life as we know it began.

What a pathetic and embarrassing example of evolution's influence on science. While great material for a story book, it is astonishing that a scientist would pen such a passage. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Just Add Water

Evolution has a high view of itself. Not only is it supposed to be as believable as gravity, but the narratives it generates are uncritically swallowed. For instance, origin of life stories are routinely reported with, frankly, laughable proclamations such as this one:

Mystery of how life on Earth began solved by British scientists: Scientists in Britain have solved the mystery of how life on Earth evolved from molecules when the planet was devoid of life four billion years ago.

Such non scientific reporting of science is by no means restricted to journalists. If they have exaggerated further it is only because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. Consider biochemist Nick Lane's new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. A compendium of such extreme overstatement one would think it a parody. But alas, never underestimate the evolution genre. Evolutionists seem to be ever raising the ante of hyperbole at this high table. Consider, for example, how Lane describes the evolutionary tales of the origin of life:

The origin of life is one of biology's biggest conundrums. How prebiotic chemistry gave rise to biochemistry, how the first cells formed, what kind of energy first powered metabolism and replication -- all these questions are serious challenges. Remarkably, all are answered in broad brush stroke by the amazing properties of alkaline hydrothermal vents, which form naturally chemiosmotic, self-replicating mineral cells with catalytic walls. They concentrate organics, including nucleotides, in impressive quantities, making them the ideal hatcheries for life.

I guess we should thank our lucky alkaline hydrothermal vents. (Which, by the way, were not needed by the British scientists extolled above who also, remarkably, solved all the problems). Lane lists nine other "inventions" of evolution which, believe it or not, are as absurd as this one. I have no doubt Lane is a smart fellow. That is why evolution is all the more amazing--and all the more dangerous. Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Hype Must Go On

What was the worst example of evolutionary exaggeration this week? The contrived mega hoopla surrounding the primate fossil, Darwinius massillae, right? Wrong. True, the hoopla is so extreme it would seem to be a parody. Years from now, when scholars sift through the mountains of evolutionary nonsense, trying to figure out how it could have happened, the Darwinius massillae episode will probably rank as a spectacular icon. Like a vacant mansion from the gilded age, this episode will serve as the ultimate example of the unsustainable and vacuous non science we are witnessing.

But amazingly the silly evidential claims of Darwinius massillae are standard fare for the evolution genre. Evolutionists routinely top this example, and they did this week with the headline that announced:

Mystery of how life on Earth began solved by British scientists: Scientists in Britain have solved the mystery of how life on Earth evolved from molecules when the planet was devoid of life four billion years ago.

Granted this was a merely a headline, but the article did not help much. How could it? The headline is nothing short of outrageous (the scientists did nothing of the sort). But it is not particularly unusual. Evolutionists, and the subservient media, have a long history of such reporting. It makes the Darwinius massillae affair look downright sober.

Real Facts

Why do people believe that the most complex designs in the known universe evolved? Teams of our best scientists and their super computers cannot figure out how these wonders work, but we're sure they just happened to arise in a warm little pond somewhere. Somehow the mud created designs that outperform our best military systems. How do we know this to be true? Here is some example reasoning from PZ Myers' blog:

Biologists recognize that the basis of life is chemistry — that we are the product of some wonderfully interesting biochemical reactions. We do not believe in spontaneous generation, but we do know that the boundary between biology and chemistry is very, very fuzzy indeed, and that there was a transition in the history of life where chemical replicators gradually acquired sufficient complexity that they became the basis for life. Again, this is the product of evidence and experiment: we see molecular indicators of the common origin of all life, and that we see even in our own cells the hallmarks of a history with a much simpler origin.

Evidence and experiment? Molecular indicators of the common origin of all life? Such claims are, of course, false. It is not controversial that origin of life research has always been motivated by evolutionary thinking. The impetus for thinking that biology's incredible gizmos come from muddy water comes from evolution, not science. Indeed, the scientific evidence has always been a problem for origin of life research. Even the National Academy of Sciences has admitted that:

Constructing a plausible hypothesis of life’s origins will require that many questions be answered. Scientists who study the origin of life do not yet know which sets of chemicals could have begun replicating themselves.

But Myers' rewrite of both science and history is not uncommon. This is the sort of anti intellectualism to which evolutionary thinking leads. Myers continues:

The evolution of whales is also a matter of fact and evidence. We have the fossils; we can see a pattern of change across geological time, from those hooved terrestrial quadrupeds to flippered ambush predators adapted to living in the shallows to four-flippered, paddle-tailed swimmers to obligate water-dwellers with flukes and no hind limbs, with many stages in between. It is a beautiful and strongly-supported example of macroevolutionary change. So yes, we believe it — you'd have to be blind to ignore the testimony of the rocks.

Blind? How about logical? Myers here confidently proclaims the fact of evolution based on affirming the consequent. But this fallacy is only the beginning. The pattern Myers celebrates is so often contradicted in the rocks that this evolutionary illogic is also guilty of confirmation bias. Beyond these two fallacies, there is the problem there really wasn't a consequent to affirm in the first place. Not surprisingly, since the evidence is so often at variance with the pattern Myers finds so persuasive, evolution has long since dropped such a prediction. Increasing complexity, decreasing complexity, rapid appearance, trees, bushes, diversity explosions, stasis for eons—evolution predicts them all.

This is it folks. This is the kind of evidence and reasoning evolutionary thinking brings to the table. To be sure, earth's history is packed with an incredible menagerie of life forms. For those interested in real facts, that is a real fact. But how they got there is a different question. They may have just evolved there, courtesy of the wind, rain, and natural forces. There are of course mammoth scientific problems with that idea. But it could be true. What we do know about that idea, however, is that it is not a scientific fact. Rather it is an unlikely hypothesis that, amazingly, evolutionists insist must be true. Religion drives science and it matters.

Improved Reporting on Abiogenesis Research

It is one of the silliest of all the icons of evolution. Abiogenesis, the notion that life springs forth on its own from a lifeless pool of chemicals, is not motivated by science. There are no observations to suggest it occurs. (If anything science’s law of biogenesis, which states that all life comes only from pre existing life, suggests the exact opposite). Instead, abiogenesis is motivated by the religious ideas that mandated evolution. It is, frankly, an outrage that taxpayer money is used to fund abiogenesis research. Nonetheless, a new study does give evolutionists some good news.

The new study reports on a way to spawn two ribonucleic acid (RNA) nucleotides. The formation of such nucleotides, without too much experimenter interference, is quite difficult. And yet RNA is thought likely to be needed in the hoped for abiogenesis process. The bad news for evolutionists is that this finding does nothing to mitigate enormous problems with the whole idea of abiogenesis. Yes, it does improve the picture slightly, but big obstacles remain.

The good news for the rest of us is that science writer Nicholas Wade does a good job on providing a balanced view of this new study. To be sure, his article in today’s New York Times gives, on the whole, a much too rosy interpretation of the finding. The worst part is the headline (“Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life”) which greatly exaggerates the findings. But headlines are headlines. Otherwise, much of the article is a vast improvement over the sort of reporting we are accustomed to seeing.

For instance, Wade gives mention to the problem of investigator interference and fine-tuning (e.g., the starting point for the experiment includes an unstable chemical). Wade quotes one critic, who suggests it would be a fantasy to think the chemical would be naturally available in its pure form. Also, Wade explains that even the lead author has reservations about the results.

Wade also mentions the problem of chiralty. Just as our right hand is different from our left hand, so too important organic molecules come in two mirror image forms. But only one form is present in our biochemistry. The new study does nothing to explain why or how this is so. As Wade explains:

A serious puzzle about the nature of life is that most of its molecules are right-handed or left-handed, whereas in nature mixtures of both forms exist. Dr. Joyce said he had hoped an explanation for the one-handedness of biological molecules would emerge from prebiotic chemistry, but Dr. Sutherland’s reactions do not supply any such explanation. One is certainly required …

It is good to see more accuracy in the reporting of evolutionary research.