The letters D.N.A. stand for Deoxyribonucleic Acid. DNA is the informational blueprint of all known life forms excluding the questionable life forms of some viruses that use a similar chemical blueprint structure called R.N.A. (Ribonucleic Acid).
DNA consists of 4 basic sub-units called nucleic acids (Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine). Each nucleic acid has a specific binding pair (A-T and C-G). These come together in the shape of a ladder twisted in a spiral that is commonly called a "Double Helix." Any letter can be next to any other on the poles of the ladder, but an "A" will only connect with a "T" across each "rung" or "step" of the ladder (Likewise a C with a G).
These basic units of DNA, when arranged in specific orders and functional sections along the poles of the ladder, are called genes. Each gene contains a message or "code." These codes are read by specific groups of proteins that decode the message contained in the various DNA sequences of A, T, C, and G. The proteins that read the DNA make a single stranded "working copy" of the DNA called messenger RNA (mRNA). This process is called transcription. After mRNA is made, several other different groups of proteins read the mRNA message.
These proteins that read the mRNA bring together single protein units called amino acids and attach them together to form a new chain of amino acids that, when folded properly, becomes a new functional protein (after some complicated modifications). Note that only twenty different amino acids are used by almost all living things to make proteins.
Practically all living cells of all creatures on this earth form all their proteins in this manner. Proteins are the functional units of the cell. They make the cell able to work. Most functions of the cell depend on proteins to perform them - to including the creation of proteins to begin with. In fact, as has been very briefly detailed, proteins make themselves by decoding the information contained in DNA that tells the builder proteins how to make themselves. Every single step requires energy in the form of a molecule called Adenosine Tri-phosphate (A.T.P.). Not just any energy form will do. The cell can only use ATP to perform useful functions. It is very picky. And, interestingly enough, ATP is also created with the help of very specific proteins.

In the very first cell (assuming that there was a first cell) what came first - the DNA or the protein? Of course, the protein that reads the DNA is itself coded for by the DNA. So, the protein could not be there first since its code or order is contained in the DNA that it decodes. Proteins would have to decode themselves before they could exist. So obviously, without the protein there first, the DNA would never be read and the protein would never be made. Likewise, the DNA could not have been there first since DNA is made and maintained by the proteins of the cell. Some popular theories about abiogenesis suggest that RNA probably evolved first and then DNA. But this doesn't remove the problem. RNA still has to be decoded by very specific proteins that are themselves coded for by the information contained in the RNA. Obviously both DNA and/or RNA and the fully formed decoding protein system would have to be present at the same time in order for the system as a whole to work. There simply is no stepwise function-based selection process since natural selection isn't even capable of working at this point in time.
Just like the chicken and the egg paradox, it seems like the function of the most simple living cell is dependent upon all its parts being there in the proper order simultaneously. Some have referred to such systems as "irreducibly complex" in that if any one part is removed, the higher "emergent" function of the collective system vanishes. This apparent irreducibility of the living cell is found in the fact that DNA makes the proteins that make the DNA. Without either one of them, the other cannot be made or maintained. Since these molecules are the very basics of all life, it seems rather difficult to imagine a more primitive life form to evolve from. No one has been able to adequately propose what such a life form would have looked like or how it would have functioned. Certainly no such life form or pre-life form has been discovered. Even viruses and the like are dependent upon the existence of pre-established living cells to carry out their replication. They simply do not replicate by themselves. How then could the first cell have evolved from the non-living soup of the "primitive" prebiotic oceans?
This really is quite a problem to try and explain. After all, what selective advantage would be gained for non-thinking atoms and molecules to form a living thing? They really gain nothing from this process so why would a mindless non-directed Nature select to bring life into existence? Natural selection really isn't a valid force at this point in time since there really is no conceivable advantage for mindless molecules to interact as parts of a living thing verses parts of an amorphous rock or a collection of sludge. Even if a lot of fully formed proteins and strings of fully formed DNA molecules were to come together at the same time, what are the odds that all the hundreds and thousands of uniquely specified proteins needed to decode both the DNA and mRNA, (not to mention the needed ATP molecules and the host of other unlisted "parts"), would all simultaneously fuse together in such a highly functional way? Not only has this phenomenon never been reproduced by any scientist in any laboratory on earth, but a reasonable mechanism by which such a phenomenon might even occur has never been proposed - outside of intelligent design that is.

To sum up the evolutionary dilemma: Even if the physical impossibility of forming and gathering the necessary physical building blocks of a cell were overcome, it would still require information. And it would still require a ‘language.” And it would need to immediately form a copying mechanism. Looking at it from a different angle, you need a cell to create a DNA molecule. But you need DNA to create a cell. What is required to create DNA and cells is information arising from intelligence. Which brings us back to the Biblical model.

Abiogenesis is the theory that under the proper conditions life can arise spontaneously from non-living molecules. One of the most widely cited studies used to support this conclusion is the famous Miller–Urey experiment. Surveys of textbooks find that the Miller–Urey study is the major (or only) research cited to prove abiogenesis.
Although widely heralded for decades by the popular press as ‘proving’ that life originated on the early earth entirely under natural conditions, we now realize the experiment actually provided compelling evidence for the opposite conclusion.
It is now recognized that this set of experiments has done more to show that abiogenesis on Earth is not possible than to indicate how it could be possible. This paper reviews some of the many problems with this research, which attempted to demonstrate a feasible method of abiogenesis on the early earth.
Contemporary research has failed to provide a viable explanation as to how abiogenesis could have occurred on Earth. The abiogenesis problem is now so serious that most evolutionists today tend to shun the entire field because they are ‘uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled’ because ‘it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations’ and they worry that a ‘frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding’.1
Abiogenesis was once commonly called ‘chemical evolution’,2 but evolutionists today try to distance evolutionary theory from the origin of life. This is one reason that most evolutionary propagandists now call it ‘abiogenesis’. Chemical evolution is actually part of the ‘General Theory of Evolution’, defined by the evolutionist Kerkut as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form’.3
Another reason exists to exaggerate abiogenesis claims—it is an area that is critical to proving evolutionary naturalism.4 If abiogenesis is impossible, or extremely unlikely, then so is naturalism.5–8
Darwin recognized how critical the abiogenesis problem was for his theory. He even conceded that all existing terrestrial life must have descended from some primitive life-form that was originally called into life ‘by the Creator’.9 But to admit, as Darwin did, the possibility of one or a few creations is to open the door to the possibility of many others! If God made one type of life, He also could have made many thousands of different types. Darwin evidently regretted this concession later and also speculated that life could have originated in some ‘warm little pond’ on the ancient earth.
The ‘warm soup’ theory
Although seriously challenged in recent years, the warm soup hypothesis is still the most widely held abiogenesis theory among Darwinists. Developed most extensively by Russian atheist Alexandr Ivanovich Oparin (1894–1980) in his book, The Origin of Life, a worldwide best seller first published in 1924 (the latest edition was published in 1965).10 Oparin ‘postulated that life may have evolved solely through random processes’ in what he termed a biochemical ‘soup’ that he believed once existed in the oceans. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules that originally rained into the primitive oceans from the atmosphere were energized by forces such as lightning, ultraviolet light, meteorites, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, hot springs, volcanoes, earthquakes, or electric discharges from the sun. If only the correct mix of chemicals and energy were present, life would be produced spontaneously. Almost a half century of research and millions of dollars have been expended to prove this idea—so far with few positive results and much negative evidence.11

What sequence?

Oparin concluded that cells evolved first, then enzymes and, last, genes.12 Today, we recognize that genes require enzymes in order to function, but genes are necessary to produce enzymes. Neither genes nor cells can function without many complex structures such as ribosomes, polymerase, helicase, gyrase, single-strand–binding protein and scores of other proteins. Dyson concluded that Oparin’s theory was ‘generally accepted by biologists for half a century’ but that it ‘was popular not because there was any evidence to support it but rather because it seemed to be the only alternative to biblical creationism’.13

The Miller–Urey research

Haldane,14 Bernal,15 Calvin16 and Urey17 all published research in an attempt to support this model—each with little, if any, success. Then, in 1953 came what some then felt was a critical breakthrough by Harold Urey (1893–1981) of the University of Chicago and his 23-year-old graduate student, Stanley Miller (1930–). Urey came to believe that the conclusion reached by ‘many’ origin-of-life researchers that the early atmosphere was oxidizing must have been wrong; he argued instead that it was the opposite, namely a reducing atmosphere with large amounts of methane.18
Their ‘breakthrough’ resulted in front-page stories across the world that usually made the sensational claim that they had ‘accomplished the first step toward creating life in a test tube’.19 Carl Sagan concluded, ‘The Miller–Urey experiment is now recognized as the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.’20 The experiment even marked the beginning of a new scientific field called ‘prebiotic’ chemistry.21 It is now the most commonly cited evidence (and often the only evidence cited) for abiogenesis in science textbooks.22

Miller’s experiment13
The Miller–Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with the gases that Oparin had speculated were necessary to form life—namely methane, ammonia and hydrogen (to mimic the conditions that they thought were in the early atmosphere) and water vapour (to simulate the ocean). Next, while a heating coil kept the water boiling, they struck the gases in the flask with a high-voltage (60,000 volts) tungsten spark-discharge device to simulate lightning. Below this was a water-cooled condenser that cooled and condensed the mixture, allowing it to fall into a water trap below.23
Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a pink stain on the sides of the flask trap. As the experiment progressed and the chemical products accumulated, the stain turned deep red, then turbid.24 After a week, the researchers analyzed the substances in the U-shaped water trap used to collect the reaction products.25 The primary substances in the gaseous phase were carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen (N2).21 The dominant solid material was an insoluble toxic carcinogenic mixture called ‘tar’ or ‘resin’, a common product in organic reactions, including burning tobacco. This tar was analyzed by the latest available chromatographic techniques, showing that a number of substances had been produced. No amino acids were detected during this first attempt, so Miller modified the experiment and tried again.20,26
In time, trace amounts of several of the simplest biologically useful amino acids were formed—mostly glycine and alanine.20 The yield of glycine was a mere 1.05%, of alanine only 0.75% and the next most common amino acid produced amounted to only 0.026% of the total—so small as to be largely insignificant. In Miller’s words, ‘The total yield was small for the energy expended.’27 The side group for glycine is a lone hydrogen and for alanine, a simple methyl (–CH3) group. After hundreds of replications and modifications using techniques similar to those employed in the original Miller–Urey experiments, scientists were able to produce only small amounts of less than half of the 20 amino acids required for life. The rest require much more complex synthesis conditions.
Oxygen: enemy of chemical evolution
The researchers used an oxygen-free environment mainly because the earth’s putative primitive atmosphere was then ‘widely believed not to have contained in its early stage significant amounts of oxygen’. They believed this because ‘laboratory experiments show that chemical evolution, as accounted for by present models, would be largely inhibited by oxygen’.28 Here is one of many examples of where their a priori belief in the ‘fact’ of chemical evolution is used as ‘proof’ of one of the premises, an anoxic atmosphere. Of course, estimates of the level of O2 in the earth’s early atmosphere rely heavily on speculation. The fact is, ‘We still don’t know how an oxygen-rich atmosphere arose.’29
It was believed that the results were significant because some of the organic compounds produced were the building blocks of much more complex life units called proteins—the basic structure of all life.30 Although widely heralded by the press as ‘proving’ that life could have originated on the early earth under natural conditions (i.e. without intelligence), we now realize the experiment actually provided compelling evidence for exactly the opposite conclusion. For example, without all 20 amino acids as a set, most known protein types cannot be produced, and this critical step in abiogenesis could never have occurred.
In addition, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules (called a racemic mixture) were consistently produced by the Miller–Urey procedure. In life, nearly all amino acids that can be used in proteins must be left-handed, and almost all carbohydrates and polymers must be right-handed. The opposite types are not only useless but can also be toxic (even lethal) to life.31,32
Was there a methane–ammonia atmosphere?
According to many researchers today, an even more serious problem is the fact that the atmosphere of the early earth was very different from what Miller assumed. ‘Research has since drawn Miller’s hypothetical atmosphere into question, causing many scientists to doubt the relevance of his findings.’33 The problem was stated as follows:
‘… the accepted picture of the earth’s early atmosphere has changed: It was probably O2-rich with some nitrogen, a less reactive mixture than Miller’s, or it might have been composed largely of carbon dioxide, which would greatly deter the development of organic compounds.’34
A major source of gases was believed to be volcanoes, and since modern-day volcanoes emit CO, CO2, N2 and water vapour, it was considered likely that these gases were very abundant in the early atmosphere. In contrast, it is now believed that H2, CH4 and NH3 probably were not major components of the early atmosphere. Furthermore, many scientists now believe that the early atmosphere probably did not play a major role in the chemical reactions leading to life.20
Although the composition of the atmosphere of the early earth is now believed to have consisted of large amounts of carbon dioxide, this conclusion still involves much speculation. Most researchers also now believe that some O2 was present on the early earth because it contained much water vapour, and photodissociation of water in the upper layers of the atmosphere produces oxygen.35 Another reason is that large amounts of oxidized materials exist in the Precambrian geological strata.36
Yet another reason to conclude free oxygen existed on the early earth is that it is widely believed that photosynthetic organisms existed very soon after the earth had formed, something that is difficult for chemical evolutionary theories to explain. A 2004 paper argues from uranium geochemistry that there were oxidizing conditions, thus photosynthesis, at 3.7 Ga.37 But according to uniformitarian dating, the earth was being bombarded by meteorites up to 3.8 Ga. So even granting evolutionary presuppositions, this latest research shows that life existed almost as soon as the earth was able to support it, not ‘billions and billions of years’ later. Even if the oxygen were produced by photodissociation of water vapour rather than photosynthesis, this would still be devastating for Miller-type proposals.
The dilution problem
Urey also speculated that the oceans in the ancient earth must have consisted of about a 10% solution of organic compounds that would be very favourable for life’s origin.38 This level of organic matter would equal a concentration about 100 times higher than a modern American city’s sewer water. The total amount of extant organic compounds on the earth today could not produce even a fraction of that needed to achieve a concentration this high in the oceans.
Early hopes not realized
Modern replications of the Miller–Urey experiment using a wide variety of recipes, including low levels of O2, yield even lower amounts of organic compound than the original experiment.39 To solve this problem, some researchers have speculated that small, isolated pools of water achieved the required level of concentration. The same problem remains: No feasible method exists to account for this source. Some even speculate that ‘submerged volcanoes and deep-sea vents—gaps in the earth’s crust where hot water and minerals gush into deep oceans—may have provided the initial chemical resources’.40
To duplicate what might have happened in a primordial soup billions of years ago, scientists would need to mix the chemicals currently believed to be commonly found on the early earth, expose them to likely energy sources (usually speculated to be heat or radiation), and see what happens. No-one has performed this experiment, because we now know that it is impossible to obtain relevant biochemical compounds by this means. The Miller–Urey experiment held great hopes for the materialists, which have now given way to pessimism:
‘Soon after the Miller–Urey experiment, many scientists entertained the belief that the main obstacles in the problem of the origin of life would be overcome within the foreseeable future. But as the search in this young scientific field went on and diversified, it became more and more evident that the problem of the origin of life is far from trivial. Various fundamental problems facing workers in this search gradually emerged, and new questions came into focus … . Despite intensive research, most of these problems have remained unsolved.
‘Indeed, during the long history of the search into the origin of life, controversy is probably the most characteristic attribute of this interdisciplinary field. There is hardly a model or scenario or fashion in this discipline that is not controversial.’41
Some of these major problems will now be reviewed.
Functional proteins can exist only in very narrow conditions
To produce even non-functional amino acids and proteins, researchers must highly control the experiment in various ways because the very conditions hypothesized to create amino acids also rapidly destroy proteins. Examples include thermal denaturing of proteins by breaking apart their hydrogen bonds and disrupting the hydrophobic attraction between non-polar side groups.42 Very few proteins remain biologically active above 50ºC, or below about 30ºC, and most require very narrow conditions. Cooking food is a good example of using heat to denature protein, and refrigeration of using cold to slow down biological activity. As any molecular biologist knows from daily lab work, the pH also must be strictly regulated. Too much acid or base adversely affects the hydrogen bonding between polar R groups and also disrupts the ionic bonds formed by the salt bridges in protein.
Cross-reactions

We now also realize, after a century of research, that the eukaryote protozoa, believed in Darwin’s day to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin, are actually enormously complex. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is
‘… essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. … In terms of their basic biochemical design … no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.’55
This finding poses major difficulties for abiogenesis because life at the cellular level generally does not reveal a gradual increase in complexity as it allegedly ascends the evolutionary ladder from protozoa to humans. The reason why the molecular machinery and biochemistry of modern organisms is basically similar is that the basic biochemical requirements and constraints are the same for all life.56

The polymerization problem

The Miller–Urey experiment left many critical questions unanswered, even such basic ones as, ‘How did the chemicals combine to form the first molecules of living organisms?’34 Chemicals do not produce life; only complex structures such as DNA and enzymes produce life. Also, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed could be explained, how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves must still be dealt with. This problem is a major stumbling block to all abiogenesis theories because
‘… no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation. That’s one of the strongest reasons that Wächtershäuser, Morowitz, and other hydrothermal vent theorists want to move the kitchen [that cooked life] to the ocean floor. If the process starts down deep at discrete vents, they say, it can build amino acids—and link them up—right there.’33
The amino acid assembly problem is complicated by the fact that amino acids are able to bond in many locations by many kinds of chemical bonds. To form polypeptide chains requires restricting the links to only peptide bonds, and only in the correct locations. All other bonds must be prevented from being formed, no easy task. In living cells, a complex control system involving enzymes exists to ensure that inappropriate bonds do not normally occur; without this system, these inappropriate bonds would destroy the proteins produced.

To form a protein, amino acids must link together to form a peptide bond, eliminating a water molecule. But there is a far greater tendency for the reverse to happen. This would be even more of a problem in water.
Another problem is that the strong thermodynamic tendency is for the peptide bonds to break down in water, not to form.57 Without high-energy compounds such as ATP and enzymes, amino acids do not form the many polypeptides needed for life. Even dipeptides are difficult to form under natural conditions, yet the average protein is composed of around 400 amino acids.
Several recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that life may have arisen in submarine vents, where temperatures approach 350ºC. Unfortunately for both warm-pond and hydrothermal-vent theorists, the extreme heat has proven to be a major downfall of their theories. This is because high temperatures would accelerate the breakdown of amino acids, just as cooking meat breaks down the bonds, causing meat to become more tender.57
Another theory is that abiogenesis may have been a consequence of the ‘self-ordering properties’ of biochemicals.58 Just as electrostatic forces produce highly ordered crystals of salt from Na+ and Cl– ions, so too, some Darwinists reasoned, in the same way, life may likewise self-assemble. This approach also has failed. For example, all nucleotide base pairs have an equal affinity to the sugar phosphate backbones on each side of the DNA molecule, and consequently, their order is not a result of bonding affinity differences but is due to information-directed assembly. In other words, the information does not derive from the DNA chemistry, but is instead external to it (see next section).
Miller himself has recognized that Kauffman’s research is not viable and, consequently, he was
‘… unimpressed with any of the current proposals on the origin of life, referring to them as “nonsense” or “paper chemistry.” He was so contemptuous of some hypotheses that, when I asked his opinion of them, he merely shook his head, sighed deeply, and snickered—as if overcome by the folly of humanity. Stuart Kauffman’s theory of autocatalysis fell into this category. “Running equations through a computer does not constitute an experiment,” Miller sniffed. Miller acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely where and when life emerged. “We’re trying to discuss a historical event, which is very different from the usual kind of science, and so criteria and methods are very different,” he remarked.’59
Information content
Another major reason the Miller–Urey experiments failed to support abiogenesis was that, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, a critical key to life is the information code stored in DNA (or, as in the case of retroviruses, RNA), depending on the sequence of nucleotides. This in turn provides the instructions for the amino acid sequences for the proteins, the machinery of life.60,61 Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), former chairman of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester (UK) who turned to philosophy, affirmed a very important point—the information was something above the chemical properties of the building blocks:
‘As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability of any particular sequence and thereby enables it to have a meaning—a meaning that has a mathematically determinate information content.’62
Paul Davies reinforced the point that obtaining the building blocks would not explain their arrangement:
‘… just as bricks alone don’t make a house, so it takes more than a random collection of amino acids to make life. Like house bricks, the building blocks of life have to be assembled in a very specific and exceedingly elaborate way before they have the desired function.’63

An analogy is written language. Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines, etc.) abound in nature, but this fact does not help to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespeare’s plays). The reason is that this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to design and build the machinery required to translate that information into symbols (the written text). What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines. Likewise, it is not enough to explain the origin of the amino acids, which correspond to the letters. Rather, even if they were produced readily, the source of the information that directs the assembly of the amino acids contained in the genome must be explained.34
Another huge problem is that information is useless unless it can be read. But the decoding machinery is itself encoded on the DNA. The leading philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1902–1994), expressed the huge problem:
‘What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But … the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only one we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code.
‘Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics.’64
That is, the genetic information and the required reading machinery form an irreducibly complex system. So far, it has eluded materialistic explanations.65

The chirality problem

The two enantiomers of a generalized amino acid, where R is any functional group (except H)
What Sarfati66 calls a ‘major hurdle’ is the origin of homochirality, the fact that all amino acid biomolecules with rare exceptions (such as some used in bacterial cell walls) are all left-handed; and with rare exceptions, all sugars, including those in nucleic acids, are right-handed. Those produced in a laboratory are a half left-handed and half right-handed mixture called a racemate. Even in the laboratory, chemists use pre-existing homochirality from a biological source in order to synthesize homochiral compounds.60 Chiral molecules are dissymmetric—they exist as mirror images of each other, just as the right hand is a mirror image of the left hand (the word chiral comes from the Greek word for ‘hand’). The problem is left-handed sugars and right-handed amino acids can be toxic and prevent abiogenesis. Furthermore, most all enzymes are designed to work only with right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids. All attempts to solve the chirality problem, including magnetochiral dichroism, have failed.67
The legacy of the Miller experiment
A major unresolved question that ‘involves psychology and history more than chemistry’ is, ‘Why has the Miller–Urey experiment had such a strong impact on the origin-of-life field?’68 Shapiro concludes a major reason is that the experiment seems to imply that we are on the verge of understanding how life was created without intelligence or design. In the public mind (and in the minds of many scientists) this experiment psychologically supports abiogenesis. But the Miller–Urey results, and the many similar experiments completed since then, actually show the opposite of what the Miller–Urey experiment purported to demonstrate. Few textbooks actually analyze the results, and most uncritically accept this experiment as proof of how the building blocks of life were produced and then imply that the only task left was to determine how they were assembled.
My review of college textbooks found that most discussed the Miller–Urey experiments, some extensively, but few texts mentioned any of the problems. Most implied that the research has conclusively shown how the building blocks of life spontaneously generated. In part, due to the common claims in textbooks and museum exhibits, many people assume that a good, if not excellent, case exists for the Miller–Urey thesis. Davies noted that when he set out to write a book on the origin of life, he ‘was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life’s origins’, but after spending ‘a year or two researching the field’, he is
‘… now of the opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding … . This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna.’69
The Miller–Urey experiment is now an icon of evolution, presented in most all biology, zoology and evolution textbooks as clear evidence of abiogenesis, when it actually illustrates the many difficulties of chemical evolution.22
The current status of the Miller–Urey line of research
In an interview with Stanley Miller, now considered one of ‘the most diligent and respected origin-of-life researchers’ in the world, after he completed his 1953 experiment, he ‘dedicated himself to the search for the secret of life’ but was also ‘quick to criticize what he feels is shoddy work’ in an effort to overcome the fact that the origin-of-life field has ‘a reputation as a fringe discipline, not worthy of serious pursuit’.59 Miller vowed that one day
‘ … scientists would discover the self-replicating molecule that had triggered the great saga of evolution … . [and] the discovery of the first genetic material [will] legitimize Millers’ field. “It would take off like a rocket,” Miller muttered through clenched teeth. Would such a discovery be immediately self-apparent? Miller nodded. “It will be in the nature of something that will make you say, ‘… How could you have overlooked this for so long?’ And everybody will be totally convinced”.’59
This hope has become less realistic as our knowledge has advanced. What we have learned, especially during the past few years, makes it less likely than ever that abiogenesis was ever possible.36,70,71 Yet the Miller–Urey experiment is now the classic, best-known origin-of-life experiment, cited in texts from high school to graduate school, in areas ranging from biology to geology and philosophy to religion.20,22 Phillip Johnson summed up the whole Miller–Urey research problem as follows:
‘Because post-Darwinian biology has been dominated by materialist dogma, the biologists have had to pretend that organisms are a lot simpler than they are. Life itself must be merely chemistry. Assemble the right chemicals, and life emerges. DNA must likewise be a product of chemistry alone. As an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History puts it, “volcanic gases plus lightning equal DNA equals LIFE!” When queried about this fable, the museum spokesman acknowledged that it was simplified but said it was basically true.’72
Conclusion
It is now recognized that the Miller–Urey line of research is simply a ‘revival of the antique notion of spontaneous generation’ because it
‘… suggests that given the primordial soup, with the right combination of amino acids and nucleic acids, and perchance a lightning bolt or two, life might in fact have begun “spontaneously”. The major difference is that according to what biologists customarily called spontaneous generation, life supposedly began this way all of the time. According to the “soup” suggestion, by contrast, it began this way only once in the immeasurably distant past.’73
We must conclude, as Ridley did, that the early forms of life, and how natural selection could shape them, are ‘so obscure at the primordial stage that we can only guess why complexity might have increased’.
Darwin thought about the question inconclusively. He once wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell about a question ‘which is very difficult to answer, viz. how at first start of life, when there were only simplest organisms, how did any complication of organisms profit them? I can only answer that we have not facts enough to guide any speculation on the subject.’ We have more facts now, but they are still inadequate, and Darwin’s answer still holds.74
When confronted with this evidence, supporters of abiogenesis argue that science must be naturalistic, and we have no choice but to tell the best story we have, even if it is not a complete or even accurate story.4 Although widely heralded by the popular press for decades as ‘proof’ that life originated on the early earth entirely by natural conditions, the Miller–Urey experiments have actually provided compelling evidence for exactly the opposite conclusion. This set of experiments—more than almost any other carried out by modern science—has done much more to show that abiogenesis is not possible on Earth than to indicate how it could be possible.

From Primordial Soup to the Prebiotic Beach

From Primordial Soup to the Prebiotic Beach

An interview with exobiology pioneer, Dr. Stanley L. Miller, University of California San Diego

1n 1953, a University of Chicago graduate student named Stanley Miller working in Harold Urey's lab flipped a switch sending electric current through a chamber containing a combination of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. The experiment yielded organic compounds including amino acids, the building blocks of life, and catapulted a field of study known as exobiology into the headlines. Since that time a new understanding of the workings of RNA and DNA, have increased the scope of the subject. Moreover, the discovery of prebiotic conditions on other planets and the announcement of a bacterial fossil originating on Mars has brought new attention to the study of life's origins. I spoke with Dr. Miller in his lab at UCSD about the field he has helped to make famous, exobiology.



Let start with the basics. Can you give a simple definition of exobiology?

The term exobiology was coined by Nobel Prize winning scientist Joshua Lederberg. What it means is the study of life beyond the Earth. But since there's no known life beyond the Earth people say its a subject with no subject matter. It refers to the search for life elsewhere, Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and in other solar systems. It is also used to describe studies of the origin of life on Earth, that is, the study of pre-biotic Earth and what chemical reactions might have taken place as the setting for life's origin.


Some 4.6 billion years ago the planet was a lifeless rock, a billion years later it was teeming with early forms of life. Where is the dividing line between pre-biotic and biotic Earth and how is this determined?

We start with several factors. One, the Earth is fairly reliably dated to 4.55 billion years. The earliest evidence for life was 3.5 billion years based on findings at the Apex formation in Western Australia. A new discovery reported in the journal Nature indicates evidence for life some 300 million years before that. We presume there was life earlier, but there is no evidence beyond that point.

We really don't know what the Earth was like three or four billion years ago. So there are all sorts of theories and speculations. The major uncertainty concerns what the atmosphere was like. This is major area of dispute. In early 1950's, Harold Urey suggested that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere, since all of the outer planets in our solar system- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune- have this kind of atmosphere. A reducing atmosphere contains methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. The Earth is clearly special in this respect, in that it contains an oxygen atmosphere which is clearly of biological origin.

Although there is a dispute over the composition of the primitive atmosphere, we've shown that either you have a reducing atmosphere or you are not going to have the organic compounds required for life. If you don't make them on Earth, you have to bring them in on comets, meteorites or dust. Certainly some material did come from these sources. In my opinion the amount from these sources would have been too small to effectively contribute to the origin of life.


So while these are potential sources of organic compounds they are not essential for the creation of life on Earth?

As long as you have those basic chemicals and a reducing atmosphere, you have everything you need. People often say maybe some of the special compounds came in from space, but they never say which ones. If you can make these chemicals in the conditions of cosmic dust or a meteorite, I presume you could also make them on the Earth. I think the idea that you need some special unnamed compound from space is hard to support.

You have to consider separately the contributions of meteors, dust and comets. The amount of useful compounds you are going to get from meteorites is very small. The dust and comets may provide a little more. Comets contain a lot of hydrogen cyanide, a compound central to prebiotic synthesis of amino acids as well as purines. Some HCN came into the atmosphere from comets. Whether it survived impact, and how much, are open to discussion. I'm skeptical that you are going to get more than a few percent of organic compounds from comets and dust. It ultimately doesn't make much difference where it comes from. I happen to think prebiotic synthesis happened on the Earth, but I admit I could be wrong.

There is another part of the story. In 1969 a carbonaceous meteorite fell in Murchison Australia. It turned out the meteorite had high concentrations of amino acids, about 100 ppm, and they were the same kind of amino acids you get in prebiotic experiments like mine. This discovery made it plausible that similar processes could have happened on primitive Earth, on an asteroid, or for that matter, anywhere else the proper conditions exist.



Doesn't the Panspermia theory looks at the question of ultimate origins of life in a slightly different way?

That's a different controversy. There are different versions of the theory. One idea is that there was no origin of life, that life, like the universe, has always existed and got to the Earth through space. That idea doesn't seem very reasonable since we know that the universe has not always existed, so life has to happen some time after the big bang 10 or 20 billion years ago.

It may be that life came to Earth from another planet. That may or may not be true, but still doesn't answer the question of where life started. You only transfer the problem to the other solar system. Proponents say conditions may have been more favorable on the other planet, but if so, they should tell us what those conditions were.

Along these lines, there is a consensus that life would have had a hard time making it here from another solar system, because of the destructive effects of cosmic rays over long periods of time.

What about submarine vents as a source of prebiotic compounds?

I have a very simple response to that . Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful.


Can you review with us some of the history and basic background of your original prebiotic experiments?

In the 1820's a German chemist named Woeller announced the synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate, creating a compound that occurs in biology. That experiment is so famous because it is considered the first example where inorganic compounds reacted to make a biological compound. They used to make a distinction between organic, meaning of biological origin, and inorganic- CO2, CO and graphite. We now know that there is no such distinction.

However, it remained a mystery how you could make organic compounds under geological conditions and have them organized into a living organism. There were all sorts of theories and speculation. It was once thought that if you took organic material, rags, rotting meat, etc, and let it sit, that maggots, rats etc. would arise spontaneously. It's not as crazy as it seems, considering DNA hadn't been discovered. It was then reasonable to hold those views if you consider living organisms as protoplasm, a life substance. This all changed in 1860 when Pasteur showed that you don't get living organisms except from other living organisms. This disproved the idea of spontaneous generation.

But spontaneous generation means two things. One is the idea that life can emerge from a pile of rags. The other is that life was generated once, hundreds of millions of years ago. Pasteur never proved it didn't happen once, he only showed that it doesn't happen all the time.

A number of people tried prebiotic experiments. But they used CO2F, nitrogen and water. When you use those chemicals, nothing happens. It's only when you use a reducing atmosphere that things start to happen.


Who came up with the idea of the reducing atmosphere?

Oparin, a Russian scientist, began the modern idea of the origin of life when he published a pamphlet in 1924. His idea was called the heterotrophic hypothesis: that the first organisms were heterotrophic, meaning they got their organic material from the environment, rather than having to make it, like blue-green algae. This was an important idea. Oparin also suggested that the less biosynthesis there is, the easier it is to form a living organism. Then he proposed the idea of the reducing atmosphere where you might make organic compounds.

He also proposed that the first organisms were coacervates, a special type of colloid. Nobody takes that last part very seriously anymore, but in 1936, this was reasonable since DNA was not known to be the genetic material..

In 1951, unaware of Oparin's work, Harold Urey came to the same conclusion about the reducing atmosphere. He knew enough chemistry and biology to figure that you might get the building blocks of life under these conditions.


Tell us about the famous electrical discharge experiment.

The experiments were done in Urey's lab when I was a graduate student. Urey gave a lecture in October of 1951 when I first arrived at Chicago and suggested that someone do these experiments. So I went to him and said, "I'd like to do those experiments". The first thing he tried to do was talk me out of it. Then he realized I was determined. He said the problem was that it was really a very risky experiment and probably wouldn't work, and he was responsible that I get a degree in three years or so. So we agreed to give it six months or a year. If it worked out fine, if not, on to something else. As it turned out I got some results in a matter of weeks.

In the early 1950s Stanley L. Miller, working in the laboratory of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, did the first experiment designed to clarify the chemical reactions that occurred on the primitive earth. In the flask at the bottom, he created an "ocean" of water, which he heated, forcing water vapor to circulate through the apparatus. The flask at the top contained an "atmosphere" consisting of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2) and the circulating water vapor.
Next he exposed the gases to a continuous electrical discharge ("lightning"), causing the gases to interact. Water-soluble products of those reactions then passed through a condenser and dissolved in the mock ocean. The experiment yielded many amino acids and enabled Miller to explain how they had formed. For instance, glycine appeared after reactions in the atmosphere produced simple compounds - formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. Years after this experiment, a meteorite that struck near Murchison, Australia, was shown to contain a number of the same amino acids that Miller identified and in roughly the same relative amounts. Such coincidences lent credence to the idea that Miller's protocol approximated the chemistry of the prebiotic earth. More recent findings have cast some doubt on that conclusion.

b]Taken from Leslie Orgel's Scientific American article
"The Origin of Life on Earth" (Scientific American, October, 1994)[/b]

You must have been excited to get such dramatic results so quickly, and with what, at the time, must have seemed like an outlandish hypothesis?

Oh yes. Most people thought I was a least a little bit crazy. But if you look at methane/ammonia vs CO2/nitrogen there was no doubt in my mind. It was very clear that if you want to make organic compounds it would be easier with methane. It's easy to say that but it is quite a bit more difficult to get organized and do the experiment.

The surprise of the experiment was the very large yield of amino acids. We would have been happy if we got traces of amino acids, but we got around 4 percent. Incidentally, this is probably the biggest yield of any similar prebiotic experiment conducted since then. The reason for that has to do with the fact that amino acids are made from even simpler organic compounds such as hydrogen cyanide and aldehydes.

That was the start. It all held together and the chemistry turned out to be not that outlandish after all.


What was the original reaction to your work in the science community?

There was certainly surprise. One of the reviewers simply didn't believe it and delayed the review process of the paper prior to publication. He later apologized to me. It was sufficiently unusual, that even with Urey's backing it was difficult to get it published. If I'd submitted it to "Science" on my own, it would still be on the bottom of the pile. But the work is so easy to reproduce that it wasn't long before the experiment was validated.

Another scientist was sure that there was some bacterial contamination of the discharge apparatus. When you see the organic compounds dripping off the electrodes, there is really little room for doubt. But we filled the tank with gas, sealed it, put it in an autoclave for 18 hours at 15 psi. Usually you would use 15 minutes. Of course the results were the same.

Nobody questioned the chemistry of the original experiment, although many have questioned what the conditions were on pre-biotic Earth. The chemistry was very solid.


How much of a role did serendipity play in the original setup?

Fortunately, Urey was so adamant at the time about methane that I didn't explore alternate gas mixtures. Now we know that any old reducing gases will do. CO2/hydrogen and nitrogen will do the trick, although not as well.

There was some serendipity in how we handled the water. If we hadn't boiled it and run it for a week, we wouldn't have gotten such good yields of amino acids. We knew right away that something happened rather quickly because you could see a color change after a couple of days.

The fact that the experiment is so simple that a high school student can almost reproduce it is not a negative at all. That fact that it works and is so simple is what is so great about it. If you have to use very special conditions with a very complicated apparatus there is a question of whether it can be a geological process.


The original study raised many questions. What about the even balance of L and D (left and right oriented) amino acids seen in your experiment, unlike the preponderance of L seen in nature? How have you dealt with that question?

All of these pre-biotic experiments yield a racemic mixture, that is, equal amounts of D and L forms of the compounds. Indeed, if you're results are not racemic, you immediately suspect contamination. The question is how did one form get selected. In my opinion, the selection comes close to or slightly after the origin of life. There is no way in my opinion that you are going to sort out the D and L amino acids in separate pools. My opinion or working hypothesis is that the first replicated molecule had effectively no asymmetric carbon


You are talking about some kind of pre-RNA?

Exactly a kind of pre-RNA. RNA has four asymmetric carbons in it. This pre-RNA must have somehow developed into RNA. There is a considerable amount of research now to try and figure out what that pre-RNA compound was, that is, what was the precursor to the RNA ribose-phosphate.


Peter E. Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen has proposed a polymer called peptide nucleic acid (PNA) as a precursor of RNA. Is this is where PNA comes in?

Exactly, PNA looks prebiotic. Currently that is the best alternative to ribose phosphate. Whether it was the original material or not is another issue.


Can you clarify one thing? Have all of the amino acids been synthesized in pre-biotic experiments, along with all the necessary components for making life?

Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids. If you count asparagine and glutamine you get thirteen basic amino acids. We don't know how many amino acids there were to start with. Asparagine and glutamine, for example, do not look prebiotic because they hydrolyze. The purines and pyrimidines can alos be made, as can all of the sugars, although they are unstable.


Your original work was published only a month apart from Watson and Crick's description of the DNA molecule. How has the field of molecular biology influenced the field of exobiology?

The thing that has probably changed the outlook the most is the discovery of ribozymes, the catalytic RNA. This means you can have an organism with RNA carrying out both the genetic functions and catalytic functions. That gets around the problem of protein synthesis, which is this incredibly complicated thing. There is a problem with RNA as a prebiotic molecule because the ribose is unstable. This leads us to the pre-RNA world.

The idea of the pre-RNA world is essentially the same as the RNA world, except you have a different molecule that replicates. Another thing worth remembering is that all these pre-biotic experiments produce amino acids. To have these amino acids around and not use them in the first living organism would be odd. So the role of amino acids in the origin of life is unknown but still likely.


Tell us about your recent work and the lagoon idea.

The primitive Earth had big oceans, but it also had lakes, lagoons and beaches. Our hypothesis is that the conditions may have been ideal on these beaches or drying lagoons for prebiotic reactions to occur, for the simple reason that the chemicals were more concentrated in these sites than in the middle of the ocean.


Is this because of the temperatures and also the presence of minerals as well?

Temperature is an important factor. Minerals have been thought by some to play a role in the origin of life, but they really haven't done much for us so far. People talk about how minerals might have helped catalyze reactions, but there are few examples where the mineral makes any difference.

Our most recent research tackled the problem of making pyrimidines- uracil and cytosine, in prebiotic conditions. For some reason it just doesn't work very well under dilute conditions. We showed that it works like a charm once you get things concentrated and dry it out a bit. This changed my outlook on where to start looking for prebiotic reactions.

Another example is our work with co-enzyme A. The business end of co-enzyme A is called pantetheine. We showed you could make this under these kind of pre-biotic "dry beach" conditions. We found that you didn't need it to be very hot, you can make it at 40 degrees C. This indicates the ease with which some of this chemistry can take place.


Temperature seems to be a talking point regarding prebiotic hypotheses.

We know we can't have a very high temperature, because the organic materials would simply decompose. For example, ribose degrades in 73 minutes at high temperatures, so it doesn't seem likely. Then people talk about temperature gradients in the submarine vent. I don't know what these gradients are supposed to do. My thinking is that a temperature between 0 and 10 degrees C would be feasible. The minute you get above 25 degrees C there are problems of stability.


How does the discovery of the Martian meteorite factor in to the discussion? Are you convinced these are the fossilized remains of extraterrestrial microorganisms?

I think the data is interesting and suggestive, but not yet conclusive. Let's accept that the meteorite does come from Mars. You have apparently got very small bacterial fossils also iron sulfide and magnetite sitting next to each other. Then there are these PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). All of this is suggestive but not compelling.

There are just two possibilities. Either there was life on Mars or there was not. I have no problem with the idea of life on Mars, the question remains whether this evidence is adequate. If it is correct, it has an implication for one of the big questions of prebiotic research. That is, is it easy or difficult to produce life from prebiotic compounds in prebiotic conditions? It seems that it would be difficult on Mars. If it turns out to be the case on Mars, where the conditions do not look very favorable, then it should apply to anywhere in the universe, or any planet with a suitable atmosphere and temperature.


Can you tell us about the field of exobiology today in context of the world of science research?

It is a very small field. There is a society, the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. It has only 300 members, a rather small society. My own lab is part of program called NSCORT (NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training). This program is conducted in close cooperation with NASA and supports five researchers along with graduate students, post-docs and undergraduate students.

The more important research are the experiments these days, rather than the trading of ideas. Good ideas are those that when reduced to an experiment end up working. Our approach is to do experiments and demonstrate things, not just talk about possibilities.


What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing studies in exobiology?

Well we are talking about solving chemical problems. Therefore a background in basic chemistry is essential along with knowledge in the fields of organic chemistry, biochemistry and some background in geology and physics. Exobiology is a small field with a lot of interaction. It is one of few fields where an undergraduate would be able to work with top people in the field almost immediately.

This interview was conducted in October, 1996

Why Abiogenesis Is Impossible

http://www.trueorigin.org/abio.asp


If naturalistic molecules-to-human-life evolution were true, multibillions of links are required to bridge modern humans with the chemicals that once existed in the hypothetical “primitive soup”. This putative soup, assumed by many scientists to have given birth to life over 3.5 billion years ago, was located in the ocean or mud puddles. Others argue that the origin of life could not have been in the sea but rather must have occurred in clay on dry land. Still others conclude that abiogenesis was more likely to have occurred in hot vents. It is widely recognized that major scientific problems exist with all naturalistic origin of life scenarios. This is made clear in the conclusions of many leading origin-of-life researchers. A major aspect of the abiogenesis question is “What is the minimum number of parts necessary for an autotrophic free living organism to live, and could these parts assemble by naturalistic means?” Research shows that at the lowest level this number is in the multimillions, producing an irreducible level of complexity that cannot be bridged by any known natural means.

Introduction

biogenesis is the theory that life can arise spontaneously from non-life molecules under proper conditions. Evidence for a large number of transitional forms to bridge the stages of this process is critical to prove the abiogenesis theory, especially during the early stages of the process. The view of how life originally developed from non-life to an organism capable of independent life and reproduction presented by the mass media is very similar to the following widely publicized account:

Four and a half billion years ago the young planet Earth... was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began... The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms... From these one-celled organisms evolved all life on earth (from the Emmy award winning PBS NOVA film The Miracle of Life quoted in Hanegraaff, 1998, p. 70, emphasis in original).
Science textbook authors Wynn and Wiggins describe the abiogenesis process currently accepted by Darwinists:

Aristotle believed that decaying material could be transformed by the “spontaneous action of Nature” into living animals. His hypothesis was ultimately rejected, but... Aristotle’s hypothesis has been replaced by another spontaneous generation hypothesis, one that requires billions of years to go from the molecules of the universe to cells, and then, via random mutation/natural selection, from cells to the variety of organisms living today. This version, which postulates chance happenings eventually leading to the phenomenon of life, is biology’s Theory of Evolution (1997, p. 105).
The question on which this paper focuses is “How much evidence exists for this view of life’s origin?” When Darwinists discuss “missing links” they often imply that relatively few links are missing in what is a rather complete chain which connects the putative chemical precursors of life that is theorized to have existed an estimated 3.5 billion years ago to all life forms existing today. Standen noted a half century ago that the term “missing link” is misleading because it suggests that only one link is missing whereas it is more accurate to state that so many links are missing that it is not evident whether there was ever a chain (Standen, 1950, p. 106). This assertion now has been well documented by many creationists and others (see Bergman, 1998; Gish, 1995; Lubenow, 1994, 1992; Rodabaugh, 1976; and Moore, 1976).

Scientists not only have been unable to find a single undisputed link that clearly connects two of the hundreds of major family groups, but they have not even been able to produce a plausible starting point for their hypothetical evolutionary chain (Shapiro, 1986). The first links— actually the first hundreds of thousands or more links that are required to produce life—still are missing (Behe, 1996, pp. 154–156)! Horgan concluded that if he were a creationist today he would focus on the origin of life because this

...is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer’s dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion (1996, p. 138).
The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include (a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules, (b) evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules, (c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules, (d) eventual evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and (e) eventually evolution into the first cells. This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial. Scientists even lack plausible just-so stories for most of evolution. Furthermore the parts required to provide life clearly have specifications that rule out most substitutions.

In the entire realm of science no class of molecule is currently known which can remotely compete with proteins. It seems increasingly unlikely that the abilities of proteins could be realized to the same degree in any other material form. Proteins are not only unique, but give every impression of being ideally adapted for their role as the universal constructor devices of the cell ... Again, we have an example in which the only feasible candidate for a particular biological role gives every impression of being supremely fit for that role (Denton, 1998, p. 188, emphasis in original).
The logical order in which life developed is hypothesized to include the following basic major stages:

Certain simple molecules underwent spontaneous, random chemical reactions until after about half-a-billion years complex organic molecules were produced.
Molecules that could replicate eventually were formed (the most common guess is nucleic acid molecules), along with enzymes and nutrient molecules that were surrounded by membraned cells.
Cells eventually somehow “learned” how to reproduce by copying a DNA molecule (which contains a complete set of instructions for building a next generation of cells). During the reproduction process, the mutations changed the DNA code and produced cells that differed from the originals.
The variety of cells generated by this process eventually developed the machinery required to do all that was necessary to survive, reproduce, and create the next generation of cells in their likeness. Those cells that were better able to survive became more numerous in the population (adapted from Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 172).
The problem of the early evolution of life and the unfounded optimism of scientists was well put by Dawkins. He concluded that Earth’s chemistry was different on our early, lifeless, planet, and that at this time there existed

...no life, no biology, only physics and chemistry, and the details of the Earth’s chemistry were very different. Most, though not all, of the informed speculation begins in what has been called the primeval soup, a weak broth of simple organic chemicals in the sea. Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow, without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying—a replicator. This may seem like a big stroke of luck... Freakish or not, this kind of luck does happen... [and] it had to happen only once... What is more, as far as we know, it may have happened on only one planet out of a billion billion planets in the universe. Of course many people think that it actually happened on lots and lots of planets, but we only have evidence that it happened on one planet, after a lapse of half a billion to a billion years. So the sort of lucky event we are looking at could be so wildly improbable that the chances of its happening, somewhere in the universe, could be as low as one in a billion billion billion in any one year. If it did happen on only one planet, anywhere in the universe, that planet has to be our planet—because here we are talking about it (Dawkins, 1996, pp. 282–283, emphasis in original).
The Evidence for the Early Steps of Evolution

The first step in evolution was the development of simple self-copying molecules consisting of carbon dioxide, water and other inorganic compounds. No one has proven that a simple self-copying molecule can self-generate a compound such as DNA. Nor has anyone been able to create one in a laboratory or even on paper. The hypothetical weak “primeval soup” was not like soups experienced by humans but was highly diluted, likely close to pure water. The process is described as life having originated

spontaneously from organic compounds in the oceans of the primitive Earth. The proposal assumes that primitive oceans contained large quantities of simple organic compounds that reacted to form structures of greater and greater complexity, until there arose a structure that we would call living. In other words, the first living organism developed by means of a series of nonbiological steps, none of which would be highly improbably on the basis of what is know today. This theory, [was] first set forth clearly by A.I. Oparin (1938) ... (Newman, 1967, p. 662).
An astounding number of speculations, models, theories and controversies still surround every aspect of the origin of life problem (Lahav 1999). Although some early scientists proposed that “organic life ... is eternal,” most realized it must have come “into existence at a certain period in the past” (Haeckel, 1905, p. 339). It now is acknowledged that the first living organism could not have arisen directly from inorganic matter (water, carbon dioxide, and other inorganic nutrients) even as a result of some extraordinary event. Before the explosive growth of our knowledge of the cell during the last 30 years, it was known that “the simplest bacteria are extremely complex, and the chances of their arising directly from inorganic materials, with no steps in between, are too remote to consider seriously.” (Newman, 1967, p. 662). Most major discoveries about cell biology and molecular biology have been made since then.

Search for the Evidence of Earliest Life

Theories abound, but no direct evidence for the beginning of the theoretical evolutionary climb of life up what Richard Dawkins and many evolutionists call “mount improbable” ever has been discovered (Dawkins, 1996). Nor have researchers been able to develop a plausible theory to explain how life could evolve from non-life. Many equally implausible theories now exist, most of which are based primarily on speculation. The ancients believed life originated by spontaneous generation from inanimate matter or once living but now dead matter. Aristotle even believed that under the proper conditions putatively “simple” animals such as worms, fleas, mice, and dogs could spring to life spontaneously from moist ”Mother Earth."

The spontaneous generation of life theory eventually was proved false by hundreds of research studies such as the 1668 experiment by Italian physician Francesco Redi (1626–1697). In one of the first controlled biological experiments, Redi proved that maggots appeared in meat only after flies had deposited their eggs on it (Jenkens- Jones, 1997). Maggots do not spontaneously generate on their own as previously believed by less rigorous experimenters.

Despite Redi’s evidence, however, the belief in spontaneous generation of life was so strong in the 1600s that even Redi continued to believe that spontaneous generation could occur in certain instances. After the microscope proved the existence of bacteria in l683, many scientists concluded that these “simple” microscopic organisms must have “spontaneously generated,” thereby providing evolution with its beginning. Pasteur and other researchers, though, soon disproved this idea, and the fields of microbiology and biochemistry have since documented quite eloquently the enormous complexity of these compact living creatures (Black, 1998).

Nearly all biologists were convinced by the latter half of the nineteenth century that spontaneous generation of all types of living organisms was impossible (Bergman, 1993a). Now that naturalism dominates science, Darwinists reason that at least one spontaneous generation of life event must have occurred in the distant past because no other naturalistic origin-of-life method exists aside from panspermia, which only moves the spontaneous generation of life event elsewhere (Bergman, 1993b). As theism was filtered out of science, spontaneous generation gradually was resurrected in spite of its previous defeat. The solution was to add a large amount of time to the broth:

Aristotle believed that decaying material could be transformed by the “spontaneous action of Nature” into living animals. His hypothesis was ultimately rejected, but, in a way, he might not have been completely wrong. Aristotle’s hypothesis has been replaced by another spontaneous generation hypothesis, one that requires billions of years to go from the molecules of the universe to cells, and then, via random mutation/natural selection, from cells to the variety of organisms living today. This version, which postulates chance happenings eventually leading to the phenomenon of life, is biology’s Theory of Evolution (Wynn and Wiggins, 1997, p. 105, emphasis mine).
Although this view now is widely accepted among evolutionists, no one has been able to locate convincing fossil (or other) evidence to support it. The plausibility of abiogenesis has changed greatly in recent years due to research in molecular biology that has revealed exactly how complex life is, and how much evidence exists against the probability of spontaneous generation. In the 1870s and 1880s scientists believed that devising a plausible explanation for the origin of life

would be fairly easy. For one thing, they assumed that life was essentially a rather simple substance called protoplasm that could be easily constructed by combining and recombining simple chemicals such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen (Meyer, 1996, p. 25).
The German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1925) even referred to monera cells as simple homogeneous globules of plasm. Haeckel believed that a living cell about as complex as a bowl of Jell-o ® could exist, and his origin of life theory reflected this completely erroneous view. He even concluded that cell “autogony” (the term he used to describe living things’ ability to reproduce) was similar to the process of inorganic crystallization. In his words:

The most ancient organisms which arose by spontaneous generation—the original parents of all subsequent organisms—must necessarily be supposed to have been Monera—simple, soft, albuminous lumps of plasma, without structure, without any definite form, and entirely without any hard and formed parts.
About the same time T. H. Huxley proposed a simple two-step method of chemical recombination that he thought could explain the origin of the first living cell. Both Haeckel and Huxley thought that just as salt could be produced spontaneously by mixing powered sodium metal and heated chlorine gas, a living cell could be produced by mixing the few chemicals they believed were required. Haeckel taught that the basis of life is a substance called “plasm,” and this plasm constitutes

the material foundations of the phenomena of life ... All the other materials that we find in the living organism are products or derivatives of the active plasm: In view of the extraordinary significance which we must assign to the plasm—as the universal vehicle of all the vital phenomena [or as Huxley said “the physical basis of life”]—it is very important to understand clearly all its properties, especially the chemical ones ... In every case where we have with great difficulty succeeded in examining the plasm as far as possible and separating it from the plasma-products, it has the appearance of a colorless, viscous substance, the chief physical property of which is its peculiar thickness and consistency ... Active living protoplasm ... is best compared to a cold jelly or solution of glue (1905 pp. 121,123).
Once the brew was mixed, eons of time allowed spontaneous chemical reactions to produce the simple “protoplasmic substance” that scientists once assumed to be the essence of life (Meyer, 1996, p. 25). As late as 1928, the germ cell still was thought to be relatively simple and

...no one now questions that individual development everywhere consists of progress from a relatively simple to a relatively complex form. Development is not the unfolding of an infolded organism; it is the formation of new structures and functions by combinations and transformations of the relatively simple structures and functions of the germ cells (Conklin, 1928, pp. 63–64).
Cytologists now realize that a living cell contains hundreds of thousands of different complex parts such as various motor proteins that are assembled to produce the most complex “machine” in the Universe—a machine far more complex than the most complex Cray super computer. We now also realize after a century of research that the eukaryote protozoa thought to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin in Darwin’s day actually are enormously more complex than the prokaryote cell. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is

essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals... In terms of their basic biochemical design... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
This is a major problem for Darwinism because life at the cellular level generally does not reveal a gradual increase in complexity as it ascends the evolutionary ladder from protozoa to humans. The reason that all cells are basically alike is because the basic biochemical requirements and constraints for all life are the same:

A curious similarity underlies the seemingly varied forms of life we see on the earth today: the most central molecular machinery of modern organisms has always been found to be essentially the same. This unity of biochemistry has surely been one of the great discoveries of the past 100 years (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p. 90).
The most critical gap that must be explained is that between life and non-life because

Cells and organisms are very complex... [and] there is a surprising uniformity among living things. We know from DNA sequence analyses that plants and higher animals are closely related, not only to each other, but to relatively simple single-celled organisms such as yeasts. Cells are so similar in their structure and function that many of their proteins can be interchanged from one organism to another. For example, yeast cells share with human cells many of the central molecules that regulate their cell cycle, and several of the human proteins will substitute in the yeast cell for their yeast equivalents! (Alberts, 1992, p. xii).
The belief that spontaneous regeneration, while admittedly very rare, is still attractive as illustrated by Sagan and Leonard’s conclusion, “Most scientists agree that life will appear spontaneously in any place where conditions remain sufficiently favorable for a very long time” (1972, p. 9). This claim then is followed by an admission from Sagan and Leonard that raises doubts not only about abiogenesis, but about Darwinism generally, namely, “this conviction [about the origin of life] is based on inferences and extrapolations.” The many problems, inferences, and extrapolations needed to create abiogenesis just-so stories once were candidly admitted by Dawkins:

An origin of life, anywhere, consists of the chance arising of a self-replicating entity. Nowadays, the replicator that matters on Earth is the DNA molecule, but the original replicator probably was not DNA. We don’t know what it was. Unlike DNA, the original replicating molecules cannot have relied upon complicated machinery to duplicate them. Although, in some sense, they must have been equivalent to “Duplicate me” instructions, the “language” in which the instructions were written was not a highly formalized language such that only a complicated machine could obey them. The original replicator cannot have needed elaborate decoding, as DNA instructions... do today. Self-duplication was an inherent property of the entity’s structure just as, say, hardness is an inherent property of a diamond... the original replicators, unlike their later successors the DNA molecules, did not have complicated decoding and instruction-obeying machinery, because complicated machinery is the kind of thing that arises in the world only after many generations of evolution. And evolution does not get started until there are replicators. In the teeth of the so-called “Catch-22 of the origin of life”... the original self-duplicating entities must have been simple enough to arise by the spontaneous accidents of chemistry (1996, p. 285).
The method used in constructing these hypothetical replicators is not stated, nor has it ever been demonstrated to exist either in the laboratory or on paper. The difficulties of terrestrial abiogenesis are so great that some evolutionists have hypothesized that life could not have originated on earth but must have been transported here from another planet via star dust, meteors, comets, or spaceships (Bergman, 1993b)! As noted above, panspermia does not solve the origin of life problem though, but instead moves the abiogenesis problem elsewhere. Furthermore, since so far as we know no living organism can survive very long in space because of cosmic rays and other radiation, “this theory is ... highly dubious, although it has not been disproved; also, it does not answer the question of where or how life did originate” (Newman, 1967, p. 662).

Darwin evidentially recognized how serious the abiogenesis problem was for his theory, and once even conceded that all existing terrestrial life must have descended from some primitive life form that was called into life “by the Creator” (1900, p. 316). But to admit, as Darwin did, the possibility of one or a few creations is to open the door to the possibility of many or even thousands! If God made one animal type, He also could have made two or many thousands of different types. No contemporary hypothesis today has provided a viable explanation as to how the abiogenesis origin of life could occur by naturalistic means. The problems are so serious that the majority of evolutionists today tend to shun the whole subject of abiogenesis.

History of Modern Abiogenesis Research

The “warm soup” theory, still the most widely held theory of abiogenesis among evolutionists, was developed most extensively by Russian scientist A.I. Oparin in the 1920s. The theory held that life evolved when organic molecules rained into the primitive oceans from an atmospheric soup of chemicals interacting with solar energy. Later Haldane (1928), Bernal (1947) and Urey (1952) published their research to try to support this model, all with little success. Then came what some felt was a breakthrough by Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller in the early 1950s.

The most famous origin of life experiment was completed in 1953 by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago. At the time Miller was a 23-year-old graduate student working under Urey who was trying to recreate in his laboratory the conditions then thought to have preceded the origin of life. The Miller/Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases (representing what they thought composed the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next, they used a spark-discharge device to strike the gases in the flask with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the water boiling. Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a reddish stain on the sides of the flask. After analyzing the substances that had been formed, they found several types of amino acids. Eventually Miller and other scientists were able to produce 10 of the 20 amino acids required for life by techniques similar to the original Miller/ Urey experiments.

Urey and Miller assumed that the results were significant because some of the organic compounds produced were the building blocks of proteins, the basic structure of all life (Horgan, 1996, p. 130). Although widely heralded by the press as “proving” the origin of life could have occurred on the early earth under natural conditions without intelligence, the experiment actually provided compelling evidence for exactly the opposite conclusion. For example, equal quantities of both right- and left-handed organic molecules always were produced by the Urey/Miller procedure. In real life, nearly all amino acids found in proteins are left handed, almost all polymers of carbohydrates are right handed, and the opposite type can be toxic to the cell. In a summary the famous Urey/Miller origin-of-life experiment, Horgan concluded:

Miller’s results seem to provide stunning evidence that life could arise from what the British chemist J.B.S. Haldane had called the “primordial soup.” Pundits speculated that scientists, like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, would shortly conjure up living organisms in their laboratories and thereby demonstrate in detail how genesis unfolded. It hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, almost 40 years after his original experiment, Miller told me that solving the riddle of the origin of life had turned out to be more difficult than he or anyone else had envisioned (1996, p. 138).
The reasons why creating life in a test tube turned out to be far more difficult than Miller or anyone else expected are numerous and include the fact that scientists now know that the complexity of life is far greater than Miller or anyone else in pre-DNA revolution 1953 ever imagined. Actually life is far more complex and contains far more information than anyone in the 1980s believed possible. In an interview with Miller, now considered one of “the most diligent and respected origin-of-life researchers,” Horgan reported that after Miller completed his 1953 experiment, he

...dedicated himself to the search for the secret of life. He developed a reputation as both a rigorous experimentalist and a bit of a curmudgeon, someone who is quick to criticize what he feels is shoddy work....he fretted that his field still had a reputation as a fringe discipline, not worthy of serious pursuit.... Miller seemed unimpressed with any of the current proposals on the origin of life, referring to them as “nonsense” or “paper chemistry.” He was so contemptuous of some hypotheses that, when I asked his opinion of them, he merely shook his head, sighed deeply, and snickered—as if overcome by the folly of humanity. Stuart Kauffman’s theory of autocatalysis fell into this category. “Running equations through a computer does not constitute an experiment,” Miller sniffed. Miller acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely where and when life emerged. “We’re trying to discuss a historical event, which is very different from the usual kind of science, and so criteria and methods are very different,” he remarked... (Horgan, 1996, p. 139).
The major problem of Millers experiment is well put by Davies,

Making the building blocks of life is easy—amino acids have been found in meteorites and even in outer space. But just as bricks alone don’t make a house, so it takes more than a random collection of amino acids to make life. Like house bricks, the building blocks of life have to be assembled in a very specific and exceedingly elaborate way before they have the desired function (Davies, 1999, p. 28).
We now realize that the Urey/Miller experiments did not produce evidence for abiogenesis because, although amino acids are the building blocks of life, the key to life is information (Pigliucci, 1999; Dembski, 1998). Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines and similar) abound in nature, but this does not help us to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespear’s plays) because this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to translate that information into symbols. What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines. Likewise, the information contained in the genome must be explained (Dembski, 1998). Complicating the situation is the fact that

research has since drawn Miller’s hypothetical atmosphere into question, causing many scientists to doubt the relevance of his findings. Recently, scientists have focused on an even more exotic amino acid source: meteorites. Chyba is one of several researchers who have evidence that extraterrestrial amino acids may have hitched a ride to Earth on far flung space rocks (Simpson, 1999, p. 26).
Yet another difficulty is, even if the source of the amino acids and the many other compounds needed for life could be explained, it still must be explained as to how these many diverse elements became aggregated in the same area and then properly assembled themselves. This problem is a major stumbling block to any theory of abiogenesis:

...no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation. That’s one of the strongest reasons that Wächtershäuser, Morowitz, and other hydrothermal vent theorists want to move the kitchen [that cooked life] to the ocean floor. If the process starts down deep at discrete vents, they say, it can build amino acids—and link them up—right there (Simpson, 1999, p. 26).
Several recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that life may have arisen in submarine vents whose temperatures approach 350° C. Unfortunately for both warm pond and hydrothermal vent theorists, heat may be the downfall of their theory.

Heat and Biochemical Degradation Problems

Charles Darwin’s hypothesis that life first originated on earth in a warm little pond somewhere on a primitive earth has been used widely by most nontheists for over a century in attempts to explain the origin of life. Several reasons exist for favoring a warm environment for the start of life on earth. A major reason is that the putative oldest known organisms on earth are alleged to be hyperthermophiles that require temperatures between 80° and 110° C in order to thrive (Levy and Miller, 1998). In addition some atmospheric models have concluded that the surface temperature of the early earth was much higher than it is today.

A major drawback of the “warm little pond” origin- of-life theory is its apparent ability to produce sufficient concentrations of the many complex compounds required to construct the first living organisms. These compounds must be sufficiently stable to insure that the balance between synthesis and degradation favors synthesis (Levy and Miller, 1998). The warm pond and hot vent theories also have been seriously disputed by experimental research that has found the half-lives of many critically important compounds needed for life to be far “too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds” (Levy and Miller, 1998, p. 7933). Furthermore, research has documented that “unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (in less than 100 years), we conclude that a high temperature origin of life... cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine or cytosine” because these compounds break down far too fast in a warm environment. In a hydrothermal environment, most of these compounds could neither form in the first place, nor exist for a significant amount of time (Levy and Miller, p. 7933).

As Levy and Miller explain, “the rapid rates of hydrolysis of the nucleotide bases A,U,G and T at temperatures much above 0° Celsius would present a major problem in the accumulation of these presumed essential components on the early earth” (p. 7933). For this reason, Levy and Miller postulated that either a two-letter code or an alternative base pair was used instead. This requires the development of an entirely different kind of life, a conclusion that is not only highly speculative, but likely impossible because no other known compounds have the required properties for life that adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine possess. Furthermore, this would require life to evolve based on a hypothetical two-letter code or alternative base pair system. Then life would have to re-evolve into a radically new form based on the present code, a change that appears to be impossible according to our current understanding of molecular biology.

Furthermore, the authors found that, given the minimal time perceived to be necessary for evolution to occur, cytosine is unstable even at temperatures as cold as 0º C. Without cytosine neither DNA or RNA can exist. One of the main problems with Miller’s theory is that his experimental methodology has not been able to produce much more than a few amino acids which actually lend little or no insight into possible mechanisms of abiogenesis.

Even the simpler molecules are produced only in small amounts in realistic experiments simulating possible primitive earth conditions. What is worse, these molecules are generally minor constituents of tars: It remains problematical how they could have been separated and purified through geochemical processes whose normal effects are to make organic mixtures more and more of a jumble. With somewhat more complex molecules these difficulties rapidly increase. In particular a purely geochemical origin of nucleotides (the subunits of DNA and RNA) presents great difficulties. In any case, nucleotides have not yet been produced in realistic experiments of the kind Miller did. (Cairns-Smith, 1985, p. 90).
Postulating alternative codes for an origin-of-life event at temperatures close to the freezing point of water is a rationalization designed to overcome what appears to be a set of insurmountable problems for the abiogenesis theory. Given these problems, why do so many biologists believe that life on earth originated by spontaneous generation under favorable conditions? Yockey concludes that although Miller’s paradigm was at one time

worth consideration, now the entire effort in the primeval soup paradigm is self-deception based on the ideology of its champions... The history of science shows that a paradigm, once it has achieved the status of acceptance (and is incorporated in textbooks) and regardless of its failures, is declared invalid only when a new paradigm is available to replace it ... It is a characteristic of the true believer in religion, philosophy and ideology that he must have a set of beliefs, come what may... There is no reason that this should be different in the research on the origin of life ...Belief in a primeval soup on the grounds that no other paradigm is available is an example of the logical fallacy of the false alternative... (Yockey, 1992, p. 336 emphasis in original).
The many problems with the warm soup model have motivated the development of many other abiogenesis models. One is the cold temperature model that is gaining in acceptance as the flaws of the hot model become more obvious. As Vogel notes, many researchers still

argue that the first cells arose in the scalding waters of hot springs or geothermal vents, while a small but prominent band of holdouts insists on cool pools or even cold oceans. With no fossils to go by, the argument has circled a variety of indirect clues ... But now ... comes good news from the cold camp: Evidence from the genes of living organisms suggests that the cell that gave rise to all of today’s life-forms was ill-suited for extremely hot conditions (Vogel, 1999, p. 155).
Based on a geochemical assessment, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (1984 p. 66) concluded that in the atmosphere the “many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible” in the various water basins on the primitive earth. They concluded that the “soup” would have been far too diluted for direct polymerization to occur. Even local ponds where some concentrating of soup ingredients may have occurred would have met with the same problem.

Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario “the myth of the prebiotic soup” (Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen, 1984, p. 66).
It also is theorized that life must have begun in clay because the “clay-life” explanation explains several problems not explained by the “primordial soup” theory. Graham Cairns-Smith of the University of Scotland first proposed the clay-life theory about 40 years ago, and many scientists have since come to believe that life on earth must have began from clay rather than in the the warm little pond as proposed by Darwin. The clay-life theory holds that an accumulation of chemicals produced in clay by the sun eventually led to the hypothetical self-replicating molecules that evolved into cells and then eventually into all life forms on earth today.

The theory argues that only clay has the two essential properties necessary for life: the capacity to both store and transfer energy. Furthermore, because some clay components have the ability to act as catalysts, clay is capable of some of the same lifelike attributes as those exhibited by enzymes. Additionally the mineral structure of certain clays are almost as intricate as some organic molecules. However, the clay theory suffered from its own set of problems, and as a result has been discarded by most theorists. At the very least, the Stanley Miller experiments proved that amino acids can be formed under certain conditions. The clay theory has yet to achieve even this much. As a result, Miller’s experiments continue to be cited because no other viable source exists for the production of amino acids. Now, the hot thermal vent theory is being discussed once again by many as an alternative although, as noted above, it too suffers from potentially lethal problems.

What is Needed to Produce Life

Naturalism requires enormously long periods of time to allow non-living matter to evolve into the hypothetical speck of viable protoplasm needed to start the process that results in life. Even more time is needed to evolve the protoplasm into the enormous variety of highly organized complex life forms that have been found in Cambrian rocks. Neo-Darwinism suggests that life originated over 3.5 billion years ago, yet a rich fossil record for less than roughly 600 million years commonly is claimed. Consequently, almost all the record is missing, and evidence for the most critical two billion years of evolution is sparse at best with what little actually exists being highly equivocal.

A major issue then, in abiogenesis is “what is the minimum number of possible parts that allows something to live?” The number of parts needed is large, but how large is difficult to determine. In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability). These criteria were developed by biologists who were trying to understand the process we call life. Although these criteria are not perfect, they are useful in spite of cases that seem to contradict our definition. A mule, for instance, cannot usually reproduce but clearly is alive, and a crystal can “reproduce” but clearly is not alive. One attempt by an evolutionist to determine what is needed in order to self-replicate produced the following conclusions:

If we ditch the selfish-replicator illusion, and accept that the only known biological entity capable of autonomous replication is the cell (full of cooperating genes and proteins, etc.)... DNA replication is so error-prone that it needs the prior existence of protein enzymes to improve the copying fidelity of a gene-size piece of DNA. “Catch-22,” say Maynard Smith and Szathmary. So, wheel on RNA with its now recognized properties of carrying both informational and enzymatic activity, leading the authors to state: “In essence, the first RNA molecules did not need a protein polymerase to replicate them; they replicated themselves.” Is this a fact or a hope? I would have thought it relevant to point out for ‘biologists in general’ that not one self-replicating RNA has emerged to date from quadrillions (1024) of artificially synthesized, random RNA sequences (Dover, 1999, p. 218).
The cell, then appears to be the only biological entity that self-reproduces and simultaneously possesses the other traits required for life. The question then becomes “What is the simplest cell that can exist?”

Many bacteria and all viruses possess less complexity than required for an organism normally defined as “living,” and for this reason must live as parasites which require the existence of complex cells in order to reproduce. For this reason Trefil noted that the question of where viruses come from is an “enduring mystery” in evolution. Viruses usually are much smaller than parasitic bacteria and are not considered alive because they must rely on their host even more than bacteria do. Viruses consist primarily of a coat of proteins surrounding DNA or RNA that contains a handful of genes, and since they do not

... reproduce in the normal way, it’s hard to see how they could have gotten started. One theory: they are parasites who, over a long period of time, have lost the ability to reproduce independently... Viruses are among the smallest of “living” things. A typical virus, like the one that causes ordinary influenza, may be no more than a thousand atoms across. This is in comparison with cells which may be hundreds or even thousands of times that size. Its small size is one reason that it is so easy for a virus to spread from one host to another—it’s hard to filter out anything that small (Trefil, 1992, p. 91).
In order to reproduce, a virus’s genes must invade a living cell and take control of its much larger DNA. A bacterium is 400 times greater in size than the smallest known virus, while a typical human cell averages 200 times larger than the smallest known bacterium. The QB virus is only 24 nanometers long, contains only 3 genes and is almost 20 times smaller than Escherichia coli, billions of which inhabit the human intestines. E. coli is 1,000 nanometers long compared to a typical human cell that is about 10,000 nanometers long (1 nanometer equals 1 billionth of a meter, or about 1/25-millionths of an inch) and contains an estimated 100,000 genes. Researchers have detected microbes in human and bovine blood that are only 2-millionths of an inch in diameter, but these organisms cannot live on their own because they need more than simple inorganic, or common inorganic molecules to survive.

Since parasites lack many of the genes (and other biological machinery) required to survive on their own, in order to grow and reproduce they must obtain the nutrients and other services they require from the organisms that serve as their hosts. Independent free-living creatures such as people, mice and roses are far more complex than organisms like parasites and viruses that are dependent on these complex free-living organisms. Abiogenesis theory requires that the first life forms consisted of free-living autotrophs (i.e. organisms that are able to manufacture their own food) since the complex life forms needed to sustain heterotrophs (organisms that cannot manufacture their own food) did not exist until later.

Most extremely small organisms existing today are dependent on other, more complex organisms. Some organisms can overcome their lack of size and genes by borrowing genes from their hosts or by gorging on a rich broth of organic chemicals like blood. Some microbes live in colonies in which different members provide different services. Unless one postulates the unlikely scenario of the simultaneous spontaneous generation of many different organisms, one has to demonstrate the evolution of an organism that can survive on its own, or with others like itself, as a symbiont or cannibal. Consequently, the putative first life forms must have been much more complex than most examples of “simple” life known to exist today.

The simplest microorganisms, Chlamydia and Rickettsea, are the smallest living things known, but also are both parasites and thus too simple to be the first life. Only a few hundred atoms across, they are smaller than the largest virus and have about half as much DNA as do other species of bacteria. Although they are about as small as possible and still be living, these two forms of life still possess the millions of atomic parts necessary to carry out the biochemical functions required for life, yet they still are too simple to live on their own and thus must use the cellular machinery of a host in order to live (Trefil, 1992, p. 28). Many of the smaller bacteria are not free living, but are parasite like viruses that can live only with the help of more complex organisms (Galtier et al., 1999).

The gap between non-life and the simplest cell is illustrated by what is believed to be the organism with the smallest known genome of any free living organism Mycoplasma genitalium (Fraser et al., 1995). M. genitalium is 200 nanometers long and contains only 482 genes or over 0.5 million base pairs which compares to 4,253 genes for E. coli (about 4,720,000 nucleotide base pairs), with each gene producing an enormously complex protein machine (Fraser et al., 1995). M. genitalium also must live off other life because they are too simple to live on their own. They invade reproductive tract cells and live as parasites on organelles that are far larger and more complicated but which must first exist for the survival of parasitic organisms to be possible. The first life therefore must be much more complex than M. genitalium even though it is estimated to manufacture about 600 different proteins. A typical eukaryote cell consists of an estimated 40,000 different protein molecules and is so complex that to acknowledge that the “cells exist at all is a marvel... even the simplest of the living cells is far more fascinating than any human- made object" (Alberts, 1992, pp. xii, xiv).

M. genitalium is one-fifth the size of E. coli but four times larger than the putative nanobacteria. Blood nanobacteria are only 50 nanometers long (which is smaller than some viruses), and possess a currently unknown number of genes. When Finnish biologist Olavi Kajander discovered nanobacteria in 1998, he called them a “bizarre new form of life.” Nanobacteria now are speculated to resemble primitive life forms which presumably arose in the postulated chemical soup that existed when earth was young. Kajander concluded that nanobacteria may serve as a model for primordial life, and that their modern-day primordial soup is blood. Actually, nanobacteria cannot be the smallest form of life because they evidently are parasites and primordial life must be able to live independently. Like viruses they are not considered alive but are of intense medical interest because they may be one cause of kidney stones (Kajander and Ciftcioglu, 1998). Other researchers think these bacteria are only a degenerate form of larger bacteria.

For these reasons, when researching the minimum requirements needed to live the example of E. coli is more realistic. Most bacteria require several thousand genes to carry out the minimum functions necessary for life. Denton notes that even though the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing under 10–12 grams, each bacterium is a

veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world (Denton, 1986, p. 250).
The simplest form of life requires millions of parts at the atomic level, and the higher life forms require trillions. Furthermore, the many macromolecules necessary for life are constructed of even smaller parts called elements. That life requires a certain minimum number of parts is well documented; the only debate now is how many millions of functionally integrated parts are necessary. The minimum number may not produce an organism that can survive long enough to effectively reproduce. Schopf notes that simple life without complex repair systems to fix damaged genes and their protein products stand little chance of surviving. When a mutation occurs

cells like those of humans with two copies of each gene can often get by with one healthy version. But a mutation can be deadly if it occurs in an organism with only a single copy of its genes, like many primitive forms of life.... (Schopf, 1999, p. 102)
Therefore, the answer to our original question, “What is the smallest form of nonparasitic life?” probably is an organism close to size and complexity of E. Coli, possibly even larger. No answer is currently possible because we have much to learn about what is required for life. As researchers discover new exotic “life” forms thriving in rocks, ice, acid, boiling water and other extreme environments, they are finding the biological world to be much more complex than assumed merely a decade ago. The oceans now are known to be teeming with microscopic cells which form the base of the food chain on which fish and other larger animals depend. It now is estimated that small, free-living aquatic bacteria make up about one-half of the entire biomass of the oceans (MacAyeal, 1995).

Many highly complex animals appear very early in the fossil record and many “simple” animals thrive today. The earliest fossils known, which are believed to be those of cyanobacteria, are quite similar structurally and biochemically to bacteria living today. Yet it is claimed they thrived almost as soon as earth formed (Schopf, 1993; Galtier et al., 1999). Estimated at 3.5 billion years old, these earliest known forms of life are incredibly complex. Furthermore, remarkably diverse types of animals existed very early in earth history and no less than eleven different species have been found so far. A concern Corliss raises is “why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling” (1993, p. 2). E. coli, as far as we can tell, is the same today as in the fossil record.

Probability Arguments

As Coppedge (1973) notes, even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10,261. Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form.

At this rate he estimates it would require 10119,831 years on the average to obtain a set of these proteins by naturalistic evolution (1973, pp. 110, 114). The number he obtained is 10119,831 greater than the current estimate for the age of the earth (4.6 billion years). In other words, this event is outside the range of probability. Natural selection cannot occur until an organism exists and is able to reproduce which requires that the first complex life form first exist as a functioning unit.

In spite of the overwhelming empirical and probabilistic evidence that life could not originate by natural processes, evolutionists possess an unwavering belief that some day they will have an answer to how life could spontaneously generate. Nobel laureate Christian de Duve (1995) argues that life is the product of law-driven chemical steps, each one of which must have been highly probable in the right circumstances. This reliance upon an unknown “law” favoring life has been postulated to replace the view that life’s origin was a freakish accident unlikely to occur anywhere, is now popular. Chance is now out of favor in part because it has become clear that even the simplest conceivable life form (still much simpler than any actual organism) would have to be so complex that accidental self-assembly would be nothing short of miraculous even in two billion years (Spetner, 1997). Furthermore, natural selection cannot operate until biological reproducing units exist. This hoped for “law,” though, has no basis in fact nor does it even have a theoretical basis. It is a nebulous concept which results from a determination to continue the quest for a naturalistic explanation of life. In the words of Horgan:

One day, he [Stanley Miller] vowed, scientists would discover the self-replicating molecule that had triggered the great saga of evolution....[and] the discovery of the first genetic material [will] legitimize Millers’s field. “It would take off like a rocket,” Miller muttered through clenched teeth. Would such a discovery be immediately self-apparent? Miller nodded. “It will be in the nature of something that will make you say, ‘Jesus, there it is. How could you have overlooked this for so long?’ And everybody will be totally convinced” (Horgan, 1996, p. 139).
The atheistic world view requires abiogenesis; therefore scientists must try to deal with the probability arguments. The most common approach is similar to the attempt by Stenger, who does not refute the argument but tries to explain it by way analogy:

For example, every human being on Earth is the product of a highly elaborate combination of genes that would be a very unlikely outcome of a random toss. Think of what an unlikely being you are—the result of so many chance encounters between your male and female ancestors. What if your great great great grandmother had not survived that childhood illness? What if your grandfather had been killed by a stray bullet in a war, before he met your grandmother? Despite all those contingencies, you still exist. And if you ask, after the fact, what is the probability for your particular set of genes existing, the answer is one hundred percent. Certainty! (1998, p. 9).
The major problem with this argument, as shown by Dembski, is that it is a gross misuse of statistics, one of the most important tools science has ever developed. Although change is involved, intelligence is critically important even in the events Stenger describes. The fallacy of his reasoning can be illustrated by comparing it to a court case using DNA. Stenger’s analogy cannot negate the finding that the likelihood is 1 in 100 million that a blood sample found on the victim at the crime is the suspect’s. For this reason, it is highly probable that the accused was at the crime scene; the fact that his blood was mixed with the victim’s, will no doubt be accepted by the court and an attempt to destroy this conclusion by use of an analogy such as Stenger’s will likely be rejected.

Conclusions

It appears that the field of molecular biology will falsify Darwinism. An estimated 100,000 different proteins are used to construct humans alone. Furthermore, one million species are known, and as many as 10 million may exist. Although many proteins are used in most life forms, as many as 100 million or more protein variations may exist in all plant and animal life. According to Asimov:

Now, almost each of all the thousands of reactions in the body is catalyzed by a specific enzyme ... a different one in each case ... and every enzyme is a protein, a different protein. The human body is not alone in having thousands of different enzymes—so does every other species of creature. Many of the reactions that take place in human cells also happen in the cells of other creatures. Some of the reactions, indeed, are universal, in that they take place in all cells of every type. This means that an enzyme capable of catalyzing a particular reaction may be present in the cells of wolves, octopi, moss, and bacteria, as well as in our own cells. And yet each of these enzymes, capable though it is of catalyzing one particular reaction, is characteristic of its own species. They may all be distinguished from one another. It follows that every species of creature has thousands of enzymes and that all those enzymes may be different. Since there are over a million different species on earth, it may be possible—judging from the enzymes alone—that different proteins exist by the millions! (Asimov, 1962, pp. 27–28).
Even using an unrealistically low estimate of 1,000 steps required to “evolve” the average protein (if this were possible) implies that many trillions of links were needed to evolve the proteins that once existed or that exist today. And not one clear transitional protein that is morphologically and chemically in between the ancient and modern form of the protein has been convincingly demonstrated. The same problem exists with fats, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and the other compounds that are produced by, and necessary for, life.

Scientists have yet to discover a single molecule that has “learned to make copies of itself” (Simpson, 1999, p. 26). Many scientists seem to be oblivious of this fact because

Articles appearing regularly in scientific journals claim to have generated self-replicating peptides or RNA strands, but they fail to provide a natural source for their compounds or an explanation for what fuels them... this top-down approach... [is like] a caveman coming across a modern car and trying to figure out how to make it. “It would be like taking the engine out of the car, starting it up, and trying to see how that engine works” (Simpson, 1999, p.26).
Some bacteria, specifically phototrophs and lithotrophs, contain all the metabolic machinery necessary to construct most of their growth factors (amino acids, vitamins, purines and pyrimidines) from raw materials (usually O2, light, a carbon source, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and a dozen or so trace minerals). They can live in an environment with few needs but first must possess the complex functional metabolic machinery necessary to produce the compounds needed to live from a few types of raw materials. This requires more metabolic machinery in order to manufacture the many needed organic compounds necessary for life. Evolution was much more plausible when life was believed to be a relatively simple material similar to, in Haeckel’s words, the “transparent viscous albumin that surrounds the yolk in the hen’s egg” which evolved into all life today. Haeckel taught the process occurred as follows:

By far the greater part of the plasm that comes under investigation as active living matter in organisms is metaplasm, or secondary plasm, the originally homogeneous substance of which has acquired definite structures by phyletic differentiations in the course of millions of years (1905, p.126).
Abiogenesis is only one area of research which illustrates that the naturalistic origin of life hypothesis has become less and less probable as molecular biology has progressed, and is now at the point that its plausibility appears outside the realm of probability. Numerous origin-of-life researchers, have lamented the fact that molecular biology during the past half-a-century has not been very kind to any naturalistic origin-of-life theory. Perhaps this explains why researchers now are speculating that other events such as panspermia or an undiscovered “life law” are more probable than all existing terrestrial abiogenesis theories, and can better deal with the many seemingly insurmountable problems of abiogenesis.

Acknowledgements: I want to thank Bert Thompson, Ph.D., Wayne Frair, Ph.D., and John Woodmorappe, M.A., for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.