"Primordial Soup" - Actually a Most Toxic Brew

Evolution's soup was poisonous! Too much tar and hydrogen, an unusuable mix of amino acids, and more. Yuk.

"...without excuse! The Testimony of the Details", by Timothy R. Stout (Abbreviated version)

(This article digest is by Marko Malyj, of the article published in Creation Matters, Volume 15, Number 3, May/June 2010, a publication of the Creation Research Society, to appear early 2011 at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2003%20low%20res.pdf). {Original version of this blog post with all pictures is available at http://umarko.blogspot.com/. My comments that are not in the original published version are offset in curly braces.}

In this article, we will look briefly at ... Miller's "origin of life" experiment. In 1953, Stanley Miller performed an experiment which is still discussed in almost every introductory biology textbook today. He mixed water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a spark chamber. When a high voltage arc was introduced across the gases in the chamber, he produced a number of complex molecules including several different kinds of amino acids. Evolutionists claim that this experiment demonstrates how natural physical processes could have produced the building-block molecules which in time turned into the first living cells. Therefore, a Creator was no longer needed as the source of life.

Sorry, this is NOT the "Origin of Life"...

At first glance, it can appear that Miller's experiment helps the case for evolution. That is why the textbooks still talk about it. However, the problems are in the details. There are a number of principles from biochemistry that teach against a natural origin of life....

1. Unusable ratio of amino acids. Many kinds of amino acids are possible: living systems primarily use 20. The different kinds have varying chemical properties. The most important is whether a particular kind of amino acid is attracted to water molecule or repelled by them. In life, the ratio between the two needs to be fairly even. The simplest and easiest to make of the amino acids are water repelling.

Miller's experiments gives skewed results: it produces about 100 times as many water-repelling amino acids as water-attracting (Miller, 1959).... Random processes could never do anything useful with such a skewed ratio.

2. Tar. 80% of Miller's product was an inert tar useless for life. Only 2% was amino acids. The amino acids that he did get would have become tar, except he used his skills as a biochemist to design a method to remove them from the spark chamber before they became tar. This is true of all similar experiments. They produce tar or nothing (Shapiro, 1986). The hypothetical "primordial soup" talked about so frequently by evolutionists has never been simulated in a laboratory.

3. Fatal molecules. Many of the compounds produced by the experiment are poisonous to life, including formic acid. They are very aggressive chemically, and readily attach themselves to and would ruin any complex compound molecules that appear. In fact, the experiments produced twice as much formic acid as the combined amount of amino acids (Miller, 1959).

4. Too much hydrogen. No one has been able to get results comparable to Miller's initial experiment. There is a good reason for this. Miller used a high proportion of hydrogen in his mix. Rocks on earth indicate that such high amounts never existed. However, when the amount of hydrogen is reduced to a more realistic value, the results are severely impacted (Anonymous, 2003).....

{5. A 50/50 mix of right- and left-handed amino acids. (Tim Stout did not mention this important issue in his article!) All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’. But Miller's primordial soup had a 50/50 mix of right and left handed amino acids. A wrong-handed amino acid disrupts the stabilizing α-helix in proteins. DNA could not be stabilised in a helix if even a single wrong-handed monomer were present, so it could not form long chains. This means it could not store much information, so it could not support life. (Sarfati, 1998).}

Wherever you look, you can find similar examples where the details contradict the claims of evolutions. There is a reason for this. God designed the universe to give testimony of Himself as the Creator. The data of science properly interpreted should lead a person to Him.

References (selected)

Anonymous. (2003, May 14). Primordial recipe: Spark and stir, Astrobiology Magazine. Retrieved June 23, 2010, from http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/461/primordial-recipe-spark-and-stir.

Miller, S. and H. Urey. 1959. Organic compound synthesis on the primitive Earth. Science 130:245-251.

Sarfati, Jonathan. 1998. Origin of Life: the chirality problem. Creation ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(3):263-266.

Shapiro, R. 1986. ORIGINS: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on the Earth, Summit Books, New York, pp. 113, 208, 302.