Miller-Urey Follow-up

Despite the fact that the Stanley-Miller experiment is struggling as far as icons go (even Wikipedia admits that the 1953 experiment was flawed and inaccurate), textbooks today give absolutely no indication that anything is wrong. I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist ranting on about "secret societies" and such, but look at the passage I took out of my Princeton Review AP Biology Exam 2013 book just this afternoon.

Magloire, Kim. Cracking the AP Biology Exam. Random House: New York, 2013. Reproduced without permission.

Read it carefully. If you looked at my last post (see below if you haven't), you'd know that Wikipedia, the Scientific American and Stanley Miller himself admitted that his 1953 trial was worthless to the abiogenesis movement. He re-did the experiment himself in 1983, and found that if he used the correct elements in his setup, he wound up with a worthless (biologically speaking) brown sludge. Of course, there are theories to explain this away - but why are they not presented in the text above? Why do the authors (willfully or intentionally) avoid this rather large problem with their example? Note the phrasing - "They put the gases theorized to be abundant" - even though we now know that methane and ammonia were hardly present at the time of the primordial soup! Miller acted on the prevalent theory of his time - so why does the textbook fail to mention this? Did the author think it unimportant?

"But how do we make the leap from simple organic molecule to more complex compounds and life as we know it? Since no one was around to witness the process (italics mine), no one knows for sure how (or when) it occurred."

 If we don't know how or when it occurred, and no one was around to witness it, how can we be confident it occurred in the first place? (And they are so confident, the writer didn't even see a need to mention these potential problems, however trifling they may be). The next line is also important:

Complex organic compounds (such as proteins) must have formed via dehydration synthesis.

 They must have? The logic here is: since evolution is true and humans are here today, complex organic compounds must have formed spontaneously, an occurrence that has never been reproduced even in  controlled laboratory setting. The author, unknowingly perhaps, automatically precludes any other origin theories in this sentence. And this, folks, is the AP Biology Prep book - it's like a Bible to all the aspiring Bio students out there (including me). They might spend 3-4 months poring over every page, memorizing every fact - including this one, regarding the Miller-Urey experiment (I have to do the same myself). But who will tell those people that the information is faulty?

In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." If evolution is false, the only alternate solution (unless you buy into all that "am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man" stuff) is special creation by a deity. It's important to note that I'm not saying that the authors and the publishers of the Princeton Review (and any other textbook out there) are trying to brainwash you - no, they may be unaware of what they do themselves. I'm just warning the reader not to take anything they read at face value, especially when it deals with matters of the soul, as evolution inevitably does. For if evolution is true, all is meaningless; but if it is false, the human soul is eternal (almost all religions agree upon that, at least). To close, I'll just close with some words from Adolf Hitler (don't take them the wrong way, please!):

"Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state."

The Miller-Urey Experiment

In 1953, in the University of Chicago, two bright young men performed an experiment that would later become the landmark moment in the history of experimental abiogenesis, aka, "life in a test tube". Stanley Miller and Harold Urey created, from the hypothetical primordial soup, actual amino acids, the building blocks of life. This was hailed as a huge step forward for the Theory of Evolution, and is still printed in many science textbooks (Apex, Technical Lab Systems, etc.) as the experiment that proved life could form on early earth. But is this experiment really so effective? And if it is, what does it mean for creationists? The Wikipedia page for this experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) was chock-full of jargon, pulling in words like "racemic mixture" and "optical isomers" with casual abandon. But dissecting this page and going further into the history of this setup tells a very different story.

First off, lets examine the gases found in the "primitive atmosphere" mentioned in the diagram. Miller and Urey sealed water, methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃) and hydrogen (H₂) into the sterilized circuit depicted above, then left the setup for regularly applying shocks to the mixture. Within a day, the mixture had turned pinkish in color, and after two weeks, analysis showed that around twenty different amino acids had formed in the solution. Ten percent of the carbon turned into organic material (not surprising, seeing as “An organic compound is any member of a large class of gaseous, liquid, or solid chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon” [Wikipedia]), and eighteen percent of the methane turned into bio-molecules, which are “any molecule that is produced by a living organism”. Seeing as the body contains over fifty elements and a far greater number of molecules (simple and complex), that is not a very valid claim. But even now, we have yet to touch upon the greater problem faced by Miller and Urey – the actual proposed composition of the early earth atmosphere.

The rather fanciful sketch above provides a good example of what most people believe occurred during the early stages of the earth – volcanoes quietly smoked in the background, while oceans fostered the developing forms of life that abounded. Wikipedia says (in the three lines that are given regarding the early earth) that when the earth was first accreting itself, there was plenty of hydrogen, water vapor, methane and ammonia – perfect conditions for Miller and Urey. However, it goes on to say that “as the solar nebula dissipated” – meaning when the earth actually formed from the rocks and materials thrown out when the sun came together – “these gases would have escaped, blown off by the solar wind”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Earliest_atmosphere). When Miller and Urey found out about this, Miller tried to repeat the experiment using the new chemicals proffered (nitrogen, carbon-dioxide, inert gases, etc.). He got a colorless brew, with very few amino acids. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/primordial-soup-urey-miller-evolution-experiment-repeated/)

If you read the Scientific American article a bit further, you see a nice explanation to get around this – nitrites were formed concurrently with the former amino acids. Nitrites, as the article mentions, are extremely detrimental to amino acids, breaking them down rapidly. Of course, the scientist (named Bada) found a way around this – iron was capable of neutralizing the nitrites, and the element Fe had been found in various rockbeds said to be at the layer of primordial earth.  The only problem with thinking like this is that iron is a reducing agent, and is not like an anti-catalyst. An anti-catalyst can retard chemical reactions all day long, and remain unchanged for it, but a reducing agent (like the iron Bada proposed adding to the soup) loses an electron every time a reaction is halted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_agent). Considering the relatively small amount of iron present on the early earth’s surface (http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/atmos_origin.html), it is highly unlikely there was enough iron to neutralize all the nitrites that were forming everywhere.

I realize that this is a massive topic, and that I have barely scratched the surface of this controversy. If any reader has any questions or contradicting information, please comment or message me.

Animal Evidence #3 - The New Zealand Cave Weta

The New Zealand weta is part of a small branch of the insect world that consists of the some of the largest and heaviest insects of the face of the earth. They are an extraordinarily diverse group, inhabiting terrains ranging from caves to forests. Some are herbivores, others are omnivores, and some are scavengers capable of stalking and killing beetles and insects (although rumor says that have eaten small mammals as well). One captive weta was weighed at 70 grams (heavier than a sparrow) and the maximum recorded length was a whopping 200 millimeters, almost the length of a table tennis racket!

The really interesting species is the cave weta. The cave weta is differentiated from its cousins by its habitat, of course, it lives in caves. However, it's lifespan is also considerably longer, with some instances of weta living for three or four years (no small amount in the insect world). The antennae is also longer, extending for a distance of almost four times the cave weta's body. But the truly bizarre thing is when winter rolls around the high mountain caves where this creature makes its home. When the temperature drops below zero, and the ice begins to form on the roofs of the caves, the cave weta has nowhere to shelter. So it lies still, closes its eyes (if it had eyelids) and freezes solid for three whole months!

The cave weta's blood contains a chemical that allows it to survive when its frozen solid - no digestion, no respiration, just solid ice for three months. When the spring thaw comes around, this incredible insect just dries out and goes looking for food. Speaking from the viewpoint of evolution, the cave weta is absolutely impossible. This insect (and mind you, very few other insects have this chemical in their blood) happened to live in one of the coldest and barest climates in New Zealand and just happened to have the right chemical in it's blood to enable it to survive the winter chill. Of course, the first, un-evolved, weta ancestor that moved into the caves would die out entirely in a year if it didn't have this chemical in its body. The only alternative to special creation would be pure blind luck - an insect that lives in one of the coldest climates on the planet luckily manages to form a chemical that would enable it to survive the winter that it didn't know was coming! Clearly this is impossible, and is frankly insulting to the intellect. I leave the reader to consider his own alternative theories.