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.

Spontaneous Life?

One of the fundamental tenets of the evolutionary theory is that the first living cell was formed spontaneously, without the need for a creator of any kind. Now, when Darwin claimed that by "a happy chance" life started on prehistoric Earth, the science of the time was not aware of any of the incredible complexities that comprise even the simplest bacterium imaginable. After all, the simplest imaginable life form has to have at least 124 proteins which have, on the average, 124 amino acids in each one. These proteins are incredibly complicated, and the odds of a single one of them forming on it's own (even in a 100% amino acid soup) are extremely low (see http://theevolutionproblem.blogspot.in/2012/09/amino-acids.html). However, the evolutionary belief is that everything can happen, given enough time, and therefore life could have formed on it's own. But is this feasible? Could time, chance and nature manage to produce the incredibly complex structure that is a bacterium?

A bacterium, which is one of the simplest forms of life possible, is so complex that scientists are still trying to work out the motor that power that flagellum, and the chemical composition of the cytoplasm. However, there is a hypothetically possible creature simpler than this. The absolute minimum number of proteins a single-celled organism must have to function is 124. Each of this proteins is constructed, on the average, of roughly 400 amino acids. If even one of the amino acids is misplaced, the creature will most likely die (the dread sickle-cell disease, scourge of Africa, is caused by two misplaced amino acids among thousands). There are two types of amino acids - D and L. Both of them are almost precisely identical chemically, and yet only L amino acids are found in proteins, as they are the only type that will work biologically speaking. They can form proteins, but these proteins are worthless when it comes to constructing a creature. When amino acids are formed in the laboratory, there is an exact ratio of L and D amino acids. The odds of all the amino acids in one of the smaller strands of protein being L handed are pretty much the same as the odds of you flipping a coin 100 times and expecting it to come up heads every time.

Clearly this is ridiculously improbable, as the odds of this happening are around 1 over 10 power 32, which is 10 followed by 32 zeroes (if you didn't know that already). To put this in perspective, if I flipped the coin once a second, it would take me approximately 10^25 years. Considering that the upper age limit for the universe if around 10^10 years, this is clearly impossible. So, to recap, the odds of all the amino acids in a single protein is ridiculously small, and yet, despite the fact that amino acids have not been formed even in laboratory settings, despite the fact that amino acids are known to degrade in the open, despite all these facts, die-hard evolutionists still claim that somehow life could have formed. This mentality reminds me of the words of Saki:

"Once you have taken the impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become practically limitless"

The Grand Canyon - Undeniable Proof of Evolution?

The Grand Canyon is one of America's most recognizable proofs of long-ages - small river cuts through rock slowly, and carves a path through solid rock over millions of years. With the relatively tiny Colorado River winding its way through it, slowly chipping away at the massive walls, it is conceivable that this veritable stream could carve through the solid rock that the Grand Canyon is made of.

As the diagram shows, the Grand Canyon has been chopped up into several sedimentary layers, each of which represents a long period of time in the Earth's life. However, the fact remains that the Grand Canyon is not, and can never be, conclusive evidence for the long-age theory. For it to be conclusive, we would have to be able to observe and test it, which is impossible given the long time spans involved. However, it is plausible that the Grand Canyon is not millions of years old, but rather dates from Noah's Flood, which was a catastrophe that was certainly capable of carving such a huge gash in the earth. This idea is supported by the rapid formation of huge gorges in days and weeks even nowadays. For example, the Canyon Lake Gorge was formed in a matter of days following a reservoir overflow.

The gorge pictured above was formed rapidly in 2002, when we could observe it carefully. The gorge was formed after Canyon Lake, a reservoir in Texas, overflowed catastrophically following extensive flooding of the Guadalupe River. Nine people were killed and around $1 billion were lost through damages through this rush. However, this gorge was also formed, stretching about a mile, being hundreds of yards wide and up to fifty feet deep at points. Clearly, if this gorge could have been formed so rapidly by such a (relatively) small flood, it makes sense to say that the Grand Canyon could have been formed just as quickly during Noah's Flood.

Quote of the day: In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence - Isaac Newton.

The Big Bang - The Start of it All?

The Big Bang is the stereotyped "beginning of it all", and is generally accepted as suitable explanation for the origin of the universe. In a sentence, it is "the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe", and says that "the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly." It has large amounts of data to back it up, such as the Inflating Universe, the red-shift, and more. However, creationists have dug up sizable amounts of evidence to refute this popular theory. Who is right?

The Expanding Universe Theory

Evolutionists have put forward both observational and hypothetical explanations for this popular theory. The observational evidence is the well-known fact that space itself is expanding, as though after some massive explosion in the center of it. However, even Wikipedia says that "little is known about the earliest moments of the Universe's history". To have created the Universe, it needs to have reached the Planck Temperature, which can only be reached if the Law of General Relativity breaks down entirely. Creationists also point to other possible impossibilities which must be surmounted to have caused the Big Bang, such as the problem of baryon asymmetry (for more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry).

When the Universe was formed, there was supposed to have been an equal amount of matter and antimatter that was formed. However, as things stand today, there is actually a very small amount of antimatter in the Universe now. This can be explained by either saying that the antimatter is merely in a separate part of the Universe, away from the matter, or by saying that it (for some reason) repels regular matter, thereby halting any interactions. Now, these small problems above are hardly enough to topple such a large, well-backed theory, and probably won't. Nonetheless, the fact remains that we cannot tell anything about what happened in the past; we can merely tell what might have happened judging by the things we can see now.

I hope to present more arguments in a later post.

Radiometric Dating - Proof of Old Earth?

Radiometric dating is one of the single greatest pieces of evidence that evolutionists have for their theories of millions and millions of years. After all, if these rocks are 65 my (million years) old, then it stands to reason that the earth is that age too, right? Actually, there are some bugs in the program. Radiometric dating is a technique that measures the amount of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope in a substance, and then compares that with the known decay rate of the isotopes in modern substances. This extrapolation can give us a very good idea of how old the rocks are supposed to be.

So what do creationist's, who believe in a 6,000 year old Earth, have to say to this? Well, Answers in Genesis, the leading Christian apologetic group has a well-researched paper on the probability of cataclysms in the past grossly speeding up the decay process, thereby misleading present day scientists. Also, they show that nuclear decay rates do not always remain constant, because even small changes to the environment can have massive repercussions on atoms (http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/radioisotopes-earth). There are plenty of arguments out there, but the strongest one for the creationist's has got to be the famous dating of the Mt. St. Helen's volcano shortly after it's eruption

When Dr. Steve Austin took samples from recently solidified rocks that had just hardened from lava, he no doubt expected the dates to be under a year at the least. When he and his team analysed it, however, they found that it was dated from between .35 to 2.8 million years ago, which is a huge margin of error!! This is not the first time that this has been documented, though. According to Dr. Keith Swenson (http://www.creationism.org/articles/swenson1.htm), a former scientist named Dalrymple had taken samples from other recent volcanic explosions, and had found them to be way off target. He wrote some papers on this (Dalrymple, G.B., 1969. 40Ar/36Ar analysis of historic lava flows. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6:47-55), but was not noticed.

Of course, none of this proves that radiometric dating is wrong, as evolutionists have been quick to point out. They have made valid claims that perhaps Dr. Steve Austin messed up somewhere (http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm), or that he used the wrong type of dating for the rocks (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4146). The long and short of it, though, is that no one can disprove radiometric dating until conclusive evidence is found after hundreds of trials have been done. So, this theory still is partially valid, and is left for the individual to decide;

Animal Evidence #2 - The Bombardier Beetle

The bombardier beetle. The name of this unique bug pretty much says everything we need to know. This incredible beetle is equipped with a miniature "turret" that it can aim exactly like a cannon, and fire burning chemicals at any possible threat. This has been held by Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe as an example of irreducible complexity, meaning that the entire firing system either had to be there as a whole, or not at all. Any intermediate forms of this would not work and would explode, destroying the beetle and any chances of it's future evolution. Evolutionists counter this by saying that the evolution of the firing mechanism can be broken down into fifteen simple steps (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html) which are in themselves beneficial, and would have probably occurred. Creationist's counter it with hypotheses like those discussed in the video:

In this clip, Dr. Job Martin says that while the fifteen steps given by evolutionist's are rather neat and simple, if the beetle ever tried firing it's gun with even one of the features slightly distorted, the whole bug would blow up. While this is also a plausible theory, evolutionist's point to the time factor, i.e., we weren't there, so therefore either of us could be right. And thus, it is left with us, the open-minded reader, to tell which of the two theories is more valid than the other.

Animal Evidence #1 - The Giraffe

The giraffe - the symbol of Africa, and a creature who's evolutionary background is extremely easy to guess. A creature was browsing along one day, looked up, saw the leaves on a tree, tried to get them, and lengthened it's neck somehow. Over years of this happening, the giraffe got it's long neck. However, as nice as this cute story may be, even leading evolutionists today say that it is utterly preposterous. Rather, they claim that an organism that had a longer neck than usual would be able to eat the leaves on taller trees, thereby granting it extra food, and ensuring that it would reproduce. After millions and millions of years of this, the giraffe as we know it came to be. Simple, right? So what could creationist's possibly have to put against this obviously right hypothesis?

The tallest giraffe has the least competiton

Creationists point to an extremely interesting system that the giraffe has "evolved" somehow. The giraffe naturally needs an extremely powerful pump to get blood through that long neck and into the brain. It's heart, which can weigh up to 25 pounds, shoots the blood up the neck fast enough to counter gravity's pull down. But the question is, since the blood is shooting so fast up a giraffe's neck, what happens when it bends down to drink water? Then the massive heart would be working with the flow of gravity, and would blast the blood down the neck so fast it would destroy the brain! Clearly, there is some kind of safety mechanism involved here.

As the diagram shows, when the giraffe bends down, a completely separate set of blood vessels is triggered (the blue tube), that lets the blood slow down considerably, after which it hits a soft sponge under the brain, which gently fills and feeds the blood on to the brain. Evolutionists have a hard time explaining this kind of thing, because how on earth would something like a giraffe evolved? When it got it's powerful heart, it would die when it bent over. Without it's powerful heart, it would die when it stood up (through lack of blood to the brain). The system displayed above could not have "evolved" slowly, as it would be useless, and dead weight until everything was in place. This means that even if it evolved it's long neck, it would have to simultaneously develop this safety mechanism. Even the slightest mistake would result in failure, and instant extinction. Evolutionist's have not answered the question of how it evolved yet, and probably never will be able to.

Tiktaalik Roseae - The Fish-Amphibian Link?

Tiktaalik Roseae, the famous "fishapod" (thus dubbed by Neil Shubin), was found in 2004 on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. The scientific community eagerly snapped this fossil up, and a new transitional form was found. This creature apparently had gills, fins and scales, all of which are characteristics of fish. It also appears to have had a fully functional neck, rib cage and pair of lungs, as well as half-fish characteristics such as joints and wrists, as well as the ear structure. It is remarkably well-preserved for a specimen that has been "dated" as 365 my (million years) old.

The model displayed above seems to give crushing evidence against any arguments - after all, if they have enough of the skeleton to make a model, then there surely can be no opposition, right? Actually, CMI says that Tiktaalik Roseae appears to be a fully functional creature that has simply gone extinct. Even the discoverers of the fossil agreed and said that they "have almost no information about the step between Tiktaalik and the earliest tetrapods, when the anatomy underwent the greatest changes." So, this fossil could possibly be some undersea creature like the tripod fish, which uses it's stiff fins to "stand" on the ocean floor, which would ruin the chart of reptile evolution.

Also, CMI says that the fin, which is claimed to have been able to support the fish in shallow water, simply would not be able to support the creature's full weight on land. They also point to the coelacanth, a fish that had similar stiff fins and was thought to be extinct. However, when a living specimen was actually found in 1938 off the coast of Africa, by a fishing boat, it was found that their fin was merely used for some dextrous maneuvering while turning, which would imply that the same could be true regarding Tiktaalik. Of course, if Tiktaalik was still around today, I hold the view that it would be regarded as yet another one of Nature's oddities, rather than a transitional form.