"Astronomy" and it's sister magazine "Earth" have in their February
1998 editiion a coordinated special issue on Origins. "Astronomy"
deals with the origin of the universe and "Earth" with the origin of
the Earth and life.
Here are some excerpts:
"The pattern of structure in the universe today reflects the pattern
of initial seeds. In some sense, the fact that there are things in
the universe today is because there were primordial seeds in the
universe 30,000 years after the Bang. Seeds have to be inserted by
hand into the computer simulations of the formation of structure."
(Kolb R., "Planting Primordial Seeds", Astronomy, February 1998, Vol.
26, No. 2, p43)
I found this interesting in view of my debates with Theistic
Evolutionists in this forum, where an argument they use against the
likelihood of God intervening in biological history (as they
acknowledge he has done in human history), is that He did not need
to intervene in cosmological history, at least not after the Big
Bang. I was assured by Loren Haarsma, for example, that there are
computer models which demonstrate cosmological evolution as a fully
naturalistic process, therefore there was no reason to doubt that
the origin and/or development of life on Earth was not also a fully
naturalistic process. But now it seems that these computer models
all require some form of intervention by a human intelligent
designer!
I like the next one because Stanley Miller admits after 45 years
of trying, that making "polymers" is "not so easy":
"In 1953, a twenty-three-year-old University of Chicago graduate
student named Stanley Miller discovered the origin of life. Or so it
seemed. Using an apparatus specially built for the purpose, Miller
set out to simulate Earth four billion years ago. His contraption
was made of two glass flasks joined by tubing. Into the smaller of
the two flasks it poured water to represent the primeval ocean. The
larger flask he pumped full of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia,
volatile gases then thought to be present in the early atmosphere.
He boiled the water, letting the vapor circulate with the atmospheric
gases, then zapped the mixture with electricity, the equivalent of
ancient lightning. Within a week the water grew deep red and yellow
with organic compounds, among them amino acids, the building blocks
of proteins, which in turn make up cells. The "lightning" had
reconstituted the mix of molecules in the "atmosphere" and "ocean" to
Produce elements of life. Declared Miller's advisor, Nobel
Prize-winning chemist Harold Urey, "If God didn't do it this way, He
missed a good bet." Well, perhaps it was Miller who missed the bet.
Today his scenario is regarded with misgivings. One reason is that
geologists now think that the primordial atmosphere consisted mainly
of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, gases that are less reactive than
thoseused in the 1953 experiment. And even if Miller's atmosphere
could have existed, how do you get simple molecules such as
amino acids to go through the necessary chemical changes that
will convert them into more complicated compounds, or
polymers, such as proteins? Miller himself throws up his hands at
that part of the puzzle. "It's a problem," he sighs with
exasperation. "How do you make polymers? That's not so easy."
(Radetsky P., "Life's Crucible", Earth, Vol. 7, No. 1, February
1998, pp34,36)
I like the next one also, because we are often told that the origin
of life is nothing to do with evolution (eg. Gould's essay "Judge
Scalia's Mistake", in "Bully for Brontosaurus", etc), but according
to Miller "The origin of life is the origin of evolution":
"Their differences spring from the fact that it's awfully tough to
prove or disprove something that happened billions of years ago.
Still, origin of life theories abound. Perhaps life was seeded from
outer space. Perhaps life simmered beneath ice-capped primitive
oceans. Or perhaps life began in the cauldrons of volcanoes or
undersea hydrothermal vents. One thing is for certain: No one has
solved the mystery. In this contentious field of study, scientists
rarely see things the same way and are not shy about saying so.
There is something that everyone can agree upon: for life to endure,
it must perpetuate itself. It must figure out a way to keep itself
going and pass its success on to the next generation. And so that
there can be a next generation, life also has to make copies of
itself, copies that can adapt to changes in the environment, that can
evolve. The copies cannot be identical, cookie-cutter replicas. If
life is to evolve, the replication process must be imperfect-life
must make mistakes. `The origin of life is the origin of evolution,"
says Miller.' " (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible", 1998, p36)
The "Earth" article discusses extensively Wachtershauser's new theory
that life began as `metabolism' in hydrothermal vents. I assume that
Wachtershauser's pyrite mineral origin theory (see Bradley & Thaxton,
"Information & the Origin of Life", in Moreland's, "The Creation
Hypothesis",1994, p194) has been quietly abandoned, as has
Cairns-Smith's clay mineral origin theory:
"German chemist Gunter Wachtershauser and his colleague Claudia Huber
recently combined chemicals that exist where molten lava boils up
through fissures in the ocean floor, and the results were startling.
Rather than simply producing end products that include organic
compounds, their experiment actually set in motion a series of
chemical reactions found in all living organisms. In their view,
these reactions might have culminated in the creation of life. `You
don't mind if I brag a little, but something like this has never been
done in the entire field,'Wachtershauser says." (Radetsky, "Life's
Crucible", 1998, p36)
But the great thing about origin-of-life research is that there
are opposition parties:
"Yet not everyone searching for life's origin agrees with this
assessment. `Those conditions don't exist anywhere," says
geochemist Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in San Diego. He argues that Wachtershauser/s
and Huber's laboratory chemistry does not represent what really
happens at vents." (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible", 1998, p36)
"But, as befits this contentious field, not everyone is impressed.
Some chemists regard Wachtershauser's scenario as the product of an
overheated imagination. `What he's done is take compounds that have
been reported at vents in minute amounts and constructed an
experiment using concentrations that are enormous,' argues Jeff
Bada. `It's a disservice to the origins-of- life community to
stress that this is a plausible hydrothermal reaction when it
certainly is not.' Moreover, Bada objects to Wachtershauser's
labeling of such simple chemical reactions as `metabolism,' with the
term's connotation of life-giving processes. `To put it bluntly,
his work has no relevance to the origin of life. What he's
proposing is not a bad model for the early evolution of metabolism,
but that's a long, long ways after the origin of life. What's
required is some sort of imperfectly self-replicating molecule.
Metabolism comes only after that, and after RNA, and after the
protein-DNA world that characterizes all biochemistry today. That's
when you need molecules that have the capacity to drive other
reactions. They're not there at point of origin.' " (Radetsky,
"Life's Crucible", 1998, p40)
An alternative theory is panspermia, which Bada and Miller decisively
reject on the grounds that meteoritic organic concentrations are too
low:
"But long before the brouhaha over the Marian meteorite, researchers
already suspected a link between outer space and the origin of life.
The crux is that the very life-engendering organic molecules produced
in Stanley Miller's flask can be found in space. `Asteroids and
comets are rich in organic compounds,' says planetary scientist
Christopher Chyba of the University of Arizona in Tucson. `Maybe
these organics reached early Earth intact.' In other words, maybe
life came from interstellar space. Indeed, space is rich in
organics. For example, the Murchison meteorite, which hit Australia
in 1969, contains some seventy- four amino acids, including at least
eight that make up proteins. One quarter of Halley's comet is
composed of organic molecules. And ten percent of all interplanetary
dust particles, tiny specks no larger than 1/250 of an inch across,
is organic material. Interplanetary dust routinely falls to Earth,
lazily floating in the atmosphere for years before settling to the
ground. But could enough organics have reached Earth to make a
difference? If that's possible, then perhaps, literally, life spring
from dust. Nonsense, says Miller, now a semi-retired,
sixty-seven-year-old professor of chemistry at the University of
California in San Diego. `The concentrations are so low that I can't
see what the point is.' His opinion is supported by Bada, who
directs NASA'S Specialized Center of Research and Training in
Exobiology in addition to his work at Scripps. `Even if cosmic
debris struck the prebiotic Earth at ten thousand times the present
levels,' he says, `the resultant prebiotic soup would still have been
much too weak to engender life.' " (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible",
1998, p37)
Wachtershauser comments that "the origin of life field" is
"pseudo-religious":
"The outspoken Wachtershauser considers such assessments ignorant
and self-serving. `You have to realize that people in the origin of
life field are not very straight. This is a pseudo-religious field.
People behave like Grand Inquisitors. If somebody dares to propose
a new theory, he is put on the Index.' " (Radetsky, "Life's
Crucible", 1998, p40)
Joyce acknowledges that the volume is inversely propotional to the
data:
"Other scientific fields are not so volatile. Why this one? `Why
do people yell and scream so hard?' wonders Joyce. `Because of
scant data. The more data, the lower the volume. There's nothing
like facts to make people shut up.'" (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible",
1998, p40)
Bada admits that after the best part of a century of trying, science
still has not solved the problem: how did life originate on Earth?:
"It's the importance of the research," Bada suggests. `Today, as we
leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest unsolved
problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century: how did
life originate on Earth? There's big rewards for figuring that
out.' " (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible", 1998, p40)
Shock hopes for "just get a glimmer of a clue that might help"
(which presumably indicates that he literally hasn't a clue):
"`The subject is emotional for a lot of people,' says Shock.
`Working on it gives you the feeling that you might actually be
doing something that matters. If you could just get a glimmer of a
clue that might help....' (Radetsky, "Life's Crucible", 1998, p40)
Finally, Bada sounds a warning that "people want badly to believe"
(in a fully naturalistic origin of life):
"All of which makes people want badly to believe. `The thing that
comes across to me is how much people believe theories about the
conditions on early Earth, when we don't have direct evidence,' Bada
says. `It's very important for people to keep in mind that what we
have to do is test whether these theories are reasonable.' "
(Radetsky, "Life's Crucible", 1998, p40)
Steve
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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