Complexity of Life

Great Debates
1

The Chemical Elements of Life: The chemical evolution of life as you will see in the following is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One
should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as: carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. The four most abundant chemical
elements (by weight) in the human body are oxygen (65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), and nitrogen (3%). However, the closer one examines these
elements. The more unlikely the evolution of life appears.
[…] [Edited due to copyright concerns. Please do not post large sections of copyrighted material on this MB. Use small excepts, or, preferably, links, if you cannot use your own words. --Gaudere]
Notes:

  1. Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor and Fields), pg 65
  2. J.Brooks and G. Shaw, Origin and Development of Living Systems (New York: Academic Press), pg 359
  3. Philip Morrison, “Earth Earliest Biosphere,” Scientific American, Vol 250, pg 30-31
    Charles F. Davidson, “Geochemical Aspects of Atmospheric Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol 53, pg 1194-1205
    Steven A. Austin, “Did the Early Earth Have a Reducing Atmosphere?”, ICR Impact, No 109.
  4. Erich Dimroth and Michael M. Kimberley, Precambrian Atmospheric Oxygen: Evidence in the Sedimentary Distributions of Carbon,
    Sulfur, Uranium, and Iron," Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol 13, No 9, pg 1161
  5. Philip H. Abelson, “Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol 55, pg 1365
  6. R.T. Brinkmann, “Dissociation of Water Vapor and Evolution of Oxygen in the Terrestial Atmosphere,” Journal of Geophysical Research,
    Vol 74, No 23, pg 5355-5368
  7. George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Vol 190, pg 50
  8. D.E. Hull, “Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Spontaneous Generation,” Nature, Vol 186, pg 694
    Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (London: Rider), pg 140
    Duane T. Gish, Speculations and Experiments Related to Therories on the Origin of Life, ICR Technical Monograph, No.1
    (El Cajon, Ca: Insttute for Creation Research)
  9. Robert Shapiro, Origins (New York: Bantam Books)
  10. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Barnett Books), pg 264, 342
    Robert Shapiro, Origins (New York: Bantam Books), pg 207, 299
    Klaus Dose, “The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol 13, No 4, pg 348
  11. Lewis Thomas, foreword to The Incredible Machine, editor Robert M. Pool (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Book Service), pg 7
  12. Biologist Terry Mondy
  13. Tom Bethell, “Agnostic Evolutionists,” Harper’s Magazine, pg 49-61
  14. Ibid 10a, pg 285, 289
  15. Ginny Gray, “Student Project ‘Rattles’ Science Fair Judges,” Issues and Answers, pg 3
  16. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House), pg 25 (Each of Sagan’s 4000 books contained 500 pages of 300 words per page.)
  17. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, pgs 3, 24, 130, 141, 144, 148, 150
  18. Murray Eden, as reported in “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, pg 64
    Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, pg 109
  19. Richard E. Dickerson, “Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Vol 239, pg 73
    Ibid 1, pg 66
  20. John C. Walton (Lecturer in Chemistry, University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland), “Organization and the Origin of Life,” Origins, Vol 4, No 1, pg 30-31
    Ibid 10b, pg 135
  21. Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Life on the Earth,” Scientific American, Vol 271, pg 82
    Ibid 10c, pg 352
  22. Dean H. Kenyon (Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University), affidavit presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, No. 85-1513, brief of Appelants,
    prepared under the direction of William J. Guste, Jr., Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, pg A-23
  23. Daniel Clery and David Bradley, “Underhanded ‘Breakthrough’ Revealed,” Science, Vol 265, pg 21
    James F. Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House), pg 71-79
    A.E. Wilder-Smith, The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evoluton (San Diego: Master Book Publishers), pg 15-32,154-160
    Ibid 19, pg 76

From the book
“In The Beginning” (Chemical elements of Life part I), by Dr. Walt Brown, Ph.D., Center for Scientific Creation, Phoenix, Az, pg 12-12,53-56

2

So your idea of a debate is to quote an enormous chunk of copyrighted material?

Bet you’re a hit at parties.

3

Seeing as you’ve posted two anti-evolution threads with a post count of 3 and haven’t used any of your own words to defend your stance, I’m presuming you’re either a troll, but just in case:

This is called “Great Debates”. Not “Great Arguments Made By Somebody Else that I Copied”. If you want to debate, you have to make your own argument, not expect us to pick apart every piece of creationist work you can find.

Since your post has been edited, perhaps you’ll try again?

4

Quote-mining does not win arguments. My suspicion, JJ, based on previous experience, is that not only do you not understand evolution, you don’t understand the alleged counter-arguments, either! Such is often the case with those who choose to cut-and-paste their “arguments”, rather than being able to formulate them on their own.

5

I’m not even sure where, in theory, this arguement would go. If it really means to attack the plausibility of abiogenesis (which is what I assume “chemical evolution” reffers to), then talking about:

  1. what elements are in the human body (since humans are very different from early life in regards to their chemical composition, needs, and internal pathways)
  2. what elements are prevalent in the present atmosphere and upper strata (since it was very different when life began)

seems totaly irrelevant. It’s too bad we don’t get to see where this arguement is going, but even this snippet puts it off to a pretty wrongheaded start.

6

I wonder when he’s going to start mentioning the second law of thermodynamics.

In any case, I, too, would want to see him make an argument to debate with.

7

It seems to me that when people attack abiogenesis on the grounds of improbability, they are leaving themselves wide open. It’s Occam’s razor in reverse: if we have one theory backed up by evidence, then until another is proposed, we’re stuck with it.
There is life now. There wasn’t life before. Therefore, life had to come from non-life. QED.
I don’t suppose anyone wants to bring up irreducable complexity and save the thread?

8

One of the “paradoxes” of probability is that, if the failure of an event to happen one time doesn’t affect its ability to happen in the future, then no matter how small the probability of the events occurance is, it becomes very likely to happen given enough time (and space). So by admitting a positive probability for abiogenesis, the creationists are in fact acknowledging that it may have happened.

9

I would guess that the OP poster is only marginally aware that at the simplest level even today, it is hard to tell life from non-life. The biologists around can correct me, but can’t the simplest of viruses (vira?, viri?) be considered as either exceedingly simple microorganisms or exceedingly complex molecules depending upon what you’re trying to do?

And as to probability. It seems to me to be invalid to use the unliklihood of an event that has already happened to try to prove that it must have had a supernatural cause.

This can easily lead to unpleasant consequences. Certain diseases have low probability of occurence and we don’t know how they come about. Therefore if someone has one of those rare diseases it must be from a supernatural cause. Maybe they or their parents, relatives. tribe, or whatever did something to piss God off - get 'em before they bring us all down with them.

10

And guess what? The ol’ talk.origins archive even has an article about this very subject, too! (And according to said article, it seems that the odds against abiogenesis are not as steep as some Creationists would have you believe.) :

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
There are also little things like the Urey-Miller Experiment (which determined that amino acids could arise spontaneously from primitive compounds subjected to lightning-like electrical discharge), the Fox proteinoid experiment (which determined that amino acids baked under ultraviolet light could spontaneously form short protein-like chains called proteinoids), and the second Fox experiment (which determined that hot proteinoids soaked in salt water for a few minutes would form proteinoid microspheres which exhibited many cell-like properties).

11

There was an experiment that was performed in the mid-1950’s that I remember reading about as a kid in my Weekly Reader. A large flask was filled with seawater, carbon dioxide, cyanide, methane and other trace gases. An electrical charge was applied intermittently. After forty days and forty nights a dark slime formed on the walls of the flask. This substance was found to be amino acids, the essential building blocks of life! Some how they survived this harsh atmosphere.
Hasn’t Life Been Created in the Laboratory?
by John D. Morris, Ph.D.*
Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021
Voice: (619) 448-0900 Fax: (619) 448-3469
“Vital Articles on Science/Creation” August 2001
© Copyright <javascript:;> 2001 All Rights Reserved
[Content deleted because of that little statement that says “Copyright” – David B]
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-313.htm

12

Water vapor readily breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen? Just like table salt readily breaks down into sodium and chlorine, right?

13

Unlike scripture, the Miller Urey experiment is a moving target. Here’s a newer version that you’ll need to have debunked as well.
While you’re at it, please explain away the the apparent lack of irreducible complexity in this chemically synthesized life form. Even if you succeed in doing so, you’ll not have the luxury of resting on your laurels, because when the next version of the same question comes up in 5 or 10 years, it’ll be in an even more complex form. With the scientific method fully engaged, you face a future of coming up with more and more complex arguments, just to maintain a non-rational belief system.

14

Your first cite is a good one and I think lays to rest a lot of the objections to Miller. Too bad, though, the second cite involves an intelligently directed process. It doesn’t support random formation. ID afficionados would love it, I’m afraid.

PS, I’m convinced that more evidence will do nothing but strengthen the case for an accidental molecule turning out to be self-replicating and mutatable. That’s all that’s needed to start the process.

15

James Jensen, is that your thing, you go to a message board, copy and paste from Fundamentalist websites and try to pawn them off as your own in order to make you look smart and “prove” a point?

Do you have any thoughts of you own about this matter?

16

How dishonest can people like Morris get?

There are darn good reasons we think that early life was anaerobic, and this man describes none of them.

Further, he wildly misrepresents what the Miller-Urey experiment aimed to find out. They KNEW quite well that they couldn’t be sure of the exact atmospheric conditions (though what we know about them now doesn’t at all coincide with Morris’ account of a supposedly oxygen plentiful atmosphere). What the experiment was meant to discover was the plausibility of such simple conditions producing amino acids.

These two claims I’ve been hearing often:

—The amino acid mixture produced contained only a few of the many necessary for even “simple” life, but many not used by any life.—

The fact is, no one is sure exactly what sort of things are neccesary for “simple” life in the first place. We don’t know whether we’re dealing with an RNA world, a clay crystalization situation, or even any other possibility.

—All amino acids were of both left and right-handed varieties, while life uses only left handed.—

Uh, so? I’ve never quite understood this objection. I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t be a chemical reason why a particular pathway would use only one or the other. Once created left and right, either one is as available for further development as any other. Even if they didn’t have substantive differences in the possible chemical interactions, there’s no reason why early life could have simply happened to use one isomer, but could have just as easily used the other: which hardly makes it any sort of special necessary condition that only left-handed isomers ever come to exist.

17

Wonderful, the world of abiogenesis. Something I can sink my teeth into:

Your next long plagarized quote addresses this. It is the Urey and Miller experiment Morris is talking about. I’m not sure why you don’t make the connection (Morris actually attacks the experiment you cite).

Faulty religious imagery notwithstanding, the whole point of why abiogenesis doesn’t occur today is that a) the conditions on Earth are not the same as in the Urey-Miller aparatus, and b) amino acids to appear robustly created in sterile conditions (ie space). So what you are arguing against is nothing as far as I can see, exept for what Morris is saying:

That’s a lie… it’s taught as merely evidence for abiogenesis. Can you see the difference? Morris is pretending that Urey-Miller is a keystone for evolution (it is not; it is not even a keystone for abiogenesis) that one pulled out will not cause the theory to fall. This is a myth. The theory does not rest upon Urey-Miller result. Rather the Urey-Miller result is a dramatic confirmation that abiotic processes can produce biotic material.

It is here where Morris shows his complete ineptitude in dealing with this scientific area. We see complex organic molecules popping up in the MOST unlikely places (comet nuclei, stellar atmospheres, ISM grains). They do not require conditions that are “just right”, rather it seems that they will develop in very abiotic environments.

Untrue. Oxygen is absolutely essential for some current life functions. Free oxygen, however, is a biproduct of respiration on the part of many biotic functions. There are even anaerobic bacteria that don’t require any oxygen at all! So, no, atmospheric free oxygen is not ultimately essential to life. In fact, the oxygen in our atmosphere today is evidence that life exists because life is what allows the free oxygen to form as it does. The early Earth atmosphere had no free oxygen, and it was only after plant-like respiration that the free oxygen you and I currently enjoy was made. Has Morris ever looked into thermodynamic relations of compositional atmospheres? Apparently not.

First of all, there was no free oxygen in the early atmospher. We can track this through geological methods (you’d think Morris, a man with a PhD in geology, would know this). However, even so, the amount of free oxygen that exists compared to the amount of organic molecules that exists is miniscule even in today’s atmosphere. If it weren’t you or I could not create any organic compounds. Long and the short of it is, Morris is talking through his hat at this point and is utterly on the wrong track.

Hogwash and other baloney. Water vapor only breaks down when activation energy is present (perhaps in the form of an electric current (not a spark, mind you). Water is FAR stabler than diatomic oxygen thermodynamically and kinetically. Morris is lying at this point.

Oxidations absolutely DOES NOT require free oxygen interactions in the atmosphere. Specifically aqueous chemistry is much better at oxidizing minerals (thus wet thing rust more easily). Has Morris ever taken basic chemistry?

Sorry, this is just plain false. It’s easy for an evolution-denier to say it because they wish to believe that they way life is RIGHT NOW was the way it always was. This is just not true… and there is evidence available for you in the other thread.

And the point is? We are just now looking into the mechanisms of abiogenesis, we never said that all amino acids available to us through biological processes today had to be created in Urey-Miller conditions. This was an extremely basic and presumptive experiment that yielded fantastic results. They could have run this and found no amino acids at all (in fact, many abiogenesis folks at the time were skeptical as to whether their set-up would yield anything). The positive results for amino acids (compounds we once thought were exclusive to life) are amazing confirmations that abiotic processes can form biotic matter. This is all the experiment said. It is not the be-all and end-all of abiogenesis. For that, I’ll have to refer you to the salient mol bio journals.

Spurious and misleading. Chirality of the amino acids is expected to be racemic in abiotic processes. That life can distinguish between them is a result of enzymatic biochemistry. It has nothing at all to do with abiogenesis which is non-life based!

That’s because the experiment was repeated in order to simulate a long period of time. Lightening strikes do not simply strike the same spot over and over and over again. This is a simple fact of physics. If you want to control for this in a set-up that has repeated sparking, you need a way to isolate the systems your studying. Saying that this was somehow “unnatural” is exactly backwards. The set-up is MORE natural.

Patently untrue. There are plenty of shields for these particles that exist. If such a statement were true we would never see cosmic abundances of amino acids (we do). Morris is wrong again!

Let’s review… Morris has no understanding of the implications of the experiment, did not understand the rationale nor the illustration of the starting conditions. He has no understanding of the methods employed and misreported and misinterpreted the results in a slanted way so as to make them out to be wrong. Which one’s the turkey?

A:Dr. John Morris

PS… Isn’t it funny how Creationists love to parade the Dr. status of their scientists to give them credibility? Did Watson and Crick parade their doctorates? Did Einstein? Hmmm… gotta wonder.

18

Yes and this is a sore point. John Morris is a geologist, I don’t know what specialty but he certainly doesn’t know all there is to know about geology and has no apparent standing as a biologist or biochemist at all.

Henry Morris is a hydraulics engineer. He also has no apparent standing in the life sciences.

Duane Gish is a biochemist and his resume in actual practice is contained in the book Science and Earth History (by Arthur N. Strahler, Emeritus Chair in Geology, Columbia University) and consisted of working in the research dept. of drug maker Upjohn and Co.

None of the above cite any original papers they have published or other work done that is recognized by workers in the life sciences. All of their work has been for the Institute for Creation Research which is a propoganda mill for creationism. They have no program of their own outside the first few chapters in Genesis (King James Version).

They use PhD as a cachet to imply vast and deep knowledge about all of science whether or not they are experienced in the aspect of it that they expound. There oughtta be a law!

19

Actually, John Morris was correct when he said:

It’s true, amino acid molecules are not entirely stable when exposed to strong sources of ultraviolet light. In fact, Stanley Fox discovered that if you “baked” amino acids in ultraviolet light, they would stick together and form short-chain protein-like molecules called proteinoids.

And these ultraviolet-synthesized amino acid chains are even more similar to the molecules found in living organisms than the bare amino acids were!

Good job, John Morris, you’ve reminded us that natural processes have even more of an ability to make the molecules essential for life than the Urey-Miller experiment had discovered!

20

I’d like to see some evidence for this assertion, buckaroo. But don’t worry, I won’t disallow you from linking to another webpage that offers such evidence.