Abiogenesis: The Holy Grail of Atheism

By Michael David Rawlings

Years of experience have shown me that most atheists are more obtuse than a pile of bricks. They are either breezily unaware of their metaphysical biases or are unwilling to objectively separate themselves from them long enough to engage in a reasonably calm and courteous discussion about the tenets of their religion: namely, abiogenesis and evolution. While science's historical presupposition is not a metaphysical naturalism (or an ontological naturalism), most of today's practicing scientists insist that the composition of empirical phenomena must be inferred without any consideration given to the possibility of intelligent causation. The limits of scientific inquiry are thereby reconfigured as if they constituted the limits of reality itself, the more expansive potentialities of human consciousness be damned. In other words, if something cannot be readily quantified by science, it doesn't exist, regardless of the conclusions that any rational evaluation of the empirical data might recommend. Hence, should one reject what is nothing more than the guesswork of an arbitrarily imposed apriority, one is said to reject science itself, as if the fanatics of scientism owned the means of science.

Ultimately, the essence of this perversion is a Darwinian naturalism run amok:  mere theory elevated to an inviolable absolute of cosmological proportions, which displaces not only the traditional conventions of methodological naturalism (or mechanistic naturalism), but is superimposed on the discipline of science itself.  Never has so much been owed to so little.

I'm well acquainted with the hypotheses, the research and the findings in the field of abiogenesis. Also, I understand evolutionary theory, inside and out. I know the science, and I'm current. Indeed, I'm light years ahead of the vast majority of atheists who routinely sneer at theists as the former unwittingly expose their ignorance about the science and the tremendously complex problems that routinely defy their dogma. These are the sheeple blindly following an ideologically driven community of scientists, which, since Darwin, is determined to overthrow the unassailable. God stands and stays: science can neither prove nor disprove His existence; it's not equipped to venture beyond the temporal realm.  But this does not mean that the empirical data do not testify to His existence. Science is merely the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.  And science in the hands of materialists is the stuff of fairytales.

I recently proposed a question on Yahoo! Answers and prefaced it with a brief summary of the results derived from the Miller-Urey experiments of 1952 in the light of current science. Of course, the underlying hypothesis on which the experiments were originally based has been falsified, but we learned plenty. While I discussed a number of the problems associated with it, I neglected to emphatically state what that hypothesis was . . . just to see what sort of fish I might catch.

The following is the full version of the necessarily condensed one that appeared on Yahoo! Answers. . . .

A Yahoo! Answers resident, Lord Fluffy Tail, recently offered up the following quote in answer to a question about origins:

In 1951, the American Miller succeeded to form organic matter out of a mixture of ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water (H2O) by exposing this mixture to an electric current. During the experiments different organic mixtures were formed, among them amino acids and nucleic acids. These acids are essential for the building of proteins and chromosomes. —ORACLE ThinkQuest

Miller-Urey has been falsified for years; that is to say, the experiments' parameters and conditions were shown to be incongruent and the results, negative. The reasons for this are legion and very complex, yet textbooks continue to relate these experiments with the same sort of blurb in the above as if they were still something more than an historical footnote. An avalanche of innumerable Internet sites—most of them put up by atheistic, know-nothing layman—continue to tout them as being something that still matters along with theory that is years, even decades, behind current science.

For example, it doesn't appear that the author of Lord Fluffy Tail's source knows that the atmosphere of the primeval world was more oxygen-rich even earlier than he supposes and was generally more oxidizing than reducing—necessary for life, but not friendly to the formation of amino acids. In other words, the actual conditions were considerably more hostile to the prospects of abiogenesis than those of the Miller-Urey experiments. The primordial soup keeps getting driven deeper and deeper into the ocean where, once again, another battery of problematic conditions confound the imbecilic notions of chemical evolutionists.

Also, the author of this source writes that the "origin of life out of lifeless matter is called biogenesis."  Uh . . . no.  But that's probably just a typo.  Biogenesis pertains to the Pasteurian theory that omne vivum ex vivo, i.e., all life is from life.  The idea that life may arise from non-living matter goes by the name of spontaneous generation or, in accordance with contemporary theory, abiogenesis.

But the most startling bit of information divulged by this author—which is not a typo, but a UFO—consists of the claim that the Miller-Urey experiments produced nucleic acids.

What?  Stop the presses!  News flash!

Trust me.  They did not produce nucleic acids or anything else like them.¹

What the published Miller-Urey experiments did produce were small concentrations of at least 5  amino acids and the molecular constituents of others.  The dominant material produced by the experiments was an insoluble carcinogenic mixture of tar—large compounds of toxic mellanoids, a common end product in organic reactions.  However, it was recently discovered that the published experiments actually produced 14 amino acids (6 of the 20 fundamentals of life) and 5 amines in various concentrations.  In 1952, the technology needed to detect the even smaller trace amounts of prebiotic material was not available.  But the unpublished Miller-Urey experiments conducted in that same year show that a modified version of Miller's original apparatus, which increased air flow with a tapering glass aspirator, produced 22 amino acids (still only 6 of the fundamentals) and the same 5 amines.²

The significance of the recently uncovered results produced by the altered apparatus does not go to the synthesis of proteins as a result of the inherent chemical properties of their molecular precursors within atmospheric conditions that entail a more vaporous, volcanic-gas-like mixture of steam. It goes to the more impressive results that are derived under these simulated conditions coupled with the potentialities of the RNA-world hypothesis and its obligatory molecular precursors. Hence, Senior Correspondent Stephen K Ritter misses the target when he assumes that the team of researchers who analyzed the results of the unpublished experiments "speculate that amino acids formed in volcanic island systems could have been polymerized by carbonyl sulfide—volcanic gas—to form peptides leading to proteins" (Stephen K. Ritter; Oct. 16, 2008; "Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited"; Chemical and Engineering News-Prebiotic Chemistry).

They could not have sensibly speculated any such thing, as it is well known that amino acids do not form lasting peptide bonds (much less proteins) under any natural conditions outside living organisms. And this is true under laboratory conditions as well, whether their mixtures be racemic, as is always the case in nature on Earth, or even if they be artificially homochiral.

The original apparatus of the published experiments simulated a strictly reducing atmosphere consisting of hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water, but as Ritter in the same article observes "[s]cientists who have analyzed Miller's experiments doubt that the highly reducing reaction conditions he used existed on early Earth"; however, the apparatus equipped with the aspirating mechanism simulated the more "intense conditions of a lightning-laced volcanic eruption." Hence, the researchers aver that "[t]he volcanic apparatus experiment suggests that, even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective". Precisely! But what the researchers mean by the word "effective" goes to the formation of amino acids only, and only within the domains of semi-reducing, carbonyl-sulfide-producing atmospheres of "volcanic island systems", as the more generally oxidizing atmosphere beyond would prevent their formation.

The problem with this scenario is that under natural conditions the newly created precursors could not have stayed inside these atmospheric enclaves for long, for unlike the artificial conditions calculatedly arranged within the apparatuses of laboratories, which artificially remove biotic materials from the synthesizing medium once they are formed, nature would have continued to bombard them and thusly would have destroyed them with the very same source of energy it used to create them. Worse, the vastly more copious abiotic materials that would have also been produced would have continued to react with the racemic mixtures of the biotic materials within the synthesizing medium and would have readily incorporated the latter into compounds that would have been utterly useless for life.

Miller's experiment did produce . . . amino acids, but only by continuously circulating the reaction mixture and isolating products as they were formed. The quantities were still tiny and not in the same proportions as found in nature.

One of the causes of the low yield has been identified by [Edward] Peltzer who worked with Miller. As the amino acids were formed they reacted with reducing sugars . . . forming a brown tar around Miller's apparatus. Ultimately, Miller was producing large compounds called mellanoids, with amino acids as an intermediate product.  —J. H. John Peet (Oct. 2005), "The Miller-Urey Experiment", Truth in Science 

But the real problem for the synthesis of amino acids in a reducing atmosphere is that in spite of the latter's abundance of free electrons, it would not have provided an ozone layer to protect the amino acids it produced. If the electrical energy that induced their synthesis in one instant did not reduce them to their basic elements or induce harmful reactions in the next, the entire range of UV light's wavelengths would have slapped them silly. And biologically useful organic compounds do not form in oxidizing atmospheres.

Perplexing.

That is why the out-gassing calculations based on chondritic models of planetary formation, which support a reducing atmosphere for the primordial world, do not solve the initial problem of an abiogenic account of life's origins.³  Indeed, chondritic models, in spite of their apparent credibility and that of their inherent calculations, do not explain away the equally compelling and essentially incontrovertible geological evidence that supports an early oxidizing atmosphere.

Perplexing.

It would appear that the problem of resolving the nature of the primordial world's atmosphere requires some sort of synthesis of the two possibilities.  But even if the constituents of abiogenesis were profitably given over to the thralls of a semi-reducing atmosphere all those many years ago, we see no evidence of that today.  The geological record should contain an overflowing abundance of nitrogen-rich mineral deposits.  It doesn't.

Still, despite the paltry concentrations of organic materials produced relative to the energy expended, the best bet for abiogenesis would have been a semi-reducing atmosphere akin to the model simulated by the altered apparatus in the unpublished experiments. At least the organic materials produced in those were slightly more voluminous and diverse. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that the dynamics of the altered atmospheric model would have moved the materials away from the lingering dangers inside the synthesizing medium, past the threats beyond, and into the primordial soup of the oceans below more rapidly.

It's all pie-in-the-sky nonsense, of course, but as long as we're already suspending disbelief far above any reasonable altitude, we might as well go along with the tale forever: never mind the threats beyond the synthesizing medium, never mind the ubiquitous cross-reaction contaminants, never mind that water pushes peptidyl bonding backward, not forward, would disperse the constituents of proteins and condemn most of them to the whims of a churning and lonely isolation, and never mind most of all that the total amount of organic compounds on Earth today is less than a fraction of the lofty concentrations that would be reasonably favorable for the inscrutable processes of abiogenesis. After all, the other precursors of life, which improbably braved and overcame the same obstacles, have need of their prebiotic cousins. The long and arduous journey toward self-awareness must go on by way of an even more implausible series of elaborately complex and fortuitous accidents.

The Miller-Urey experiments showed that under the right conditions nature might be able to build some of life's amino acids; later discoveries in space and here on Earth confirmed that. But that in and of itself was not the rhyme or the reason of the experiments' underlying hypothesis, and beyond that, what have these experiments shown us? Well, not much about that which was expected, but plenty more about that which is obvious.

The natural occurrence of amino acids is light years away from life, and there exists no coherent or demonstrable explanation for how they aggregated and combined by mere chance in the exact sequences we find in life. And even if such a thing were possible, we'd still not be there.

How did the many hundreds of thousands of mindless proteins and other molecular components, which can only function within a very narrow range of conditions, aggregate and combine in the exact sequences required to build the thousands of intricately complex and interdependent pieces of machinery minimally required by a viable, functioning cell? The process could not have been accumulative, but had to have been instantaneously synchronous for obvious reasons.  All these things evince a certain set of preconditions and necessities which stupid materialist layman will never understand and agenda-driven scientists will never acknowledge.

(As for those still operating under the sleight-of-hand illusion that the refutation of Behe's flagellum argument overthrows the classic construct of irreducible complexity, see "Another Debate" and "The Debate Continues. . . .".)

If one allows that an intelligent agent was required to create the simplest form of life, one opens the door to a world where the regnant theory for the development of life might unravel. If an intelligent agent did it once, what would prevent him from creating other and even more complex forms of life again and again?

We now know that life arose much earlier than was ever thought possible, and the ramifications of this are devastating for abiogenesis, which just keeps running into wall after wall after wall. And the more apparent the complexity of the genome and the infrastructural machinery and processes of the cell becomes, the denser the walls become.

We really don't have a clue about how to explain any of this without considering the necessity of a preexistent intelligence, which is precisely why more and more evolutionists are hesitantly going where they don't want to go. . . . While it still would not resolve the matter of origins, at the very least the evidence points to intelligent extraterrestrials. And that is precisely the point ID scientists have been making for years.

Atheism is poisoning science. Intellectual fascists are arbitrarily asserting a metaphysical naturalism against the evidence.

*  *  *  *  *

With the matter thusly framed, I asked the following question:  "Given what we know today from biochemistry and microbiology, why to people continue to go for abiogenesis?"  My query, together with my observations regarding the contents of Lord Fluffy Tail's source, elicited two responses, the chief characteristic of them being a stunning obtuseness of metaphysical contortions.

For example, Vincent G, a top contributor at Yahoo! Answers, writes:

Earth was running its own experiment over an area that is 500 million square kilometer[s], had access to far many more chemicals . . . with sources of energy that also included asteroid impact[s] and volcanic eruptions, and that experiment ran for million[s] of years. . . .

. . . Who cares if the gas in the jar was not exactly what is now believed to be the right composition? Has anyone tried to redo the experiment using the one that is now thought to be the right mix? Can anyone prove that nowhere on the planet . . . [there] did not exist a pocket of gas that matched what Miller and Urey used?

The fact is that we are detecting amino acid[s] in gas clouds in friggin['] space. It seems those chemicals can even form there!

But I suppose for weaker minds, calling on the intervention of a breaded guy on a cloud somewhere makes more sense.

To which I am now obliged to respond as follows. . . .

So what? That has nothing to do with the exchange rate of proteins in the intergalactic market.

Prior to the DNA and microbiological revolutions of the latter half of the 20th Century, it was believed by materialists that the first cell owed its existence to the inherent chemical properties of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. That is to say, it was believed that from these elements, amino acids (the building blocks of life) and, in their turn, proteins (the machinery of life) were assembled first; the formation of other cellular structures and functions by combinations and transformations of proteins followed: all these things occurring over millions of years within the primordial soup.

But the results of Miller-Urey, which indeed have been repeated hundreds of times in labs across the world, clearly demonstrate that brute forces alone under the atmospheric conditions postulated cannot create anything close to a viable mixture of life's amino acids. Hundreds of other atmospheric models have been tested in labs as well with the same results. In nature, all mixtures of amino acids on Earth occur in the wrong proportions and are invariably racemic, i.e., have equal numbers of left-handed (levorotatory or levo-) and right-handed (dextrorotatory or dextro-) amino acids.

Biology's amino acids are left-handed.

While Earth's atmosphere was more oxygen-rich much earlier than was previously thought possible, it's early primordial atmosphere was a mixture of mostly carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, vaporized water and sulfur dioxide; hence, it was enveloped by a generally oxidizing atmosphere in which the production of prebiotic materials would have been virtually impossible. But that assumes that the geologists have got it right. . . .

Contrary to your reckless disregard for the differences between atmospheric models (as if the painstaking efforts of scientists to nail them down were a mere pastime between potty breaks), the differences between the results derived from the Miller-Urey experiments based on a reducing or semi-reducing atmospheric model and those derived from experiments simulating the conditions of the most probable model are profound. The latter produce compounds that inhibit the formation of protein. These compounds are cyanide and formaldehyde. The rest of the substances produced by these experiments are water and other abiotic compounds. Cyanide is a building block for dextro-amino acids.  Formaldehyde destroys proteins and nucleic acids and is heavier than water. . . .  It would have reached the oceans' depths and wreaked havoc on the supposed, organic creations of the primordial soup.  (It should be noted that some formaldehyde is not necessarily a problem for abiogenesis, just the sort of concentrations that an oxidizing atmosphere would produce.)

All uncontrolled conditions and all forms of undirected energy readily denature the peptide bonds of proteins.  This is especially true of the sort of conditions that are known to prevail as a result of "asteroid impact[s] and volcanic eruptions", and the energy derived from such events is redundantly catastrophic. The various conditions and forms of energy that can create amino acids are the very same as those that gleefully destroy proteins.

As for UV energy. . . .

The destructive intensity of its long wavelengths exceeds the constructive facility of its short ones; consequently, the quantum efficiency of the inhibitions it exerts against the polymerization of organic compounds is approximately five orders of magnitude higher than its threshold for the facilitation of their formation. In order to produce even non-functional amino acids, for example, biochemists must not only control for a certain range of conditions—including temperature—but must also select for the compound-producing wavelengths of light energy as they screen out the compound-destroying ones. Yet both types of light are unremittingly shed by stars, under which life's amino acids, except for glycine, readily break down. In other words, while ultraviolet energy can indirectly induce the chemical reactions of the organic elements that produce amino acids, it can also quickly destroy them.

Hence, I alluded to the various, alternative hypotheses for abiogenesis which have driven the primordial soup deeper and deeper into the ocean, actually, all the way down to the ocean floor. Here, beyond the reach of natural light's destructive wavelengths, it is imagined that life's various precursors formed on the backs of crystals or clay formations and then, in accordance with their self-ordering properties, assembled themselves inside discrete hydrothermal vents. However, in hindsight, it turns out that the problems of polymerization in the ocean are even more daunting due to the problem of dispersion and the higher probability of the toxic cross-reactions of dissymmetric molecules.

And the denaturing temperatures associated with geothermal or hydrothermal energy?

*Crickets chirping*

Accordingly, today's Darwinists believe that UV energy played only an indirect role in the polymerization of organic compounds. Variously, nature's abiogenic laboratories are the planet's interior cauldrons, the oceans and outer space. In the latter, the organic molecules in gaseous mixtures are partially converted by polarized light inside cooling asteroids. And the most interesting of these organic-bearing space debris are the "water-altered" variety with carbon-rich deposits, as their meteoric fragments contain many mixtures of amino acids that are predominately left-handed.⁴  Much has been made of this by the zealots of scientism—the stuff of pigheaded presupposition and sensationalistic journalism (for example, "More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth"!). But since the leftward-leaning mixtures of the amino acids that are found in meteorites are abiotic, cooler heads recognize that their significance has been wildly exaggerated.⁵

Additionally, amateurish proponents of abiogenesis routinely misunderstand the nature of the controversy associated with the problem of contamination. For even if it were conclusively demonstrated that all mixtures of amino acids in space debris, including those that are pertinent to extant biochemistry, have an intrinsic excess of left-handed forms (a ubiquitous byproduct of interplanetary synthesis), the chemical reactions of the primeval terrestrial environment, in the absence of any amplifying mechanism to generate homochirality, would have readily neutralized their efficacity.⁶

In any event, the controversy does not pertain to the levo-enantiomeric excesses that are routinely found in space debris' mixtures of α-dialkyl amino acids.⁷  No one of any repute disputes that. Yet the Internet is awash with the silly and erroneous claim that the proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design attribute these excesses to contamination. Hogwash! Instead, the controversy pertains to the minority reports of levo-enantiomeric excesses of both α-dialkyl and biology's α-hydrogen amino acids being found inside the Murchison Meteorite.⁸ But the results of all the many other tests that have been conducted on Murchison and other chondrites, before and since, dispute the findings of Engel and Nagy (1982) and those of Engel and Macko (1997).⁹ That is to say, the results of all the other tests do indeed consistently show that the mixtures of α-dialkyl amino acids are predominately left-handed, but they also consistently show that the mixtures of biology's α-hydrogen amino acids are racemic. Hence, the overwhelming consensus is that the results of Engel et al., respectively, are due to contamination.¹⁰

Accordingly, it is believed that the chemical properties of α-dialkyl amino acids are uniquely susceptible to the manipulations of the interplanetary medium's two-step mechanism of polarized light and aqueous alteration. The overall quantity of X is reduced as some portion of its dextro-enantiomers are optically reoriented and aqueously altered, and another portion of the same are decomposed and thereby divorced from their enanteiomeric counterparts.  The result is a smaller, altered mixture of X with an excess number of levo-enantiomers. While the finer details of the process are unknown, the outcome is manifest.¹¹

What is not manifest are the mechanisms by which these space travelers avoided being racemized on Earth, achieved homochirality and transferred it to the α-hydrogen amino acids of extant biochemistry. Was all of this accomplished before or after life began? If before, how in the absence of organic information? If after, why in the presence of a putatively self-replicating abundance of a well-established motif? Given the inevitability of racemization in heterogeneous environments (that is to say, given the vain pretensions of chemically acquired homochirality) and given the magical nature of transferring a mulishly intrinsic property from one type of amino acid to another . . . oh, never mind.  These are inscrutable riddles.

While the unfathomable reaches of intergalactic space are slightly partial to left-handed amino acids (albeit, to the wrong type with respect to known terrestrial life), the vagaries of molecular chemistry on Earth are irreverently indifferent to them. In other words, there is no apparent, intrinsic reason that the basic biophysics of terrestrial life could not be conversely arranged on the basis of right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars instead. Yet terrestrial life is decisively biased about both the type and the optical form of its amino acids. While the process would be no less mysterious, insofar as it were left to the mindless devices of nature, why would the self-ordering properties of biochemistry take such a circuitous route and not simply amplify the chirality of α-hydrogen amino acids?

Once again, all of this comes down to the sort of predictions that evolutionary theory actually makes, bound as it is to a mechanism of random variables:  stories about life's development (history) told in hindsight and based on nothing more substantial than the truism that what survives, survives . . . or in this case more at what is, is, and what was, was. Aside from all the hullabaloo over abiotic levo-enantiomers being nothing more than an unfalsifiable collection of vague and impenetrable conjectures, what is more annoying to the abiogenist—the unanswerable questions raised by his convictions or the questionable sanity of his convictions?

As for comets, it is now known that some amines and the amino acid glycine are produced inside irradiated compositions of frozen interplanetary dust. As life's amino acids go, glycine (being the simplest and, therefore, the sturdiest with only two hydrogen atoms on its side chain) can withstand the challenges of the interplanetary medium. (This may also be true of glutamic acid and alanine.)  But this has long been suspected as glycine consistently constitutes the largest concentrations of the biotic compounds that are found in meteorites or produced in laboratory experiments. The other fundaments of life would be destroyed by galactic cosmic rays, solar-wind particles or UV radiation outside a comet's nucleus.¹²  But this does not mean that comets could not have brought life's other, more complex amino acids to Earth or, according to computational chemistry, contributed to their creation on Earth—the result of shock-compression synthesis induced by glancing-impact events.¹³

*Yawn*

Wake me when abiogenists contrive a computer simulation that coherently explains how the first living cell was created by the primordial soup's orgy of happy coincidence and random variation.

Meanwhile back in the real world. . . .

The friggin' amino acids that have been detected "in gas clouds in friggin['] space", as well as those that have been produced in friggin' experiments or found in friggin' meteorites here on friggin' Earth have all been of the same friggin' quality with respect to that which is friggin' relevant to extant terrestrial life:  a friggin' racemic mixture of the wrong friggin' type in the wrong friggin' proportions without the benefit of having a friggin' adequate number of those friggin' required by life, all within in a friggin' "soup" of cross-reaction contaminants.  Never mind that the friggin' chemical properties of life's friggin' amino acids are clearly not up to the friggin' challenge of actualizing the vast array of meticulously complex components that are friggin' required by even the conceivably simplest form of friggin' life.

Are the lights on yet? Did you find the switch?

Since Miller-Urey, the discoveries of biochemistry and microbiology have revealed precisely why the synthesis of life out of amino acids from the ground up is a dead end. Mere chemistry does not produce life; only complex structures produce life.  Amino acids simply do not link up in nature to form proteins, not even when they are let loose in a pristine brew consisting of only left-handed ingredients.  Without high-energy compounds and enzymes, amino acids do not form the many peptides and, therefore, the many proteins needed for life. But the most significant prerequisite of all is information, and that information resides above the chemical properties of amino acids.

The original, underlying hypothesis of the Miller-Urey experiments has been falsified for decades.

Hence, no matter how many experiments were conducted by planet Earth and no matter how many more particulate chemicals She might have had at Her disposal, there is no friggin' way that amino acids fabricated the hundreds of thousands of proteins that are found in living organisms.  It takes more than a random collection of amino acids to make life. They must be assembled in a very precise and elaborate fashion in order to perform useful or desirable functions. Without the necessary information contained in preexisting nucleic acids, the result would be a collection of gobbledygook, and nucleic acids cannot evolve without the infrastructural and catalytic properties of preexisting proteins.

In other words, DNA synthesis relies on the presence of infrastructural and enzymatic proteins, and protein synthesis relies on the encoded genetic information in DNA and on the coded translations of that information in RNA. What we have here, at least with respect to the origins of DNA, is an interdependent circle of irreducible complexity.

(By the way, Vincent G, you're not by any chance related to that schmuck who goes by the moniker Dr. George Johnson are you? Yeah.  Right.  He thinks the essence of the chicken-or-the-egg problem is simply a matter of dilution and only applies to the origin of proteins. The problem is irreducibly catalytic, infrastructural and informational! All nucleic structures require proteins for their fabrication and structural integrity in living cells, and outside living cells, the spontaneously formed chains of nucleotides in vitro from preexisting material are meaningless collections of goop relative to the fabrication of biologically useful polypeptide chains. Further, the topic is abiogenesis! The problem of dilution has nothing to do with cellular environments; it has to do with the replication and polymerization of prebiotic compounds in acellular environments. And of course, neither nature nor experiments simulating realistic prebiotic conditions form nucleotides or proteins, least of all the Miller-Urey experiments. More pseudoscientific claptrap from a materialist know-nothing.)

I never said that "Miller-Urey . . . discredit[ed] abiogenesis".  I only hinted at the fact that the original, underlying hypothesis of Miller-Urey—once again, that life was built from the ground up by amino acids—had been falsified and suggested that the earlier-than-expected appearance of life on Earth was devastating to the subsequent models of abiogenesis: models that have arisen precisely because we now know for sure that the supposed primordial soup could not have fabricated the proteins necessary for life in the absence of organic information.

Every friggin' bit of your blather is moot! And that includes this bit of nonsense: "But I suppose for weaker minds, calling on the intervention of a breaded guy on a cloud somewhere makes more sense." Well, next time you pop off at a theist, you might want to bring something more substantial than your rather dull blade to what might be a gun fight. That is to say, you might want to open up your mind a bit and consider the possibility that you could be improved by a theist.

Science has moved on; you're decades behind it. Clearly, it is your pseudoscientific claptrap that does not belong on the "Science-Biology Forum" of Yahoo! Answers, and clearly your misreading of my piece is due to the arrogance of your "weak mind" and its lack of knowledge.

Now that I've brought you up to speed, awakened you, pulled you out of your make-believe world of pre-information proteins, let us move on to the make-believe world of the subsequent models of abiogenesis based on smaller compounds containing catalytic properties and information. . . .

*  *  *  *  *

The other response my query elicited was proffered by Bob.  Though more scientifically current, it was in its own perverse way even more obtuse:

The RNA world has already shown easily how the early cells arose. The only element that still seems puzzling is the appearance of life in such a short period. . . .

. . . All essential molecules are present and can be produced under varieties of conditions.

First things first.

Bob, snap out of your zombie-like trance, put the crack pipe down and step away from the instrument.

You do understand that we're talking about abiogenesis, right? Hence, we're not talking about the organic compounds that are available today, i.e., the organic molecules (monomers) that are harvested from extant living cells and are used to synthesis organic macromolecules (polymers) in vitro. Nor, strictly speaking, are we talking about the various organic molecules that "can be produced under a variet[y] of conditions" in laboratories today. In other words, we're not talking about the present, Bob; we're talking about the past. We're talking about that which was realistically available to Mother Nature approximately 4.2 billion years ago.

Focus, Bob.

In the years since Stanley Miller's landmark experiments, scientists have synthesized 17 of the 20 fundamental amino acids in experiments simulating variously tweaked reducing atmospheres inside variants of Miller's original apparatus. But all of these procedures involved high concentrations of methane and ammonia. With respect to the actual conditions of the primordial world, the geological evidence does not support the presence of these kinds of concentrations. It's not even close. But even if it did, as discussed in the above, there would have been no ozone layer to shield the organic compounds produced, and, once again, in oxidizing atmospheres no biologically useful compounds are produced. Zilch. However, in a semi-reducing atmosphere, some of the simpler and more durable amino acids might have had a fighting chance, and we know for sure that the Murchison Meteorite contains 6 of the fundamentals—exactly the number that might have been produced in a semi-reducing atmosphere here on Earth!

Hence, I'll give you 6 amino acids, Bob, in racemic mixtures, and that's being generous. Due to the barely measurable presence and woeful instability of the other 11, no one of any repute would have the temerity to argue that they could have existed in any significant concentrations in the primordial world beyond the environment of a living cell . The 6 are glycine, alanine, glutamic acid, aspartic acid, valine and proline. In this category, that leaves you 14 shy of the 20 "essential molecules" you boasted about.

But the news gets better.

In 1961 Joan Oró synthesized the purine nucleobase adenine from the polymerization of hydrogen cyanide in an aqueous-ammonia solution (aqueous ammonium cyanide¹⁴) under a simulated reducing atmosphere.¹⁵

In March of 1999, Levy et al. showed that the purine nucleobase guanine could be synthesized in the same reaction, though at significantly lower yields, with the greatest volume of product produced at freezing temperatures.¹⁶

Inspired by previous experiments that produced the pyrimidines, howbeit, in low yields at general temperatures,¹⁷ a team of scientists recently synthesized adenine, cytosine and uracil from various reactive mixtures of urea (i.e., urea combined with cyanate, cyanoacetylene or the latter's hydrolyzed form cyanoacetaldehyde) in a cyclically frozen-and-thawed solution of eutectic ice under a simulated reducing atmospheric mixture of methane and nitrogen.¹⁸

Taken together, along with the lessons learned from Robertson and Miller (June 1995), these experiments show that freezing temperatures are generally best for the formation of the purines adenine and guanine, while boiling temperatures are best for the formation of the pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. And the best reactive mixture for the synthesis of cytosine, "from which uracil can be formed by hydrolysis", is urea and cyanoacetaldehyde.¹⁹

Semi-reducing environments won't cut it for the production of these compounds; it's an all-or-nothing affair. But it's not at all unreasonable to imagine that guanine was produced in UV-shielded pockets of frozen reductive mixtures in the arctic regions of the primeval world (Levy et at.), and uracil is a relatively durable compound which, in addition to being readily derived from the degradation of cytosine, appears to be produced under the reductive conditions of outer space inside asteroids, meteorites and comets. Both uracil and xanthine,²⁰ for example, were found in the Murchison Meteorite.²¹ But since cytosine readily degrades to uracil and guanine to xanthine, more tests must be conducted before terrestrial contamination can be satisfactorily ruled out.

Finally, the methylation of uracil, a simple reaction, produces thymine.

("Pretty impressive, eh?", the materialist smugly thought to himself. But then the mundane imperatives of the real world beyond the laboratory crept into his evanescent land of dreams . . . and the cheese slid off his cracker.)

Let's start with cytosine.

Regardless what the chemical composition of the synthesizing solution is, cytosine does not form within oxidizing mediums or in spark-discharge experiments within simulated reducing atmospheres. But even if it did form within the latter, cytosine converts to its photodimers under ultraviolet light and bypasses the reductive reaction that yields uracil.

The thermally energized synthesis of cytosine based on cyanoacetylene's reaction with cyanate requires extravagantly implausible concentrations of both, as well as unrealistic concentrations of methane and nitrogen. While cyanoacetylene is "an abundant interstellar molecule" (Robertson and Miller), only paltry concentrations of it are produced within the idyllic medium of methane and nitrogen once water or ammonia are added to the mix—a devastating blow to the expectation that cyanoacetylene played a significant role in the fabrication of organic compounds in the primordial soup.²² On top of that, in nature, cyanoacetylene finds other chemicals more alluring than the ugly duckling cyanate. But it is not likely that it was discomforted by the sight of cyanate very often given the fact that in nature the latter is derived from the hydrolysis of cyanogen, which has an estimated half-life of less than 30 seconds on Earth beyond laboratory conditions.²³

But wait, there's more!

Despite Robertson and Miller's glowing recommendations, it turns out that in the real world the synthesis of cytosine based on cyanoacetaldehyde and urea is futile.

First, cyanoacetaldehyde reacts with an even wider variety of chemicals than cyanoacetylene. When even relatively small concentrations of the other chemicals that would have been commonly found in the prebiotic environment are added to the mix, no detectable cytosine is produced; hence, in nature, cyanoacetaldehyde does not achieve the uninhibited concentrations required for the reaction to occur.²⁴ But more to the point, in nature it is exclusively acquired from the hydrolysis of cyanoacetylene, so its greater stability—such as it is, with a half-life of only 31 years—is moot.

Second, even if sufficient concentrations of cyanoacetaldehyde had been present in the prebiotic world, the end product of its reaction with urea is not cytosine, but uracil. The entire enterprise is actually an accelerated polymerization-deamination reaction, wherein less and less of the dissipating cytosine is produced as its precursor is used up (Robertson and Miller). In other words, the presence of urea induces the synthesis of cytosine only to cannibalize it for the production of uracil.

An obvious difficulty with this reaction is that the formation of cytosine and the subsequent deamination of the product to uracil . . . occur at about the same rate. . . . It is clear that the yield of cytosine would fall to 0% if the reaction were extended for a number of half-lives. This provides no difficulty in the laboratory, where one can start with a urea concentration of one's choice and monitor the time carefully. On early Earth, the following circumstances would be needed: An isolated lagoon or other body of sea water would have to undergo extreme concentration, to perhaps 10⁻⁵ of its initial volume. This reduction in volume would be needed to bring urea . . . to [the concentration] necessary for the reaction. It would further be necessary that the residual liquid be held in an impermeable vessel. . . . The concentration process would have to be interrupted for some decades . . . with the urea concentration near saturation, to allow the reaction to occur. At this point, the reaction would require quenching . . . to prevent loss by deamination. At the end, one would have a batch of urea in solid form, containing some cytosine (and uracil). This sequence cannot be excluded as a rare event on early Earth, but it cannot be termed plausible. —Robert Shapiro²⁵

The bottom line: the data of the empirical record and the fundamentals of chemistry do not support the proposition that there was a significant presence of cytosine's abiotic precursors in the primordial world, and scientists are not going to find cytosine in meteorites or anywhere else in the universe beyond the controlled and directed environments of laboratories and biological systems. Except perhaps in the sort of implausible, calcified state proposed in the above, cytosine spontaneously deaminates beyond the protective membranes of cells. Even when monitored by life's structural and regulatory systems, this unstable compound is highly susceptible to acidic protonation²⁶ and has an estimated half-life of about 340 years at moderate temperatures, albeit, in a theoretically sterile environment only.²⁷ There is no way that cytosine served as a replication component in the formative stages of any RNA-world (or "exposed-gene") scenario.²⁸

In this category, scratch cytosine off the list of the those "essential molecules", Bob.

I'll give you uracil, as well as thymine by default, although it does not seem likely that uracil could have been obtained from any other place but outer space, and space debris deliver their organic payloads in calcified mixtures replete with abiotic, cross-reaction contaminates. It's not at all clear how the goods might have extracted themselves from their conveyances in any significant concentrations, regardless of how many tons of the latter might have rained down on the primordial world during the solar system's formative years. Indeed, its hard to imagine how the process of chemical evolution was not repeatedly interrupted and made to start all over again from scratch—sent to jail without passing "Go"—by that rain of fire and brimstone. Also, you can have guanine, though how it's concentrations linked up with that of its peers or were not repeatedly destroyed by the same interplanetary weather pattern is merely a slightly different version of the same fuzzy-wuzzy.

But you can't have adenine. Its synthesis requires implausible concentrations of hydrogen cyanide. Also, it's a highly reactive compound and susceptible to hydrolysis with a half-life of only 80 years under moderate temperatures.²⁹ The only semi-stabilizing interaction by which it can maintain its composition at the molecular level outside a living cell and in the absence of ribose is the consequently "weak and nonspecific" bond it forms with uracil (or thymine), which would never hold up, much less "function in any specific recognition scheme under the chaotic conditions of a prebiotic soup."³⁰ Hence, assuming it existed at all before life began, there's just no way adenine could have amassed significant concentrations in an aqueous environment. And that's the worst of all possible news for the RNA-world hypothesis, as adenine is the one indispensable nucleobase in replication.

(By the way, Bob, you're not by any chance related to that schmuck Fraser Cain who claims that all five nucleobases were found in the Murchison Meteorite are you?)

The problem with stepping down to a simpler replicating polymer³¹ with a less impressive arsenal of informational and catalytic properties is that it would become even harder for the abiogenic process to step back up to the level of a replicating polymer that would be competent enough to fabricate a cellular organism. But in the absence of any conceivable means of synthesizing biologically useful concentrations of ribose outside the membranous insulation of living cells, none of this amounts to a hill of beans, for there is no replication to be had by any system beyond the acellular stage without it.

While biological amino acids and nucleic compounds are left-handed, biological sugars are right-handed. Hence, the production of the latter also require sophisticated regulatory systems: no regulatory systems, including powerful enzymes, no biologically useful concentrations of ribose. Regardless, all sugars are highly unstable. They readily decompose or react with other chemicals.³² In order for it to retain the integrity of its composition, ribose requires the sequestered environments of living cells provided by cellular membranes, which are composed of proteins. Nucleotides require ribose: no ribose, no nucleotides. And if there's no nucleotides, there's no proteins. Yep. It's another one of those interdependent circles of irreducible complexity.

The idea of the RNA-world model is that primitive compounds consisting of nucleic material built increasingly greater extensions of themselves and thereby increased the volume of their information. At some point they attained the capacity to replicate themselves via recombinant mutations and then synthesized independent peptide chains (proteins). The new peptides were the means by which they boosted their catalytic firepower and range, and the material out of which they constructed primitive cellular membranes. After that, the more complex compounds (including nucleotides?) were constructed. Complex structures and reproductive systems were built. Life. DNA formed. Even more complex structures and reproductive systems were built. Life more abundantly. That's the synopsis, and there are variations of the yarn, which include suppositions of transitory, membranous structures that are composed of inorganic materials.

But wait a minute. What sugar was used to afford the formation of the nucleic-compound chains in the first place?

Well, it wasn't ribose, and no less than two of the known biological nucleobases, including the most vital of them all, were missing. As for amino acids, the nucleic compounds had only six in racemic mixtures to work with initially. And since there were no regulatory systems around at that stage to separate the left-handed wheat from the right-handed chaff, or vice versa with respect to ribose. . . .

Abiogenists have demonstrated that a small and incomplete regiment of ingredients were plausibly available—maybe, perhaps, what if. They have a knowledge about the basic types of compounds and structures that are minimally required. They have some vague notions about alternate routes of chemical interaction and structural substitutions. What they don't have in mind or at their command with any specificity in terms of real-world eventualities and established empirical data is the substance of the indispensable, gap-filling accessories that would make the fruition of their dreams possible.

For example, in answer to the question posed in the above, there simply is no coherent explanation about how mere nucleobases bypassed the intermediate form of nucleic compounds (nucleoside) in the absence of ribose and grew into self-replicating chains of nucleic material as if they were nucleotides. All the hype about the various sugars that are synthesized in laboratories or found in space debris is baby talk. When its molecular precursors are thermally energized in the presence of enzymes, only trace amounts of utterly worthless, racemic mixtures of ribose are produced.³³ The major products are other sugars, also composed of racemic mixtures, which combine with nucleic acids only to form compounds that prevent the polymerization of RNA.³⁴ Only in living cells do we find the structures that segregate metabolic sugars from nucleic sugars, and the regulatory mechanisms that prevent the production of racemic mixtures.

In other words, the self-ordering chemical properties of nature are monomeric dead ends. Nature can form some amino acids and nucleobases; it can form some biotic phosphates as well as some abiotic sugars and fatty acids in calcified forms.  Where does it ever form proteins or nucleosides (let alone nucleotides) outside living cells? And beyond living cells and the in vitro experiments conducted under laboratory conditions, where does nature ever polymerize and replicate complex compounds?

*Crickets chirping*

A nucleoside is formed when a ribose sugar is added to a nitrogenous base (nucleobase). While the purine nucleosides adenosine and guanosine can be synthesized by adding a ribose, the reaction will not occur in water. But, of course, this reaction is performed in laboratories by biochemists using ribose sugars derived from extant organisms. In the prebiotic world, the reaction would not have occurred in dry environments either. But even if ribose had been available to the primordial soup, the phosphate in biological systems is an ester of phosphoric acid, not a salt. It could have only maintained its composition in deep waters, where ribose can't go, beyond the reach of ultraviolet light. The pyrimidine nucleosides uridine, cytidine and thymidine require both ribose and phosphate to form. Ribose sugars will not bond to the pyrimidine bases without phosphate. Hence, the maturation of the pyrimidines proceeds from nucleobase to nucleotide in one step.

But even if nature could manage the synthesis of nucleotides, their mixtures would invariably be racemic. Worthless. They'd have to be purified, and after that, concentrated and activated before the polymerization phase could begin. And a template? (Whose got the friggin' template?) Well, polymerization would just have to start without one. Besides, the forces of molecular chemistry would supposedly sort things out: even if pyrimidines won't polymerize without a template and even if the significance of organic information doesn't reside in the nucleobase "letters" or even in the condon "words", but in their sequence. All of these things and more would have to occur—from molecule to compound, from aggregation to polymerization, from replication to recombination, from transmutation to realization—in a contaminate-invested environment incessantly pushing the process in the wrong direction.³⁵

You don't know what you're talking about, do you, Bob?

I suspect that in your mind you have somehow muddled the difference between abiogenesis and biochemical engineering. Yes. In the laboratory, researchers have designed enzymatic RNA compounds that can affect a ligative production system that in its turn can fabricate self-replicating strands of RNA.³⁶ The initial stage of the procedure is front-loaded, not by the mechanism of natural selection, but by the preordained manipulations of a sentient being. The second stage of the procedure arguably entails the mechanism of natural selection, but only on the basis of recombinant mutation, not transmutation. Also, researchers have designed a ribozyme with catalytic properties that consists of only five nucleotides!³⁷ In vitro, they can even synthesis a series of oligonucleotides and assemble them into the entire genome of one bacterium, transplant it into the cytoplasm of another, and then step back and watch the transformed bacterium reproduce in accordance with the hereditary dictates of the synthetic genome.³⁸

But these researchers did not devise these wonders from scratch, Bob. The basic chemical components were harvested from living cells; these were not the partially formed pieces of junk from any primordial soup. Indeed, the procedures themselves were based on the fundamentals of preexisting biotechnology, informed by the known processes of biological systems. And all of these things were achieved with a preordained outcome in mind, within pristine and insulated solutions simulating the environment and facilities of living cells.

In other words, they worked with preexistent paradigms and tools and materials suspended in midair, as it were, relative to origins. They can pound on the roof all they want, that's not going to resolve the clearly insurmountable problems of prebiotic logistics and polymerization for those notions that are predicated on the processes of accumulative chemistry. Whether they be strictly natural occurrences or not, the only reasonable explanation for the origins of the building's foundation and walls entails some kind of instantaneously synchronous event or another, at some point in time or another, as several abiogenists themselves have acknowledged in exasperation. So in spite of the hype—the political speak of research funding—none of this is new in the sense that it would lead to anything more than recycled adumbrations about the events that produced the extant biochemistry on which these researcher's endeavors are unequivocally based.

Are they going to back peddle to the very same monomeric dead ends that have already been thoroughly illustrated by others? Of course not. The problem of origins is not merely one of chemistry; it entails unobservable historical events, as the late Stanley Miller himself recognized:

Miller acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely where and when life emerged. "We're trying to discuss a historical event, which is very different from the usual kind of science, and so criteria and methods are very different," he remarked. —John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Broadway Books (1997, pg. 139)

Very different, indeed, for Darwinian naturalism rests on a scientifically unsustainable argument that is ultimately theological in nature, one that assumes without proof that the entire history of terrestrial life is an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect. Make no mistake about it, Darwinism is a religious system of thought, one that is diametrically opposed to the ontology of the great scientists that preceded Darwin and his cohorts, which include some Christians, who have inexplicably embraced a theory that spurns the testimony of God regarding the exact nature of the origin and succession of life, and, consequently, the essence of original sin. The matter is predominantly historical, and God was the only One there.

Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Pasteur—all understood that the teachings of reveled religion and the inferences of scientific observation were not mutually exclusive, but mutually affirming sources of information about the same indivisible reality of human consciousness and about the spiritual imperatives of the world beyond. They rightly held that divinity constituted the only guarantee that the rational forms and logical categories of the human mind were reliably synchronized with the apparent substances and mechanics of empirical phenomena. Indeed, what are we to make of the Darwinist's absolute affirmation of a construct that by it's very nature would confine its constituents' experience of reality to the processes of a random and cognition-altering speciation?

By what process of "angelization" could men have become cognizant of their random origins and spectators of all time and existence, as though from some superior and independent vantage-point? Do the Neo-Darwinians, like so many other system-builders, desert the system of which they are the authors, claiming special cognitive principles that cannot be justified within the system? —Richard Spilsbury, Providence Lost: A Critique of Darwinism, Oxford University Press (1974, pg. 116)

In the face of the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of nucleotide formation, the current trend in gene-first research is to concentrate less on the concerns of a generalized atmospheric or oceanographic primordial soup, and more on the facilities of isolated spheres of polymerization involving a synthesis with the metabolism-first model. As the details are beyond the scope of this writing, I'll leave them to those who wish to investigate the matter for themselves. For now, I offer only the following brief synopsis and opinion.

We have the Deep-sea vent theory, the Clay theory, the Autocatalysis model, the Deep-hot biosphere model, the Radioactive-beach hypothesis, the Ultraviolet- and temperature-assisted replication model, the Amphiphile-bubble hypothesis, the Iron-sulfur world theory, the Thermosynthesis world, and more. . . .³⁹

I have examined them all exhaustively.

The various thermohydraulic models are hopelessly vexed by the statistically immense problems of dilution and hydrolysis; the various mineral- or clay-catalytic models are hopelessly vexed by the problem of chemical calcification; and the rest would expose their products to undirected solar energy or oxidation. Regardless, the processes of every single one of them would either generate non-transitional redundancies or employ forces that would destroy the materials their processes created. Hence, taken individually or together, while they purportedly explain everything, they explain nothing.

But even if by some fantastic contingency the processes of these various schemes managed to leap over their rainbows without breaking anything, even if the sum of the materials produced added up to the whole of life's molecular precursors, and even if by some fantastic feat of coincidence these precursors were all gathered together in overflowing concentrations of each: they would ultimately amount to nothing more significant than an organic compilation of goop.

Combine all the concentrated mixtures you want. Sky's the limit.

Goop.

Go with whatever conditions you want; feel free to variously alternate them at any time during the process.

Goop.

Go with whatever sources of energy you want; feel free to variously alternate them at any time during the process.

Goop.

Take all the time in the cosmos and multiply it millions of times.

Goop.

For there are no contingencies under which life could self-assemble.

Each nucleotide base pair has an equal affinity for the backbone of every other; their sequence is not due to any chemically preordained bonding affinity. That is to say, the assembly of organic molecules is not due to their chemical properties; it is due to an extraneous source of information. Indeed, it is this factor in the hands of the Potter that best accounts for the tenacity and great variety of terrestrial life, not the shiftless mechanism of natural selection. And the countless cells on the planet, with their thousands of pieces of interdependent machinery, are no less marvelous with regard to their durability and complexity, from that of the lowliest protozoan to the millions of mammalian creatures. Clearly, the entire enterprise of life entails a series of instantaneously synchronous resolutions according to a fabulously intricate and comprehensively preordained blueprint.

But Bob has one more thing to say, and it's all so very mysterious and metaphysical, sort of touchy-feely, about as close as the stale and fatuous undertakings of the atheist's shriveled heart ever comes to real sublimity, something about empirically demonstrable evidence involving chemistry and physics and the origin of human consciousness: the materialist's version of the theist's teleological argument, except this one comes without any categorically anchored strings attached, this is, without any rational caveats or qualifications. He mentions "faith" and complains about its inappropriateness, apparently, on the science forums of Yahoo! Answers. . . . It's all so very bizarre and confused—its absurdities flying right over his pointed head.  But then atheists are notoriously bad philosophers anyway.

I cleaned it up a bit, corrected the annoying violations of grammatical tense in order to present it here and not gratuitously torture the minds of my readers. Deciphering the mangled thought processes of the atheist is already painful enough:

Life can arise without any intelligence being behind it. If chemistry and physics [had] not . . . allowed life to [arise] from them, we wouldn't be here to witness it. Thinking we had to be here is what leads to beliefs without evidence. And that is faith, which has no place here.

“Thinking we had to be here is what leads to beliefs without evidence”?

Indeed. So that would mean that Bob's statement regarding the inevitability of life arising out of the self-ordering properties of insensible molecules—that is, his demonstrably erroneous belief that "[t]he RNA world has already shown easily how the early cells arose"—is a faith-based belief "without evidence". We're here; therefore, mindless molecules and brute forces did it. That's all he's really saying.

As for Judeo-Christianity, it does not hold—as Bob apparently believes by the faith of literary ignorance—that "we had to be here". On the contrary, the Bible emphatically teaches that the cosmos and everything contained in it is wholly contingent upon God. It's not the other way around, as if the recommendations of the universal, objectively apprehensible idea of God and the recommendations of empirical evidence were merely the byproducts of human culture. The whole point of creation ex nihilo is that we would not and could not be here unless it were ordained by a preexistent intelligence. Hence, according to scripture, incontrovertibly backed by empirical evidence and sometimes backed by Bob's opinion depending on his mood, there is nothing inevitable about the existence of any terrestrial life form, let alone one that is sentient.

In other words, in spite of his oft repeated observation that in the scheme of things we are an insignificant speck—as if that were some earth-shattering profundity eluding lesser mortals—it is the atheist who insists that the inherent properties of chemicals make the appearance of life on Earth an inevitability, howbeit,  under the right or coincidental conditions, not the Christian! And it is the Christian, not the atheist, who observes that while the Earth's position and its axial attitude within the solar system are amazingly conducive to the formulation of life-sustaining conditions, they also entail a manifold set of conditions that are prohibitively hostile to the spontaneous occurrence of life by mere chance.

Modernity's faddish, widespread belief in chemical evolution is nothing more than a rehash of  spontaneous generation. Yesterday's version entailed many events occurring everywhere all the time; today's version entails a one-time-only event occurring in the unobserved long, long ago. The former has been falsified, and the latter defies explanation.

So where's the science?

What the sane among us still recognize to be the only rational alternative, secular humanists perceive to be a nuisance, the relic of a so-called benighted tribalism, something that portends a degree of speculation that resides beyond the faculties of a supposedly enlightened modernity, though the latter be the stuff of an ancient tradition akin to alchemy.  Ever since Darwin, the everyday-walk-in-the-park skepticism that is so vital to real science has been overshadowed by the arbitrary dogma that science must stick to a purely materialist narrative, even if that narrative tells an incomplete or incoherent story.
______________________________
¹Roughly, proteins are infrastructural, catalytic, metabolic and storage mechanisms. Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) store, transmit and decode genetic information; they also perform structural, regulatory, cellular signaling, metabolic and co-catalytic tasks.

Amino acids are composed of an amine group (a nitrogen atom with a lone pair, i.e., a pair of valence electrons), a carboxylic acid group (a carbonyl and a hydroxyl), and a side chain. Their elemental constituents are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sometimes sulfur.

A nucleic acid forms when two or more nucleotides combine by way of the covalent bond between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate group of the next; hence, nucleic acids are simply macromolecules (polymers) composed of at least two or more nucleotides (monomers).

A nucleotide is composed of a nucleoside, a five-carbon molecule of a ribose sugar and at least one of three phosphate groups. A nucleoside is composed of a nucleobase bound to a five-carbon molecule of ribose sugar. The five nucleosides of living organisms are adenosine, guanosine, uridine, cytidine and thymidine. The five corresponding nucleobases are adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine and thymine. Hence, nucleotides form when a nucleobase is combined with a ribose sugar and a phosphate group. The sugar of ribonucleotides is ribose; the sugar of deoxyribonucleotides is deoxyribose.

The "skeletal" structure of adenine and guanine is purine (a pyrimidine ring fused to an imidazole ring), thus, the purine bases. The "skeletal" structure of cytosine, thymine and uracil is pyrimidine (a heterocyclic ring with two nitrogen atoms at positions 1 and 3), thus, the pyrimidine bases. Nucleotides can contain either a purine or a pyrimidine base. In both DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid) the purine bases, of course, are adenine and guanine; however, the pyrimidine bases in DNA are cytosine and thymine, while the pyrimidines in RNA are cytosine and uracil. Hence, RNA uses uracil in place of thymine.

Adenine always pairs with thymine (or uracil in RNA) by way of two hydrogen bonds, and guanine always pairs with cytosine by way of three hydrogen bonds.   —Michael David Rawlings

²John W. Kimball (Dec. 20, 2010). "The Origin of Life". Kimball's Biology Pages.

Stephen K. Ritter (Oct. 16, 2008).  "Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited".  Chemical and Engineering News: Prebiotic Chemistry.

There are a total of 22 standard, proteinogenic amino acids. Twenty of them constitute the fundamental building blocks of life, and these are fed into specialized cellular machines (ribosomes) that read (or decipher) encoded bites of information divulged by messenger RNA (mRNA) and then "translate" that information into proteins. The encodements are derived from an organism's genes, which are composed of variously numbered and arranged codons, with each codon consisting of three adjacent nucleotides. In other words, an mRNA molecule is a copy of a gene's sequentially arranged codons and is used by a ribosome as a template for the correct sequence of amino acids in a particular protein. Hence, ribosomes translate codons, one after the other, and, with the assistance of transfer RNA (tRNA), appropriate the corresponding amino acids, bind them together in the specified order and produce peptide chains (proteins).

An organism's genes are contained in its DNA (or in its RNA for many types of viruses, which, technically, are not organisms, at least not in any sense with respect to their dormant state). An organism's genome is the entirety of its hereditary information, consisting of both the genetic and the structural sequences of its combined DNA. The genome is the master blueprint of an organism's essential design and dynamics.

The assembly of 20 of the 22 standard amino acids are encoded for by the universal genetic code, i.e., the code that is found in all living organisms. Hence, these 20 are used by all living organisms for the creation and maintenance of their essential design and dynamics. The other two standard amino acids—selenocysteine and pyrrolysine—are also assembled proteinogenically, i.e., inside ribosomes via alterations of certain canonical amino acids during the initial stage of protein synthesis. These alterations, encoded by UGA and UAG codons, are incorporated (or inserted) by dissimilar mechanisms involving discrete or highly specialized mRNA and tRNA molecules. In other words, these co-transitional mechanisms and, therefore, these amino acids are not found in all living organisms. Selenocysteine is found in all eukaryotic organisms and in some prokaryotic organisms. Pyrrolysine is found in prokaryotic organisms only (i.e., in the enzymes of some methanogenic archaea and bacteria). Only one organism—an archaea species—is known to have both.

Some routinely confound the distinction between standard and nonstandard amino acids. The distinction between them is based on the phases of protein synthesis, not on the processes/mechanisms associated with the synthesis of amino acids. Accordingly, the standard amino acids are the initial components of the translational phase of protein development, and the transitional phase occurs inside an organism's ribosomes. The nonstandard amino acids are the specialized components of the modification phase of protein development, and the post-transitional, modification phase involves certain metabolic processes that occur outside the organism's ribosomes. Hence, nonstandard amino acids are those that have been chemically modified after they have been incorporated into proteins, as well as those that are found in organisms, but not found in proteins.  In addition to these, there exist an unknown number of abiotic amino acids.

The twenty canonical amino acids are alanine, arginine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamic acid, glutamine, glycine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, proline, serine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine and valine. These are divided into the essentials and nonessentials: (1) the essentials are those that an organism cannot synthesize inside its own body for itself, so they must be ingested, acquired from an organism's diet; (2) the rest are said to be nonessential because they are already produced by the organism's body. For humans, the essentials are those contained in the proteins that build muscle and organs. Human adults can synthesis 10 of the 20 canonicals via replication or intermediate metabolic processes. The rest are readily acquired from animal flesh.  —Michael David Rawlings

³Tony Fitzpatrick (Sep. 8, 2005). "Calculations favor reducing atmosphere for early Earth: Was Miller-Urey experiment correct?". Washington University in St. Louis: Newsroom.

⁴Nancy Neal-Jones and Bill Steigerwald (Dec. 16, 2010). "Building blocks of life created in 'Impossible' place". Physorg.com: Space and Earth, Space Exploration.

Nancy Atkinson (Jan. 18, 2011). "More Asteroids Could Have Made Life’s Ingredients". Universe Today.

^{5 and 6}Anne M. Rosenthal (Feb. 12, 2003). "Murchison’s Amino Acids: Tainted Evidence?". Astrobiology Magazine.

Elie Dolgin (March 16, 2009). "Did lefty molecules seed life?". Faculty of 1000, Post-Publication Peer Review:  TheScientist.

Daniel P. Glavin and Jason P Dworkin (Jan. 23, 2009). "Enrichment of the amino acid L-isovaline by aqueous alteration on CI and CM meteorite parent bodies" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). PNAS: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center.

⁷α-dialkyl amino acids (which include α-methyl amino acids) are relatively insignificant to protein biochemistry. They have two carbon atoms attached to the pivotal α-carbon atom of the amine and carboxylic acid groups, instead of at least one hydrogen atom.   —Michael David Rawlings

⁸Michael H. Engel and Bartholomew Nagy (April 29, 1982). "Distribution and enantiomeric composition of amino acids in the Murchison meteorite".  Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona.  Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (296, pgs. 837-840).

Michael. H. Engel and S. A. Macko (Sep. 18, 1997). "Isotopic evidence for extraterrestrial non- racemic amino acids in the Murchison meteorite". School of Geology and Geophysics, The University of Oklahoma; Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia.  Nature: Letters to Nature (389, pgs. 265-268).

^{9 and 10}Jeffrey L. Bada, John R. Cronin, Ming-Shan Ho, Keith A. Kvenvolden, James G. Lawless, Stanley L. Miller, J. Oro and Spencer Steinberg (Feb. 10, 1983). "On the reported optical activity of amino acids in the Murchison meteorite". Amino Acid Dating Laboratory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California; Department of Chemistry and Center for Meteorite Studies, Arizona State University; US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California; Ames Research Center, NASA; Department of Chemistry, University of California; Department of Biophysical Sciences, University of Houston. Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (301, pgs. 494-496).

J. R. Cronin and S. Pizzarello (Feb. 14, 1997). "Enantiomeric excesses in meteoritic amino acids". Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University. Science; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (275, 5302, pgs. 951-955).

S. Pizzarello and J. R. Cronin (Feb. 4, 1999; revised June 28, 1999). "Non-racemic amino acids in the Murray and Murchison meteorites". Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Vol. 64, Issue 2, pgs. 329-338).

Anne M. Rosenthal (Feb. 12, 2003). "Murchison's Amino Acids: Tainted Evidence?". Astrobiology Magazine.

 ¹¹Kate Melville (Jan. 20, 2011). "More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth". Science A Go Go.

F Cataldo1, J R Brucato and Y Kahayan (Jan. 2005).  "Chirality in prebiotic molecules and the phenomenon of photo- and radioracemization." Soc. Lupi Chemical Research Institute, Via Casilina, Rome, Italy; INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico Capodimonte, Napoli, Italy; Istituto per lo studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati, CNR, Rome, Italy. IOP Science: Journal of Physics, Conference Series (6, 139).

¹²Maggie McKee (Aug. 17, 2009). "Found: first amino acid on comet". NewScientist: Space.

¹³"Amino Acids could be produced within impacting comets, bringing life to earth". Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Public Affairs (Sep. 12, 2010).

¹⁴Aqueous ammonium cyanide is a liquid compound derived from a heated mixture of hydrogen cyanide and ammonia hydroxide (ammonia-water): HCN + NH₃(aq) gives NH₄CN(aq).  —Michael David Rawlings

¹⁵Joan Oró (Sep. 16, 1961). “Mechanism of synthesis of adenine from hydrogen cyanide under possible primitive Earth conditions".  Chemistry Department University of Houston.  Nature: Letters to Nature (191, pgs. 1193-1194).

The reducing atmospheric mixtures used to produce nucleic bases variously consist of methane, nitrogen, hydrogen, ammonia, cyanogen, carbon monoxide and ethane.  —Michael David Rawlings

¹⁶Matthew Levy, Stanley L. Miller and John Oró (Mar. 31, 1999). “Production of Guanine from NH₄CN Polymerizations”. SpringerLink: Journal of Molecular Evolution (Vol. 49, No. 2, pgs. 165-168).

¹⁷Sanchez RA, Ferris JP and Orgel LE (Nov. 11, 1966). "Cyanoacetylene in prebiotic synthesis". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. Science; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (154, 750, pgs. 784-785).

Sanchez RA, Ferris JP and Orgel LE (Dec. 14, 1967). "Studies in prebiotic synthesis: II. Synthesis of purine precursors and amino acids from aqueous hydrogen cyanide". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. Journal of Molecular Biology; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (30, 2, pgs. 223-253).

James P. Ferris, Robert A. Sanchez and Leslie E. Orgel (May 14, 1968). "Studies in periodic synthesis: III. Synthesis of pyrimidines from cyanoacetylene and cyanate". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. ScienceDirect: Journal of Molecular Biology (Vol. 33, Issue 3, pgs. 693-704).

¹⁸César Menor-Salván Dr., Dra. Marta Ruiz-Bermejo, Marcelo I. Guzmán Dr., Susana Osuna-Esteban, Sabino Veintemillas-Verdaguer Dr. (Mar. 13, 2009). "Synthesis of Pyrimidines and Triazines in Ice: Implications for the Prebiotic Chemistry of Nucleobases" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). Centro de Astrobiología, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, Carretera Torrejón-Ajalvir, Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain. Wiley Online Library: Chemistry, A European Journal (Vol. 15; Issue 17; pgs. 4411-4418; April 20, 2009).

¹⁹Michael P. Robertson and Stanley L. Miller (29 June 1995).  "An efficient prebiotic synthesis of cytosine and uracil".  Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California.  Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (375, pgs. 772-774).

²⁰Xanthine is a non-genetic nucleobase that is mostly found in plants and in the tissues, organs and body fluids of human beings and animals.  —Michael David Rawlings

²¹"Did life begin with a meteorite? Scientists discover genetic ingredient for creation of man on rock from space".  The Independent: Science (June 18, 2008).

Zita Martins, Oliver Botta, Marilyn L. Fogel, Mark A. Sephton, Daniel P. Glavin, Jonathan S. Watson, Jason P. Dworkin, Alan W. Schwartz, Pascale Ehrenfreund (June 15, 2008). "Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison Meteorite". Cornell University Library: Earth and Planetary Science Letters (270, pgs. 130-136).

^{22 and 23}James P. Ferris, Robert A. Sanchez and Leslie E. Orgel (May 14, 1968). "Studies in periodic synthesis: III. Synthesis of pyrimidines from cyanoacetylene and cyanate". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. ScienceDirect: Journal of Molecular Biology (Vol. 33, Issue 3, pgs. 693-704).

²⁴Francois Raulin, Suzanne Bloch and Gerard Toupance (April 1977). "Addition reactions of malonic nitriles with alkanethiol in aqueous solution". SpringerLink: Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (Vol. 8, No. 3, pgs. 247-257).

²⁵Robert Shapiro (April 13, 1999). "Prebiotic cytosine synthesis: A critical analysis and implications for the origin of life". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, CA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 96, No. 8, pgs. 4396-4401).

²⁶Edward R. Garrett and Josef Tsau (July 1972). "Solvolyses of cytosine and cytidine". Wiley Online Library: Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Vol. 61, Issue 7, pgs. 1052-1061).

Robert Shapiro and Robert S. Klein (July 1966). "The Deamination of Cytidine and Cytosine by Acidic Buffer Solutions, Mutagenic Implications". ACS Publications: Biochemistry (5, 7, pgs. 2358-2362).

^{27 and 28}Matthew Levy and Stanley L. Miller (July 7, 1998). "The stability of the RNA bases: Implications for the origin of life" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 95, No. 14, pgs. 7933-7938).

²⁹Matthew Levy and Stanley L. Miller. "The stability of the RNA bases: Implications for the origin of life".

³⁰Shapiro R. (June 25, 1995). "The prebiotic role of adenine: a critical analysis." Department of Chemistry, New York University. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (1-3, pgs. 83-98).

³¹The most interesting of the postulated pre-RNA polymers are pyranosly RNA  (pRNA).  —Michael David Rawlings

^32-34Robert Shapiro (1988).  "Prebiotic ribose synthesis: A critical analysis".  SpringerLink:  Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (Vol. 18, Nos. 1-2, pgs. 71-85).

³⁵Robert Shapiro (Mar. 2000).  "A replicator was not involved in the origin of life."  Department of Chemistry, New York University.  IUBMB Life; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (49, 3, pgs. 173-176).

³⁶"How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time". ScienceDaily: Science News (Jan. 10, 2009).

Tracey A. Lincoln and Gerald F. Joyce (Jan. 8, 2009). "Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme". Department of Chemistry, Department of Molecular Biology and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology of The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA. AAAS: Science (Feb. 27, 2009; Vol. 323; No. 5918; pgs. 1229-1232).

³⁷"Scientists Create Tiny RNA Molecule With Big Implications for Life's Origins". ScienceDaily: Science News (Feb. 24, 2010).

Rebecca M. Turka, Nataliya V. Chumachenkob and Michael Yarusa (Jan. 27, 2010). “Multiple translational products from a five-nucleotide ribosome”. Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Feb. 22, 2010).

³⁸"Venter Institute Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome: Team Completes Second Step in Three Step Process to Create Synthetic Organism". J Craig Venter Institute (Jan. 24, 2008).

Daniel G. Gibson, Gwynedd A. Benders, Cynthia Andrews-Pfannkoch, Evgeniya A. Denisova, Holly Baden-Tillson, Jayshree Zaveri, Timothy B. Stockwell, Anushka Brownley, David W. Thomas, Mikkel A. Algire, Chuck Merryman, Lei Young, Vladimir N. Noskov, John I. Glass, J. Craig Venter, Clyde A. Hutchison III and Hamilton O. Smith (Jan. 24, 2008). “Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome”. The J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD. AAAS: Science (Feb. 28, 2008; Vol. 319; No. 5867; pgs. 1215-1220).

"First Self-Replicating, Synthetic Bacterial Cell Constructed by J. Craig Venter Institute Researchers". J Craig Venter Institute (May, 20, 2010).

³⁹The various bait-and-switch schemes of panspermia and exogenesis merely push the problem of origins off to other planets or solar systems.  —Michael David Rawlings

______________________________
Additional Suggested Reading:

Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. (Mar. 2000).  "Why Abiogenesis Is Impossible".  Creation Research Society Quarterly (Vol. 36, No. 4).  The True.Origin Archive:  Exposing the Myth of Evolution (Feb. 2001).

Gordon C. Mills and Dean Kenyon (1996).  "The RNA World:  A Critique".  Department of Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics, University of Texas Medical Branch; Department of Biology, San Francisco State University.  Access Research Network:  Origins and Design Archives (Vol. 17, No. 1).

Gordon C. Mills and Dean Kenyon (1996).  "What do Ribozyme Engineering Experiments Really Tell Us About the Origin of Life?".  Department of Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics, University of Texas Medical Branch; Department of Biology, San Francisco State University. Access Research Network: Origins and Design Archives (Vol. 17, No. 1).

Brian Thomas, M.S. (Feb. 2010).  "Critique of 'Primordial Soup' Vindicates Creation Research".  The Institute of Creation Research.  

Ian Johnston (Oct. 1998).  "Some Non-Scientific Observations on the Importance of Darwin".  Liberal Studies Department, Malaspina-University College.