Sludge In Flask Gives Clues To Origin of Life

sciencehabit writes "In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth."

Why wasn't the experiment ever repeated?

[Locke2005]

I was going to say "How do they know there was no contamination?", but TFA states that equal amounts of right handed and left handed organic molecules were found, ruling out contamination as a source of the amino acids.

Re:No Repeats?

[Mr. Slippery]

I have to wonder why we haven't managed to "create life" yet.

It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[HornWumpus]

Change your rant. Replace 'anyone who believes in a creator God' with 'any creationist' and your rant is 100% true.

Except the babble after because...

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[ShadowRangerRIT]

If you notice, he never said his religious friends. He said his creationist friends. Which can safely be assumed to fall into the raving lunatic bucket you describe.

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[SuricouRaven]

There are several classes of creationists, but when used in such an obviously insulting way it may be assumed to refer to the young-earth creationists. The old-earth creationists have less of an obvious conflict because their claims are in general nonfalsifyable no matter what the evidence, while the young-earthers have to distort the evidence like a bonsai kitten to fit their claims.

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[im_thatoneguy]

Every creationist regardless of religious orientation depends on a logical fallacy to advance their beliefs. Which is essentially a form of lunacy as the OP advanced.

As soon as you reject occum's razor and introduce non-empirical shenanigans every theory is subject to the Spaghetti Monster/Last Tuesday fallacies.

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[shutdown -p now]

Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.

Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.

We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.

Re:Let there be Light

[FiloEleven]

Here's the thing about Genesis chapters 1 and 2: they are poetry. It wasn't meant to be a play-by-play description of How We Got Universe. The most obvious clue is the repetition of "And there was evening, and there was morning, the x day." Scholars I am willing to trust because they know Hebrew say that it's still more obvious in its original tongue.

Too many Christians (led by the institution of the church) and also people in general are ignorant of the different kinds of literature found in the Bible. Psalms and Proverbs and Song of Solomon are pretty obviously song, poetry and...well, proverbs; but there is also history, which includes incidents most of us find far-fetched but also accounts with corroborating evidence from other historical documents. There is also apocalyptic literature, the most famous being Revelation. That, too, was never meant to be taken literally but was more of a sort of pep-rally for the Christians of the time to give them encouragement to persevere knowing that they win in the end. St. John may have also eaten some funny mushrooms.

There is a willful ignorance among many American Christians* that doggedly claims "read it literally!" without consideration for the genre within which a particular piece was written and makes those who practice it into fools. There is a willful ignorance among many opponents of Christianity, and religion in general, who do the same thing.

*I will not speak about trends in other countries because I don't have experience with the Christians in them.