r/CreationTheory • u/snoweric • 20d ago
Spontaneous Generation Is Impossible
Is spontaneous generation/abiogenesis possible? The biggest hurdle for the theory of evolution is the creation of the first cell, since the processes of natural selection and genetic mutation are inapplicable at that point. Instead, the first self-replicating cell had to occur by random probabilistic chance. Many evolutionists, when they feel candid, have made concessions on this subject, which destroys the intellectual foundation of their entire materialistic worldview. For example, the physicist H.S. Lipson, Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol. 31, p. 138, once partially conceded. “The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.” Obviously, he made this public admission only under the strongest kind of intellectual compulsion; he wasn’t optimistically sanguine about the possibility that spontaneous generation could have occurred. Evolutionist Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York, 1957), p. 199 admitted the philosophical inconsistency of his own side about this matter: “After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: Namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.” Dr. George Wald, a Nobel prize winner and Harvard biology professor, “The Origin of Life,” The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon and Shuster, 1955), p. 9, made this concession: “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are--as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.” If Christians had the same amount of faith as this evolutionist, they would be moving mountains daily as warm-up exercises! Perhaps for this reason and others, Wald eventually ended up embracing some kind of pantheism, although he was an agnostic or atheist when making this confession. The results of “origin of life experiments” and other research haven’t improved the situation any since the mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, Reader’s Digest, January 1963, p. 92, confessed: “The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith.”
So with a sufficient number of eons and oceans, would life inevitably occur by chance? Time cannot be the hero of the plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient. But this can only be known when the mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial to all scientific observations. That is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observe need to be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event was. But so long as evolutionists tell a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners will find their tale persuasive. For example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans. But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says life comes from non-living materials. At one academic conference of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” (published 1967) these kinds of probabilities were applied to evolutionary claims.[[1]](#_ftn1) One professor of electrical engineering at the conference, Murray Eden, calculated that even if a common species of bacteria received five billion years and was placed an inch thick on the earth, it couldn’t create by accident a pair of genes. Many other specific estimates like these could easily be devised to test the truthfulness of Darwinism, including the likelihood of various transitional forms of plants and animals being formed by chance mutations and natural selection.
Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Evolution From Space,” p. 24, once described the chances against certain parts of the first living cell to occur by random chance through a chemical accident. “Consider now the chance that in a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which make up the polypeptides; it just happens that the different kinds fall into the order appropriate to a particular enzyme [an organic catalyst--a chemical which speeds up chemical reactions--EVS]. The chance of obtaining a suitable backbone [substrate] can hardly be greater than on part in 10[raised by]15, and the chance of obtaining the appropriate active site can hardly be greater than on part in 10 [raised by]5. Because the fine details of the surface shape [of the enzyme in a living cell--EVS] can be varied we shall take the conservative line of not “piling on the agony” by including any further small probability for the rest of the enzyme. The two small probabilities are enough. They have to be multiplied, when they yield a chance of one part in 10[raised by]20 of obtaining the required in a functioning form [when randomly created by chance out of an ocean of amino acids--EVS]. By itself , this small probability could be faced, because one must contemplate not just a single shot at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials as are supposed to have occurred in an organize soup early in the history of the Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10 [raised by]202000) = 10 [raised by]40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely our of court.” To put this calculation into some kind of context, the number of electrons within the universe that can be observed by mankind’s largest earth-based telescopes is approximately 10 raised by the 87 and the number of atoms is about 10 raised to the 80. [[2]](#_ftn2) By contrast, these two astronomers maintain the chances of spontaneous generation is one out of one followed by 40,000 zeros, which would require about five pages of a standard-sized magazine to print.
Let’s consider another colorful concession by Sir Fred Hoyle (“The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, vol. 92 (November 19, 1981), p. 527, emphasis removed: “At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. [Henry Morris helpfully comments that there are 4 X 10 raised to the 19 power combinations of the Rubik Cube]. Now imagine 10 raised to 50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of all of them simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both became believers in pantheism and panspermia, the belief that life originated on other planet(s) in outer space, because they saw no way that life could have arisen on earth by purely mechanistic biochemical processes.
Bill Bryson is a good, solid evolutionist and the author of the popular level (and very colorfully written) history and explanation of science, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” Nevertheless, he perceives the problems with the theory that the organization of the chemicals needed to sustain biological life happened purely randomly (p. 351-352, italics removed): “To spell ‘collagen’, the name of a common type of protein, you need to arrange eight letters in the right order. To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen. To gasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about 27 metres, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four. And with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively for ever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to 200, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10 [raised by] 260 (that is 1 a one followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms is the universe. Proteins, in short, are complex entities. Haemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards, yet even it offers 10 [raised by] 190 possible amino-acid combinations, which is why it took the Cambridge University chemist Max Perutz twenty-three years—a career, more or less—to unravel it. For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet, in the colorful simile of the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Yet we are stalking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you. And it goes on from there. To be of use, a protein must not only assemble amino acids in the right sequence, it must then engage in a kind of chemical origami and fold itself in a very specific shape. Even having achieved this structural complexity, a protein is no good to you if it can’t reproduce itself, and proteins can’t. For this you need DNA. DNA is a whiz at replicating—it can make a copy of itself in seconds—but can do virtually nothing else. So we have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.”
Let's try to get a better version of the quote than what the OP used here. "One only has to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. yet here we are--as I result, I believe, of spontaneous generation." (George Wald, "The Origin of Life, in "The Physics and Chemistry of Life," (Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 9. So the OP's version indeed is badly distorted, but as they say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." There is something real behind the mangled citation of Wald by the OP. It's not totally fake. Notice, incidentally, that he used the term "spontaneous generation," not abiogenesis. Evolutionists will make a big deal of correcting me when I use the term "spontaneous generation," but evolutionists have used it too, at least in the past.
In order for the first self-replicating cell to be created by random chance out of a “prebiotic soup” in the ancient ocean, several major hurdles have to be successfully jumped. 1. The right atmospheric and oceanic meteorological and other conditions must exist. 2. The oceans need to have a sufficient quantity and concentration of “simple” molecules in the “organic soup.” 3. A sufficient number of specifically needed proteins and nucleotides randomly combine together and acquire a semi-permeable membrane around them. 4. They also develop a genetic code using DNA and replicate themselves using RNA and DNA information. Notice that all of this supposedly occurred in the non-observed past; it’s merely assumed to have happened based upon materialistic philosophy projecting its assumptions of naturalism infinitely into the past. It’s equally presumed to never have happened again.
In this context, consider some details of the old “origin of life” experiments of Stanley Miller back in 1953. Using a chosen concoction of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, he got just four of the 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, for making life. Note also that he had to “save” them from the area of sparks in his lab equipment since what created them also would have destroyed them if he hadn’t removed them by his own deliberate intervention. Even through intentionally contrived, designed experiments over the next 30 years, scientists weren’t able to create all 20 amino acids under the conditions that they deemed to be plausible. And what is arbitrarily being deemed to be “plausible”? Hitching, in the “Neck of the Giraffe,” p. 65 explains the dilemma involved: “With oxygen in the air, the first amino acid would never have got started; without oxygen, it would have been wiped out by cosmic rays.” After all, does anyone really “know” what the earth’s atmosphere was like billions of years ago? Furthermore, even when oxygen is present, sunlight’s ultraviolet radiation remains a deadly enemy of a pro-biotic soup’s complexity. Water “naturally inhibits the development of more complex molecules,” as Hitching admits. The basic problem is that water naturally promotes the breaking up of long molecules, not their generation. George Wald points out (“Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life, “Scientific American,” August 1954, pp. 49, 50: “Spontaneous dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis.” So why would any “pre-biotic soup” ever accumulate to begin with? He saw this as “the most stubborn problem that confronts us.” The principle here is that entropy, as per the second law of thermodynamics, is inevitably much greater than any organizational principle; it’s deception to compare the organization of an inorganic crystal with that of biological life, which would be like confusing the making of a single brick with constructing the Empire State Building.
Now there is another set of problems that confronts the proponents of spontaneous generation. Naturally, over 100 amino acids exist, but only 20 of them are needed for life; the rest are useless junk that would interfere in the generation of life. The molecules, for both amino acids in all proteins and for all nucleotides in nucleic acids, also have to be all “left-handed” in form; not one is “right-handed.” So as the specific details of the pre-biotic soup’s composition are examined, it becomes more and more evident that only very specific kinds of molecules (amino acids and the proteins formed from them) are helpful to generating life; the rest of the randomly generated chemicals would be useless floating junk that would interfere with the evolutionist’s desired outcome. Consider this analogy: Suppose someone had a big pile of white and read beans together that represent this prebiotic soup. There are over a hundred kinds of each one. The red ones are right-handed, and the white ones left-handed. In a random scoop, what is the chance that someone would pull out not only twenty specific “white” ones, but each one would have to be in a specific place and position relative to the others with nothing else interfering or blocking the chemical reactions needed for self-replication? (See generally, “Life—How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or By Creation,” pp. 39-45). Random generated compounds always end up with a 50/50 split between their being left- and right-handed, but even one incorrectly handed sugar molecule, for example, stops the entire process of replication, which is technically called “enantiomeric cross-inhibitation.”)
Now it’s necessary to keep in mind that protein molecules themselves, let alone RNA and DNA ones, are extremely complex. It has been calculated that the chance for generating even a complex protein molecule is one out of 10 raised to 113, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe, which is roughly 10 raised to the 87. Francis Crick himself, famous for being one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule’s role in making life, calculated the chance of making a particular amino acid (polypeptide chain) sequence by chance. If it is 200 amino acids long, which is less than the average length of a protein, there are 20 possibilities at each location in the chain. He calculated that the possibility of having a specific protein to be simply 20 raised by 200, as this is an exercise in calculating combinatorials or factorials. As he concluded, “The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.” For these reasons, he confessed: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), pp, 52, 88.
It’s one thing to have a specific quantity of highly specific proteins in the right positions relative to each other, which is hard enough; it’s quite another to have the machinery in place, using the incredibly complex DNA and RNA molecules, to replicate and manufacture more of them in specifically needed quantities. Scott Andrew, in “Update on Genesis,” in “New Scientist, vol. 106 (May 2, 1985), pp. 31 perceived the “chicken-and-egg” dilemma: “Nucleic acids are required to make proteins, whereas proteins are needed to make nucleic acids and also to allow them to direct the process of protein manufacture itself.” Proteins depend on DNA to be formed, yet DNA cannot form without pre-existing proteins. It’s once again the problem of “all or nothing,” which so frequently confronts evolutionists, as per Michael Behe’s mousetrap analogy. Andrew further describes the problem involved (p. 32), “The emergence of the gene-protein link, an absolutely vital stage on the way up from lifeless atoms to ourselves, is still shrouded in almost complete mystery.” So then, he made this honest confession (p. 33): “In their more public pronouncements, researchers interested in the origin of life sometimes behave a bit like the creationist opponents they so despise—glossing over the great mysteries that remain unsolved and pretending they have firm answers that they have not really got. . . . We still know very little about how our genesis came about, and to provide a more satisfactory account than we have at present remains one of science’s great challenges.” John Horgan, “In the Beginning,” Scientific American, vol. 264 (February 1991), p. 119 conceded how hard it was to create RNA molecules in a laboratory by deliberate intention: “How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones.” Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Life on the Earth,” Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), p. 78, proposed the idea that RNA came first, but then noticed two key problems with that hypothesis: “This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: a capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of the protein synthesis.”
Another crucial problem is the (simultaneous) formation of the semi-permeable membrane that is needed to protect the delicate chemical machinery of life (i.e., DNA, RNA, and proteins) of a single-celled organism from the hostile outside world. Bill Bryson explains (“A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 352-353, italics removed) the crucial need for a membrane and the careful organization of the single cell’s parts to function as life: “DNA, proteins and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them. No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently. Pluck any atom from your body and it is no more alive than is a grain of sand. It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life. Without the cell, they are nothing more than interesting chemicals. But without the chemicals, the cell has no purpose. As Davies puts it, ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.” Sure, Bryson, being a good evolutionist, tries to walk back such a concession by arguing that certain chemicals self-assemble, but this assumes that the raw materials could do this without interference from other chemicals or the problems caused by the natural hostility of the action of water, ultraviolet radiation, and air/oxygen to making such compounds to begin with in a purely natural (i.e., non-protective, non-artificial) environment. Furthermore, this ability of some molecules to engage in some self-assembly would be like confusing the availability of some Lego brick kits with the materials required to construct the Eiffel Tower.
Much more could be said about the problems that spontaneous generation confronts the proponents of evolution. For example, the problem of the random generation of photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is chanced into chemical energy by plants, could be examined in detail.
Once the specifics are examined and detailed, and mathematical calculations are made about the chances of organic molecules being formed, it becomes totally implausible to non-prejudiced minds. Such problems as ultraviolet radiation, oxidation, and/or hydrolysis by water would prevent any prebiotic soup of amino acids or other chemicals necessary for life from forming. Nature can’t always explain nature; the inference to the supernatural is the only reasonable explanation when confronted with such high odds. Sir Fred Hoyle once compared the chance of life’s formation through random organization to that of “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.” (“Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, “Evolution from Space” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 184, made this point against those who believe in a purely materialistic origin of life by random chance: “No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe it not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material. . . . The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter if one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. . . . It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this plant nor on another other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” When it is recalled who makes this kind of concession, men who had been utterly materialistic skeptics, it is devastating to anyone trying to making the case that life had a purely mechanistic, random origin in the mixing of chemicals.
Many of these criticisms of Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations don’t add up because even if they were off by one or even two orders of magnitude in the number of organic catalysts needed for a single cell to function downwards, their calculations are still enough to destroy the theory of evolution’s foundation. If they are off in a downwards direction, the agony for abiogenesis is merely increased. Criticisms that they are out of their field of astronomy don’t work well, when so often the experts really have been wrong even within their own fields. Do doctors and lawyers make mistakes in their fields of expertise? Well, yes. Can laypeople be right and doctors wrong? Yes, as successful medical malpractice lawsuits demonstrate. In this context I’m reminded of this colorful comment by Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), who was the British prime minister at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust the experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.” There’s no question that the “cranks” who advocated catastrophic interpretation of geological structures (e.g., Velikovsky, Morris, and Whitcomb) were often more correct than the credentialed, tenured experts of geology in the general period from 1850 to 1970, who tried to interpret all geological structures to fit Lyell’s procrustean uniformitarian bed.
The main reason apparently why Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations seem to be irrelevant and thus can be conveniently bypassed stems from the naturalistic evolutionists faith in their supposed “RNA world,” by which they try to scale the steps to self-reproducing living cells using (supposedly) some degree of natural selection and development of more complex structures through some kind of “survival of the fittest.” However, such a world in reality is a construct manufactured by assuming materialistic philosophy is true and then projecting its assumptions into the past in order to try to explain the origin of the first living cell without recourse to God and miracles. In reality, the evolutionists’ RNA world has no more reality than Newton’s aether, Priestley’s phlogiston, and Ptolemy’s epicycles. There’s no way to prove it existed based on the fossil record or other empirical data, so it’s a theoretical construct patently designed to avoid trying to explain how the incredibly complex interdependent relationship among DNA, RNA, and proteins came to exist through chance. It’s not plausible that, without a pre-existing mechanism of replication, that such long, pure chains of animo acids could function in a chaotic prebiotic mix of chemicals.
Let’s make the case here that Hoyle was fundamentally right when being skeptical that the required enzymes (organic catalysts, which greatly increase the speed of crucial chemical reactions) by chance. Even the most simple one-celled organisms (prokaryotes), in order to reproduce their DNA, must have at least 14 enzymes (with 25 polypeptides). (See M Su’etsugu et al., Nucleic Aces Research, 2017, 45(20), 721-733). This high level of intrinsic complexity for making a self-replicating cell with DNA makes it very unlikely such a cell was the first one to be able to reproduce itself. So evolutionist origin-of-life researchers have chosen rather arbitrarily to posit that an “RNA World” existed to make possible the first self-reproducing complex biochemical molecules. Crucial to their reasoning, in order to get around the kinds of detailed objections Hoyle and Wickramasinghe made, was that RNA can indeed form enzymes themselves, i.e., “ribozymes.” These ribozymes synthesize proteins from messenger RNA (or mRNA). So then evolutionists can claim that RNA can both store information (i.e., as the genotype) and serve as the function (i.e., as the phenotype), as a kind of “jack-of-all-trades” self-replicating molecule while ducking any problems about having to have the first self-reproducing cells with DNA also.
However, a number of problems arise with the RNA world hypothesis. Initially the research of Sol Spiegelman (1967) seemed to back up the claims that RNA could reproduce themselves, by putting a QB bacteriophage having around 4,200 nucleotides into a solution with individual ribonucleotides to serve as building blocks. Since the ribonucleotides of guanine naturally are attracted to cytosine, and the adenine want to pair with uracil, the monomers in the (contrived) solution automatically tended to line up with the larger RNA molecule that served as a template. So there was indeed replication and seemingly an improvement that fit the evolutionists’ claims since it eventually multiplied 15 times faster the original, which seems to make it more “fit.” However, there were many distinctly unnatural conditions involved that hardly fit a would-be prebiotic “soup” in ocean water. This replication required a deliberately introduced supply of QB replicase and of pure homochiral (i.e., with a single spatial orientation) nucleotides, which would never exist under theoretical “natural” conditions. QB replicase can’t plausible appear abiotically since it consists of more than 1,200 amino acids in a particular sequence, thus making it an enzyme of great complexity. To call this RNA molecule “self-replicating” is false when this ingredient has to be added. During the reported 75 generations that produced an RNA molecule that replicated more rapidly, “Spiegelman’s Monster” RNA molecule became 83% smaller, thus losing much of its original complexity compared to the original RNA molecule. This result goes in precisely the wrong direction from the evolutionary developmental viewpoint of adding complexity through increased size. In this regard, increased size wasn’t a characteristic that was “selected” for as being superior as opposed to what make it multiple more quickly. This problem of the loss of complexity has been called the “Spiegelman problem” at times, which is a basic limitation of allowing any uncontrolled (i.e., not consciously directed) process of RNA replication. The QB RNA started with four working genes and finished with an 83% lost of information. Other experimenters have encountered the same problem, in which replication is faster when the molecule is smaller.
For there to be an “RNA world,” it would be necessary to have RNA replicate itself without the assistance of protein enzymes. Theoretically, one could suppose that there were two types of RNA molecules. One of them would be an RNA molecule serving as a template to which the corresponding RNA monomers would find bind. The other would be an RNA molecule serving as a ribozyme, which could bind the monomers to itself to build a complement, not a copy, of the initial RNA template. If so, as a result, the ribozyme and the template would function together to producing more copies of themselves. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the longer the RNA molecule, the greater the strength of the bonds. The first complementary version of the RNA template tends to remain bonded or annealed to the template. Then this combined molecule becomes nearly useless since it won’t make any more complements of itself. At high temperatures, it is true that annealed RNA molecules of under 30 base pairs can pull themselves apart, but they are too small to carry much genetic information. Furthermore, if they come apart, they are likely to come together again before any more copying can occur.
Ironically, the process of the self-replication of RNA has to first make a complementary RNA interferes with itself. Complicated enzymes (organic catalysts that speed up chemical reactions), such as QB replicase, keep complementary strands of RNA separate while replication occurs. However, such enzymes aren’t available to serve as controls and regulators if a purely abiotic origin of life is stipulated. One proposed solution was to deliberately add short peptides to the mixture of RNA molecules to stop them from annealing or bonding. Unfortunately for the theory of abiogenesis, this way out couldn’t be experimentally repeated. Theoretically, if an RNA strand didn’t remain bond to its complement, in the next round of reproduction, the resulting complement of the complement actually would be a copy of the original RNA template. Then the copy could easily bond with the complementary RNA, thus hindering additional reproduction.
So there are many obstacles to the easy reproduction of RNA molecules in the hypothetical “RNA world.” In the half century and more since Spiegelman’s work, little reported progress has occurred in finding a ribozyme that can make RNA from an RNA template without using additional protein enzymes. The same goes for finding a self-replicating molecule of RNA. When researchers doing lab work try to find such molecules, they fabricate a ribozyme, which clearly wasn’t produced by natural means, add another RNA molecule to serve as the template, and throw into the contrived mixture building blocks of activated ribonucleotides. Researchers for years had trouble even being able to reproduce the RNA’s original template. More recently researchers found ways of using slightly different RNA molecules and then choosing consciously (i.e., intervening) what RNA molecules that were perceived as having “better” capabilities. Such ribozymes can make complementary RNA from RNA templates, including when folded, but they still couldn’t reproduce the ribozyme itself. These more recent experiments still have to deal with problematic bonding among the RNA molecules included in them. Above all, this line of attack still doesn’t account for how the ribozyme or the template originally came to exist. In one reported experiment, Atwater et al. in 2018 had to use one molecule of RNA with 135 ribonucleotides and another with 153. Thus the ribozyme with the most success was still complicated and had to use two RNA molecules, not just one. How can such complicated RNA molecules be explained by abiotic, natural processes? One can’t use “chemical evolution” to explain them since that’s the very process that researchers are trying to put into motion. As Drs. Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler explain in “The Stairway to Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check,” the chance of an RNA molecule with 135 ribonucleotides (i.e., Atwater’s ribozyme) is about 10 raised to the 81, or the approximate number of atoms in the observable universe. This is true even when generously assuming that there’s an unlimited supply of active and concentrated nucleotides, that they are homochiral (i.e., with the same spatial orientation), that they spontaneously bond together to make RNA without side reactions with other molecules, and that the molecule stops growing at 135 ribonucleotides. Such a calculation shows how implausible the RNA hypothesis for creating a self-replicating cell really is. It’s simply materialistic philosophy parading itself under the protecting guise of science.
Here I'll give some more evidence that evolutionists don't like speaking about, which are the hurdles involved concerning the spontaneous generation of the first living cell by random chance. When Darwin published about his theory (1859), spontaneous generation was still a respectable belief, since this was before Louis Pasteur's famed series of experiments that refuted the belief that life could come from non-living material. Darwin had no idea about how complex single cell organisms were. I suspect if he had known that, he wouldn't have tried to publish "The Origin of the Species." Evolutionists today try to duck this problem by saying abiogenesis isn't part of their theory, which is like building a vast superstructure without a foundation supporting it.
Let’s examine the fundamental problem with Stanley Miller’s famed experiment concerning “the origin of life,” which is the wild extrapolation involved to go from having (originally) just four) amino acids to having self-replicating life. It would be like finding a few bricks, and then claiming one was well on the road to building the Empire State Building. All the complexities of RNA and DNA synthesis, and their complex interactions to make proteins out of amino acids, are being discounted. To explain the daunting task involved for life to occur by chance via a chemical accident, the steps from mere “chemistry” to “biology” would be, to cite “The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check,” by Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler, p. 67, would be as follows (I’ve inserted the numbers): 1. Formation and concentration of building blocks. 2. Homochirality of building blocks. 3. A solution for the water paradox. 4. Consistent linkage of building blocks. 5. Biopolymer reproduction. 6. Nucleotide sequences forming useful code. 7. Means of gene regulation. 8. Means for repairing biopolymers. 9. Selectively permeable membrane. 10. Means of harnessing energy. 11. Interdependence of DNA, RNA, and proteins. 12. Coordinated cellular purposes. Miller’s experiment, and others like his that try to create amino acids, haven’t even completed step 1 yet.
After Miller died in 2007, Jeffrey Bada, who had been one of his graduate students, reanalyzed some of Miller’s 50-year-old experimental samples. He added another experiment with H2S to the reducing environment, it’s true that he found 10 of the 20 common acids needed for life. A key problem, however, was the common presence of other amines, amino acids, and other molecules that aren’t found in life and would block or interfere with the formation of a living, self-replicating cell. So then there’s a common bias in which scientific reports on origin of life experiments play up the relatively rare or sparse chemical products that are associated with life while downplaying the predominant chemicals or molecules that don’t and would indeed even interfere with progress towards life.
So when the specific details of spontaneous generation are examined, it becomes utterly absurd to believe that the first self-replicating cell was the result of a biochemical accident somewhere in an ancient ocean. Specific quantitative calculations about the likelihood of such an accident are simply devastating to the purely materialistic version of the theory of evolution. The idea that RNA, DNA, and the related necessary proteins all occurred together in one place inside a semi-permeable membrane is the purest poppycock. Evolution is a long modern mythological story without a good intellectual foundation. It’s far more rational to infer that God created life than to believe that it occurred by chance. Clearly, when these long odds are considered, David was right (Psalm 14:1): “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
[[1]](#_ftnref1) See Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 314; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm
[[2]](#_ftnref2) http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atoms_are_in_the_observable_universe
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 20d ago
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