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Primordial Soup: Interview with Stanley Miller
An anonymous reader writes "Stanley Miller's classic 'primordial soup' experiments showed that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask. For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan
called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'"
Education should provoke thought. Just training kids to pass tests is of no value. What you did, analysing your results and thinking about _why_ you got them shows far more 'talent' than someone who just repeated an experiment that is guaranteed to give good results.
Sigh! Rant over. It is just crushing to see very little evidence of people designing their science lessons to impart the ability to think, like the guy who wrote Clouds in a Glass of Beer did.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
The significant thing is that Miller was able to produce amino acids in the first place. leonbrooks is using the classic fundamentalist creationist tactic of taking a scientific success and portraying it as a failure because the experiment did not meet 100% of the artificial requirements that he has generated for it.
:-)
This is the same thought process that causes them to say "Evolution can't possibly be true because there is a missing link between species A and species C," and then when species B is discovered, they say "Aha! Now you have even bigger problems, because there is no link between A and B, and B and C!"
"Contact" [geocities.com] gave him a little recognition only because the movie was made believable (and bias I might add)
What? Are you suggesting that the movie Contact, which was a fun movie, but also new age UFO-cult pop drivel, led to Carl Sagan being more respected among SCIENTISTS?
Contact was BIASED? It's a work of fiction! What shortcomings of impartiality did you detect?
Most TRUELY academic scientists will tell you there seems to be "some" evidence of a creator
Well, Carl Sagan, it is true, is not as highly regarded for his own, unique, scientific contributions as one might believe watching PBS.
However, he had mountains of respect compared to anyone who pointed to anything specific and said it was evidence for the existence of a creator. It is perfectly well regarded in respected circles to quote Einstein "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists", particularly if you are being harassed by religious nuts about your own beliefs - volunteering such sentiments in a TRUELY ACADEMIC setting is the mark of a crackpot, however.
To say that any particular observed phenomenon is evidence, however indirect or minor, of some sort of supernatural providence which exceeds our capacity to understand is the mark of a TRUELY desperate religious nut - not a TRUELY academic scientist.
Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds.
I'm a bioinformatician - you may be attempting to communicate something valid, but what you say is nonsense. If your odds of getting picked in a lotterry are one in a million, and you enter the loterry once, you have a one in a million chance of winning the loterry. If you have to enter the single, right loterry, and there are a million of them, the odds are one in a trillion (a million squared.) In any case, not "incalculable."
If you enter the loterry every day for a billion years and have a chance of winning each time, even vanishingly small odds
Furthermore, while it is true that the odds of life arising around any given star may be extremely small, even over a billion year timespan - Sagan's point remains valid, there are about a SEXTILLION (that's ten ^ 21) stars in known universe.
The reason that we don't have enough information to calculate the odds of life arising on an earth-like planet is because we don't have enough information. The one earth-like planet we observe, the Earth, has life on it, but we're here, so our single observation is hopelessly biased.
On the other hand - unless they are "TRUELY academic" - most scientists feel that life arose as a purely chemical process, from chemical laws which were the same at that time as they are today.
Now, we don't yet know all of the steps that need to occur in order for life to arise. However, even given our broad ignorance, we can conclude that you need organic monomers of some kind (assuming organic life such as ours - an entirely seperate question) is Step 1.
Whatever the probability of success of steps 2...n, the more likely you are to succeed at Step 1, the more likely the entire process is to succeed.
Stanley Miller showed that there conditions, conditions not inconceivable on a young, earthlike planet, under which the formation of these molecular monomers is highly likely.
Therefore, the entire series of steps becomes more likely. Groundbreaking work.
Not a single scientists has been able to prove 100% that life exists elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.
Entirely true. We may very well be alone in the universe. However, our best estimate is that we are not. Conjecture, yes, propoganda - only in so far as all scientific endeavor is propoganda against superstitious beliefs.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The production of amino acids on the early earth is neccessary for spontaneous generation, but amino acids are extremely simple compared to proteins and cellular structures. One would expect amino acids whether the spontaneous generation of life happened or not.
Saying that the existance of amino acids on an early earth proves spontaneous generation is almost like saying the existance of carbon and water on a planet proves the existance of life on that planet. Inconclusive!
David Pesta
B.S. Biochemistry
Okay then, please set out the creationist position in terms we simple atheists can understand. please try and avoid circular arguments.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
That article could have just as easily said,
But it didn't. Evolutionists don't argue like that. They don't need to, because they have evidence. That's the point.
In the last 50 years many, many scientific discoveries have been made that invalidate the Miller experiment. For instance, studies performed by NASA in the 1980's pertaining to the composition of ancient Earth's atmosphere debunk the Miller experiment's hypothesis that the atmosphere was composed largely of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. They found that the atmospheric composition was dominated by nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with very little of Miller's hand-picked concoction present.
The Miller experiment will go down in history as another irrational jump to conclusions based on a less-than-adequate scientific understanding to promote certain political needs in the scientific community in an attempt to prove macroevolution. I suspect that the only reason it's still promoted is political. It certainly isn't because it's good science. Decry the "nit-picking" all you wish, but the truth of the matter is that Miller's experiment, albeit revolutionary for the 1950's, is far from what modern science would ascribe as (1) reflective of the conditions of primeval earth and (2) extremely unlikely to occur even in the best of circumstances in the wild.
> From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.
No, the existence of iron ore shows otherwise. It precipitated out of the seas when oxygen started building up in the atmosphere; in an oxydizing atmosphere there could never have been enough iron in the oceans to for the massive deposits we actually find.
BTW, I learned this a while back by spending a very little time with google. Make sure you're not getting all your "facts" from creationist Web sites.
> Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?
Out of my league, so I'll let someone else answer.
Though of course an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.
> Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.
One hypothesis is that the earliest life formed by polymerization on a quasi-crystaline base such as clay, which could show a preference to one orientation over the other.
Another hypothesis is that both orientations were once used by life forms, but that the luck of the draw meant one crowded the other out. (You get that kind of thing in hereditary systems; a long time ago Scientific American had an interesting article about how surnames dissappear from populations over time due to differential breeding rates and essentially random factors.)
> So it seems to me that what Miller demonstrated is that creating amino acids requires an intelligent mind controlling the process.
Ignoring the problems with the claims you base that conclusion on, that is a major non sequitur. It is tantamount to saying "I rolled my car over yesterday, proving that cars can't be rolled over due to natural causes."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive. People can use it as a theoretical model to understand a lot of things, but I have kept my eyes on too many of the details to say it can be said true for sure.
Please list some of the details that you think cast doubt on it, along with some insightful comments that will let us know whether you're talking about something you understand instead of just quoting creationist Web sites.
> So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.
non sequitur
> (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)
God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.
> Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post.
Providing supporting details is outside the scope of creationism altogether.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is true. and no one is saying that amino acids jumped up and formed life the second there were enough to matter. Life took time to form, a LOT of time.
I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.
Life doesn't "just happen". It takes the right ingredients, energy and time. Possibly millions of years of time.
The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life
No, it's not. Oxygen is a poison. Life has adapted to the presense of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen activley destroys the basic building blocks of life when not protected.
but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.
And we never will on Earth. The atmosphere is all wrong for it. And we will have to wait a long time to see it. It's not like waiting for your cheese to get moldy.
This can't even be done in the laboratory.
For the reasons listed above. And creating life is a hell of a lot more complex than just creating amino acids. In the steps to creating life, this is on the same level as buying one adjustable wrench in the construction of the Empire State Building.
It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
Really? How? Life is not a closed system. It requires energy from an outside source. The Sun provides the power that lets life go on.
I don't believe in spontaneous generation. The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.
All you need is a positive non-zero probablity for something to eventually happen. We have no idea how amny times life almost formed and then died before it finally succeeded. Even with one chance in one-hundred million, if you have millions, and maybe billions of years for something to happen, it just might. And it only has to succede once.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.