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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.'"
It hardly needs saying, but in a week I didn't make any amino acids I could detect. Nevertheless, I ended up getting a shockingly high mark because I'd written up every possible reason I could think of for the experiment failing: not enough time, not enough interaction between liquid and gas, not enough energy from the light, test wasn't sensitive enough, Miller had faked his results (ha!), etc. I was disappointed in the results, but pretty happy with my mark. :-)
Carousel is a lie!
For two years, I bugged my Biology teachers to let my try the Miller experiment with the school's equipment. (Of course, I was the same one who wanted them to let me make a gauss rifle, a betatron, and potato gun...)
I remember being fascinated when I first heard of the experiment. It seemed so 'important,' despite the fact that they brushed right over it and no one else in my classes understood or cared.
Of course, now I'm in college, and I can try all of these things with my own equipment.
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...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?
Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You're whining that the odds are too big, but it's guys like Stanley Miller that are trying to figure out exactly how big those odds are.
You might want to actually provide some facts as to why Carl Sagan was wrong, rather than make an ad hominem attack. Most truly academic scientists generally take a bit more convincing than just being told that, "The guy was an asshole, so he must be wrong."
As a student of Biological Anthropology, I have had the oppertunity to take a history of biological anthropology in which Miller was mentioned. Interesting guy, but the theory is not supported any more except by the few staunchest researchers. In other words, this is pop science. It survives in text books (like many other evolutionary inaccuracies that nobody seems to be willing to update). In truth, the experiment did not conclude much. In short, the amino acid theory in reality did not produce very much at all. Still, Miller dared to try it, which is a feat in itself. Update those textbooks! Include him in the history section, but his theory is not much good anymore.
the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos
I hate to disappoint you but you will not be drinking coffee with some green men anytime soon. I guess this story will be a classical debate between creationists and evolutionists, personally I think God made this vast universe as a gigantic theatre for us to perform. why waste all that space you may ask? a simple quick answer is because he can, when you examine how beautiful and enormous this universe you should conclude how mighty and great is the creator. And another thing if we are simply a product of some physical phenomena why are we concise? why are we self-aware ? and why there is no other life form which is radically different from us (for example not carbon based)? We me be able to clone a human, or genetically alter a creature to create a new species but we certainly can't give life to something dead. I challenge anyone to explain to me why we die? if you took a cell from the brain of a dying person, and from his heart, lung, and every organ you can sustain them way after the original person dies so what made his/her system shutdown globally? and for the atheist masses out there YES we have soul and I cant prove it as much as you cant prove the opposite.
I strongly feel that there are many planets harboring life in the galaxy. Consider this: what are the planets that we can directly observe to test for life? Clearly only those in the solar system. What have we found? It is thought to be a significant possibility that Mars had primitive life at some point in the past. Of course, the earth itself must be discounted because of the anthropic principle: if there weren't life on earth we wouldn't be around to ask the question. So out of a single observable planetary system we find one planet with the possibility of life. While this isn't statistically significant, it does makes it very unlikely that we are the only planet with life on it.
I'm more Christian than chemist, I'm afraid, but I'd thought that Miller's experiments were among the easier targets for creationists to dismiss. While Miller's experiments may yet offer clues for life's origin, later research demonstrates without question that the origin problem is much more complex than pop scientists like Sagan seemed to believe.
If life is that common, where is everybody?
This is the experiment I use to argue with creationists. They always say where did life come from and I point them towards this.
THe thing with creationists is that they are always forcing evolutionists to defend their theory and if they can't they use the god by default argument which is basically if you can't explain something, there must be a god. Thats the sort of reasoning that the indigineous cultures used.
Next time you are talking to a creationist, make them defend there belief. Aks them where god came from or something similar.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
been run for? I mean, has anyone set up a big tank o' goo, shocked it and shone uv light in it for several years, to see what develops? COuld life actually evolve(theoretically, i know statisticlly, it wont happen) in such a circumstance?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
So, the chances are actually incalculable. 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. Then you have the odds of actually claiming your prize and meeting the eligibility/legitimacy of the prize.
;)
Odd. I could swear that there are people who've actually won the lottery... a couple hundred in America, I wager, which puts them at just about 1 in a million.
Statistic impossibilities mean "don't plan on it happening to you," not "it'll never happen to anyone."
For more information on Miller and prebiotic Earth, here is a quotation from an Angew. Chem. review article by Kay Severin called Hot Stones or Cold Soup? New Investigations on the Endogenous Origin of Organic Compounds on Earth (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed 2000, 39, No. 20). It pretty much sums up the Miller reactions, why they're wrong, and what people think now:
... was carried out almost fifty years ago by Stanley L. Miller, at that time a PhD student in the group of Harold Urey in Chicago. Miller was able to show that electric discharges in an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water led to the formation of significant amounts of various amino acids. Experiments of this kind were repeated in numerous variants. If reducing gases were employed mixtures of organic compounds of low molecular weight could be detected in many cases. This has led to the popular idea that the primordial ocean resembled a nutritious soup.
"The most famous experiment
"But the possibility that earth once had a reducing atmosphere is questioned. A well known argument against it is the high photolability of methane and ammonia. Because a shielding layer of ozone was missing a high concentration of these gases is believed to be unlikely. Furthermore, several other results point to a neutral atmosphere of CO2 and N2. Given the fact that the atmosphere was based on an unproductive mixture of CO2 and N2 the nutritional value of the primordial ocean drops significantly.
"An alternative scenario has been propagated for several years by [Gunter] Wachterhauser. Instead of a primordial soup he favors hot minerals as the place where organic molecules were initially built as life subsequently emerged. Especially sulfur-containing minerals like pyrite are proposed to have acted as an energy source and catalyst both under the extreme conditions found in hydrothermal or volcanic vents."
Basically, primordial soup syntheses (like Miller's reactions) are out and hot rock syntheses are in. These hot rock procedures have much much much lower yields, but people are slowly figuring out how to build amino acids through them. For instance, people, headed by Wachterhauser, have figured out how to carbon fixate (condense) carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into organic building blocks for amino acids. For instance, in early 2000, Chen and Bahnemann were able to convert CO2 and water to small organics (acetaldehyde, ethanol, acetic acid) at high pressures and temperatures. Similarly, people have figured out how to take amino acids and convert them into peptides under high temperature and pressure situations.
However, to date no one has been able to actually make an amino acid through these techniques. As a result, the proof that amino acids were delivered by comets or meteorites (true fact, this is not an x-file) and now space dust, becomes much more appealing. Once the building blocks arrived on Earth, these hot rock syntheses could have taken over.
> > No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
> Are you sure that's all they are saying? The slashdot article said, "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.'" It looks like they are going much further than saying "amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
I don't see the word "proves" anywhere in that quote. And the fact that the major building blocks of life AWKI can be built from lifeless matter is exactly what convinces most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.
Science works under the assumption that nature behaves the same elsewhere as it does here, so it follows that in a big universe, interesting stuff that happens here will also happen elsewhere, with high probability.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.
Most of us actually think that it happens as a result of the laws of the universe that give us interesting stuff like gravity and chemistry, which draw atoms together in large masses and do interesting things with them.
> The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.
Our present atmosphere would immediately oxidize any primitive precursor to life. (And if the atmosphere happened to miss it, existing life would eat it.)
> This can't even be done in the laboratory.
Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.
> It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
You have no clue what the 2LoT says.
> I don't believe in spontaneous generation.
Neither do scientist. Though I suspect you actually meant to say "abiogenesis", which is something else altogether, and which both scientists and creationists believe in (their only dispute being over the mechanism).
> The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.
And we've got a beyond-astronomical universe full of places to roll the dice.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's unlikely that anybody will every create a life form by a Miller-type experiment, unless the probablility of life forming spontaneously is far greater than even the most enthusiastic proponents imagine. Moreover, it might be very hard to recognize a primodial life form. You could have one of Stuart Kauffman's sets of reciprocally catalyzing polymers (Stuart A Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution) or one of Cairns-Smith's replicating clay layers (A. G. Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life) in your soup and not even know it. And those are just the ideas that people have thought about.
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.
Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.
The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.
For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B. With all the dice rolling and obvious failures along the way, one would expect to find a whole lot of these, no?
And, the earth has not had an infinite amount of time to roll the dice. It is of finite age. Recent work shows the earth as 5 billion years old, not counting for the time it required to cool. Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago. This is not enough time to go from scratch to our planet's situation today. Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
> Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.
Errr, you can simulate all of those. Go to a steel mill and what steel being made. There's a thin layer of crust on most cooling steel that breaks apart and comes together. Look at the convection of any really thick liquid. You'll notice that some parts push fresh liquid to the surface (i.e. volcanoes) and some parts push it down (fault lines). You can also similar cold fronts using these liquids.
And if our present atmosphere can oxidize life instantly, why didn't it before? If there was no water before, no oxygen, and no ozone to protect simple protiens from being destroyed, how could life possibly form?
I'm not saying that it's impossible (as an agnostic, I know I don't think it's possible to know), but I am saying is that Miller's Experiment says nothing about how life formed on earth.
I call shenanigans. Name one such citation.