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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."
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.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.