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."

Comments

Re:Who will all just plug their ears

[causality]

1. Lightning zaps a volcano

2. Wait X [m/b]illion years

3. ...

4. Profit

And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]

Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.

Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. 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. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?

Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.