New Origin of Life Hypothesis Fails Despite Invoking Meteorites and Warm Little Ponds

Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

While Charles Darwin's idea of a warm little pond has been discarded several times, it has recently made a comeback. This time it is combined to meteorite strikes, another contentious hypothesis.

A report issues by McMaster's University has the gist of what they believe could havehappened:

”The spark of life, the authors say, was the creation of RNA polymers: the essential components of nucleotides, delivered by meteorites, reaching sufficient concentrations in pond water and bonding together as water levels fell and rose through cycles of precipitation, evaporation and drainage. The combination of wet and dry conditions was necessary for bonding, the paper says.”

The number of logic-defying gaps in this hypothesis is no smaller than in previous ones, for instance in the ones featuring hypothermal vents or things like that.

The heat produced by meteorite impacts would almost certainly destroyed all incipient building blocks of life and the lack of any ozone would have killed of anything that could have survived.

In other words, even the latest scenario is a total disastre. It could not have produced life.

Source:

Hemsworth, Wade. 2017. Meteorites may have brought building blocks of life to Earth.McMaster University (2 October).

Goodbye, Primordial Soup!

New research moves the origin of life deeper into the oceans. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Charles Darwin dreamt of a warm little pond, hoping that it would somehow cause the very first cell to come into being. Although evolutionists were fascinated by the idea, they were unable to find support for it.

When it became obvious that life could not begin in a warm little pond, scientists toyed with the idea of moving its genesis into deeper waters. In 1929, J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist known for the dilemma named after him, proposed the now discarded model. He suggested that UV radiation caused methane, ammonium and water to produce the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth.

A fresh study published in BioEssays suggests that it’s time to bury this idea. Lead author Nick Lane of University College London says that this old textbook explanation simply does not work.

Primordial soup is unable to produce life since much more than water is needed.

For supporters of evolution, the problem is by no means insignificant. If evolution is unable to begin, how on earth – or even elsewhere – can it proceed? The new study replaces primordial soup with a deep-sea hydrothermal vent.

However, even this hypothesis is as speculative as Darwin’s original dream. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) already experimentally disproved the idea that life could come from inanimate matter. In other words, there is no such thing as spontaneous generation. While theorists might use the term abiogenesis instead, the same problem is as relevant as ever.

Source:

New Research Rejects 80-Year Theory of 'Primordial Soup' as the Origin of Life. ScienceDaily. 3 February 2010. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100202101245.htm