Posted on 02/22/2010 8:13:17 AM PST by Sopater
For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.
"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."
The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can't exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Why not ... bisque, borscht, bouillabaisse, bouillon, broth, chowder, cock-a-leekie, consommé, gazpacho, gumbo, julienne, minestrone, mulligatawny, potage, Scotch broth, or vichyssoise???
Color me not surprised.
For all creationists were mocked, belittled, and derided for not accepting current scientific consensus as truth and fact, they were exonerated in the end.
As expected, this theory goes in the dustbin of obsolete scientific theories while they scrabble to find another one which explains life on earth sans God.
Not so. Sopater is correct.
The challenge that evos always throw in the faces of those who disagree with them is *So, do you have anything better to offer? Then go for it. Until then, this is the best we have and we’re going to stick with it.*
Of course, it’s totally irrelevant that the current theory has holes big enough in it to drive a truck through. They act like we have to stick with it and teach it as fact until something better comes along, and that we can’t say it’s wrong and simply discard it without something to replace it.
Of course you can. You can recognize that something is wrong and still not know what the right answer is.
No soup for you!
The problem with fine-tuning anything... if you are fine tuning the completely wrong station, you will never get what you are looking for.
And all they're doing is demonstrating that it takes intelligence, design, and purpose for life to come into existence, if they actually ever get there.
What's the height of absurdity is that they expect us to believe something happened by accident that they can't make happen on purpose.
>:(
Entropy and Conservation
...it’s the Law!
Indeed. Thanks for the ping!
The energy source and component chemicals, to name a couple. I expect that the underlying processes would have to be different as a result.
More to the point, though.... this new theory may actually be testable at some level, as both the vents and the component chemicals are still in existence.
So, this theory may actually qualify as science?
That’d be nice....
Possibly ... although I note that it adds a few rather interesting puzzles, such as "how did we get to carbon-based organisms from a sulfur-based environment?" Haldane's theory has the advantage of matching an assumed set of ancient chemicals to what we actually see in living organisms.
The new theory would have to come up with some method of transition.
Interesting point.
They’ve been “oh, so close” for “oh, so long”. Alchemy probably has a better chance of finding success than science does of demonstrating abiogenesis.
That's where the "testable" part comes in.
Note that a "null result" would not be definitive, however -- the assumption underlying any test would be that the conditions at the vents are the same now as they were at the supposed beginning of biology; the same difficulty, in other words, that causes problems for Haldane's theory.
Evidence of abiogenesis, OTOH, would be huge.
The difference now being that scientists have begun the process from scratch.... The perceptive will recognize their efforts as a form of Intelligent Design.
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