Miller-Urey and the origin of life

User avatar
jonperry
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:00 pm
Location: Corvallis Oregon
Contact:

Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Thu Oct 29, 2015 1:03 am

The Miller-Urey experiment is the famous life-origins experiment done in 1953. It produced amino acids from simple starting chemicals. It was a huge deal at the time and is now found in most bio-text books high school and up.

If you talk to a Creationist/ID guy like Stephen C. Meyer, they will often try to tell you that the Miller-Urey Experiment was a total failure. If you talk to an angry atheist in an anonymous online forum, they'll often try to tell you that the Miller-Urey experiment solved the mystery of the origin of life.

To learn what the experiment actually accomplished, check out this new Stated Clearly animation: http://statedclearly.com/videos/what-wa ... experiment

User avatar
jonperry
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:00 pm
Location: Corvallis Oregon
Contact:

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Thu Oct 29, 2015 5:52 am

Dizerner, as I was answering your questions it looks like your post got deleted somehow. Haha, now I look like I'm talking to myself. Luckily I pulled quotes from you before your post was taken down:
Have more experiments been done like this and why not?
As mentioned in the animation, many experiments have since been done and new ones are still being done. In the 50s and 60s, lots of amino acid producing experiments were played with. Scientists were testing different atmospheres and environments to make sure all bases were covered. If you look in the notes under our video you'll find links to papers describing a few of those experiments. The photos of scientists at the end are photos of a few of the actual scientists doing work today. They are no longer testing amino acid formation, that puzzle is long solved. they are now looking at higher level questions as I'll explain below.
Do they understand the exact chemical processes that lead to the formations?
Yes! We now know the exact play-by-play reactions that produce bio-molecules! The reaction shown in my animation (inside the Miller-Urey brown water) is called the Strecker Synthesis. The animation actually shows it work the way it does in real life. It was a lot of work to make sure we got it right but we were working with a NASA chemist so we figured we'd go all out for unnecessary realism :D

Research has shown that strecker synthesis is responsible for amino acid formation in lightning simulations as well as in asteroid simulations.
What role would amino acids even play in a continued evolution?
Amino acids are the building-blocks of life.

NASA chemists refer to questions about biological building-block formation/sorting as "Type 1 questions".

There are a few groups of biological building-block molecules that make up living cells: amino acids, lipids, sugars, and nucleotides. These building-blocks alone are extremely complex and specific, therefore, their natural origin was a great mystery until Stanley Miller showed us how to start answering these questions through simulation experiments.

All classes of building blocks have now been shown, through thousands of experiments, to form readily in a wide variety of probable, young-Earth environments. Nucleotides are the trickiest. Last I checked we had only found one solution for their production so far and it's not very probable. Too many things have to be perfect for it to work.

Besides building-block formation, type 1 questions also deal with how these molecules, once produced, are sorted and concentrated in one area. This is important to know because before these building-blocks can even begin to do anything life-like, they need to exist in high, relatively pure concentrations.

Type 1 questions are almost all solved. Most scientists have moved on to Type 2 questions: How do we get these building blocks to form larger structures that are at least superficially similar to proteins and genes? In cells, building-blocks have the ability to combine and form larger structures. We want to see this outside of cells. Watch our animation on DNA to see how nucleotides make up DNA chains and how amino acids make up proteins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwibgNGe4aY

Many Type 2 questions have been solved, but many are style a mystery. For example, the average protein chain in life is around 360 amino acids long. So far, In prebiotic simulations, we have only seen them grow to about 30 amino acids long.

Type 3 questions are about function, things like: How does useful genetic information develop from random chains of RNA?

Surprisingly, some of these questions are already being answered too: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24157838

User avatar
backwoodsman
Posts: 536
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2009 11:32 am
Location: Not quite at the ends of the earth, but you can see it from here.

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by backwoodsman » Thu Oct 29, 2015 8:30 am

Jon,

I just wanted to put this link here in case you're interested in the other side of the coin. It is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg.

It seems a pointless waste of time and resources to pursue research into something that's known to be impossible; doing so is a strong indicator that those involved care more about ideology than truth. Of course you can choose to believe whatever you like; but if you want intelligent, thinking people to consider your view as a possibility, at some point you have to deal with the evidence against it in an intellectually honest manner (i.e., do something with it other than simply ignoring it).

http://www.reasons.org/articles/evoluti ... biogenesis

PR
Posts: 73
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:11 am

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by PR » Thu Oct 29, 2015 9:13 am

Jon, at the end of the day, isn't this simply intelligent beings, rather than random undirected chance, causing their desired results to come to pass? Which IMO is essentially what Christians believe about God and the beginning of life.

Phil

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Thu Oct 29, 2015 10:07 am

Thanks Jon, I appreciate your answers a lot... I figured my questions may be too basic and waste your time.

User avatar
jonperry
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:00 pm
Location: Corvallis Oregon
Contact:

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Thu Oct 29, 2015 5:12 pm

backwoodsman wrote:Jon,

I just wanted to put this link here in case you're interested in the other side of the coin. It is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.reasons.org/articles/evoluti ... biogenesis
I find it odd that the "other side of the coin" starts out their article with a blatant lie "The only experimental evidence cited in 80+ years for a primordial soup is the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953". Look in the notes under my animation on YouTube and you'll find a small list of primordial soup experiments. Dozens more have been done that I didn't bother listing, all yielding great results. Primordial soup experiments are still going on at Georgia Tech and several other labs around the world. Here is a picture of one I took this summer on my cell phone. Image

Besides blatantly lying, the second tactic used in the article you posted is to quote a small handful of scientists (good scientists, I grant you that) who think that life origins chemistry is not going to work. Is this the evidence upon which you've based your claim that chemical origins are "known to be impossible"? If so, let me remind you that Howard Siler (two time bobsled Olympic medalist, and Chairman of the US Bobsled Federation Competition Committee) once said there would never be a Jamaican bobsled team. Did his "authority" make it his statement true? Watch Cool Runnings to find out!

An argument from authority might make sense in religion because God chooses prophets and gives them authority to be his mouthpieces. In science, however, the only true authority is the observable universe. So far, observations are pointing most researchers toward the hypothesis of Chemical Origins.

The third tactic the author of your article uses is to talk about probability equations that the ID mathematicians claim make the origin of life impossible. Unfortunately for those mathematicians, actual experiments have shown their math to be completely misplaced. Math is great if it's applied correctly to story problems. When misapplied, it's not worth sharpening your pencil for. Real life experiments show that functional polymers are quickly generated from random space after only a few days of replication and selection: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24157838. The mistake these mathematicians are making is that they assume there is only one way for a protein (or ribozyme in the case of the experiment I linked you to) to perform a specific function. In reality, there are countless ways to skin a cat.

My guess is that the author knew his article was full of lies and bad arguments as he was writing it. That's probably why he signed his name "Guest Writer". It simply amazes me that people think lying is a good way to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If I were a Christian I would be very angry at Mr. Guest Writer for disgracing the ministry.
It seems a pointless waste of time and resources to pursue research into something that's known to be impossible; doing so is a strong indicator that those involved care more about ideology than truth.
Life Origins research continues to get funding because researchers keep making breakthroughs. Many of these breakthroughs have turned out to be highly applicable to medicine, the fuel industry, and materials production. David Lynn's group at Emory receives much of its current funding from pharmaceutical companies because of it's applications: http://www.chemistry.emory.edu/faculty/lynn/

The Lynn group also appears to consume way too much champagne :)

User avatar
jonperry
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:00 pm
Location: Corvallis Oregon
Contact:

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by jonperry » Thu Oct 29, 2015 5:23 pm

PR wrote:Jon, at the end of the day, isn't this simply intelligent beings, rather than random undirected chance, causing their desired results to come to pass?
No, it is not intelligent beings causing their desired results. Here, watch the animation again, apparently you missed the core message about how simulation experiments work. Maybe it wasn't stated clearly enough: https://youtu.be/NNijmxsKGbc

Scientists set up ancient Earth simulations and then watch what happens without interfering. The intelligence involved is simply in trying to figure out what ancient environments might have been like so they can properly simulate them. It also takes intelligence to set the simulations up in a way that will be easy to watch/analyze once the simulation has run its course.

dizerner

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by dizerner » Thu Oct 29, 2015 6:39 pm

jonperry wrote: It simply amazes me that people think lying is a good way to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If I were a Christian I would be very angry at Mr. Guest Writer for disgracing the ministry.
I know it's small comfort, but I certainly agree with you here as a Christian. I've heard smart people admit in a candid moment, that if they had no precommitment to believe a certain thing about science, they would indeed be convinced to believe as the mainstream scientists do. But then they want to act like science supports them; in our zeal to defend what we see as a Biblical scientific paradigm are we losing a Biblical moral paradigm?
Unfortunately for those mathematicians, actual experiments have shown their math to be completely misplaced. Math is great if it's applied correctly to story problems. When misapplied, it's not worth sharpening your pencil for.
ID is interesting, but a difficult idea. I think scientists tend to be a bit dismissive of it, but they have no motivation to really think deeply about it. The fundamental idea seems too difficult to unravel: is there any arranged state of matter and energy that would never happen under natural laws and materials operating from whatever starting conditions? (We would we have to know a high degree of everything there is to know; and if intelligence arose naturally we might have to even answer "no" since intelligence can manipulate the natural world in seemingly unnatural ways.)

User avatar
backwoodsman
Posts: 536
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2009 11:32 am
Location: Not quite at the ends of the earth, but you can see it from here.

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by backwoodsman » Fri Oct 30, 2015 12:41 pm

jonperry wrote:My guess is that the author knew his article was full of lies and bad arguments as he was writing it. That's probably why he signed his name "Guest Writer". It simply amazes me that people think lying is a good way to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If I were a Christian I would be very angry at Mr. Guest Writer for disgracing the ministry.
It seems that, in your haste and eagerness to discredit Mr. Guest Writer, you overlooked the photos and short bios of the writers at the bottom, as well as the link to the list of all RTB's guest writers. (Oh, the overconfidence and brashness of youthful ideological fervor; but I digress.)

On the assumption that you applied the same standard of thoughtful, gracious consideration to the rest of your comments, I'll not address them now so you can have a chance to research and think through them a bit more carefully. (Who knows -- there might actually be something you don't know, or someone, somewhere, who knows more about it than you do! But again I digress.)

By the way, as I've mentioned before, I'm still waiting for you to address several loose ends from past conversations. When I mentioned ignoring evidence against your view, it was partly those to which I was referring.

User avatar
Jason
Posts: 379
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:28 pm

Re: Miller-Urey and the origin of life

Post by Jason » Fri Oct 30, 2015 4:15 pm

Jon, I have a quick question about something we had previously discussed in private. If the origin of life actually was supernatural, would we expect the interactions we observe in molecular chemistry to look any different? You seem to think that these experiments have something useful to say about the existence of an intelligent source. Otherwise, you wouldn't be posting about prebiotic chemistry on a Christian message board. Am I wrong?

Post Reply

Return to “Creation/Evolution”