Primordial Soup Recipes Yield Sickly Goo

Don’t eat Darwin Brand Primordial Soup. It’s toxic, because the cooks don’t know what they are doing.

As you look over the recent stories about the origin of life, ask yourself if the ‘experts’ in the kitchen know anything about nutrition or recipes. One thing is for sure: their products are not intelligently designed.

Brewing up Earth’s earliest life (Astrobiology Magazine). The photo that the authors of this article chose looks as ghastly as the name of the ingredients scientists chose for their primordial soup:  sulfidic anions. Do the cooks in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics know what they’re doing?

Around 4 billion years ago, Earth was an inhospitable place, devoid of oxygen, bursting with volcanic eruptions, and bombarded by asteroids, with no signs of life in even the simplest forms. But somewhere amid this chaotic period, the chemistry of the Earth turned in life’s favor, giving rise, however improbably, to the planet’s very first organisms.

What prompted this critical turning point? How did living organisms rally in such a volatile world? And what were the chemical reactions that brewed up the first amino acids, proteins, and other building blocks of life? These are some of the questions researchers have puzzled over for decades in trying to piece together the origins of life on Earth.

A good cook knows what he or she is trying to make. These guys have no idea. They’re even experimenting with the most potent poisons in the world as ingredients that might work, “however improbably,” to create life, including hydrogen cyanide. The ideas in this article sound more like a witch’s brew than serious soup creation: a pinch of volcanic gas, a tincture of bisulfide, brought to a boil with cyanide brought in by comets. Was Sukrit Ranjan, a postdoc at MIT, drunk when he dreamed this up?

Interestingly, he consulted the literature in a rather unexpected subject while conducting these calculations: winemaking — a science that involves, in part, dissolving sulfur dioxide in water to produce sulfites and bisulfites under oxygenless conditions similar to those on early Earth.

The perhapsimaybecouldness index is high. Such-and-such might work. This may help produce building blocks. The conditions on the early earth might have been this way. Warning: never eat a dish cooked up by a blind chef, even when it comes with the NASA seal of approval. Regarding probability, watch “Amoeba’s Journey” from the Illustra film Origin.

Mazur interviews all the leading lights in the materialist origin-of-life field.

Researchers show role for cyanide in origins of life (Phys.org). Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is so toxic, one drop is enough to kill a man in minutes. It quickly disables the irreducibly complex ATP synthase motors used by all living things, depriving cells of oxygen. Although used in industry as a stepping stone to the synthesis of products including pesticides, the maximum exposure is 10 parts per million (NIH). Astrobiologists, though, love the stuff. They envision all kinds of wonderful life-forms appearing downstream of the building blocks that chance might make out of cyanide. “It sounds odd, but cyanide may have been a key ingredient in the origins of life,” Dimitar Sasselov and a grad student say in this article. (Note: if it sounds odd, most likely it tastes odd, too.) Actually, they only say this because they enjoy the “RNA World” act in The Origin of Life Circus , the book by Susan Mazur, where Sasselov admitted “we still don’t have a sense of what makes them [molecular building blocks] work as a system” and “we can’t use existing life forms, because they are too sophisticated” (p. 227). Nevertheless, this sorcerer and his apprentice are dazzled by the signature of HCN in nearby stars. If they cook with HCN, we hope they are careful, otherwise they might win a Darwin Award.

Death Drives the Evolution of Life on ‘One Strange Rock’ (Space.com). Now we know why the origin-of-life researchers play with poison. They have a death wish. To them, according to Hanneke Weitering, “Life on earth would never have evolved without death.” She advertises the snickering morticians at National Geographic:

Life never would have evolved on Earth without death. It may seem counterintuitive, but without the natural cycle of life and death and the food chain it created, life never would have evolved from simple, single-celled organisms to the complex creatures that roam our planet today. In a new episode of the documentary series “One Strange Rock,” which airs tonight (April 23) on the National Geographic Channel, astronauts explain how death drove the evolution of life on Earth.

So die, then, and stop bothering us who prefer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Extreme environment of Danakil Depression sheds light on Mars, Titan and nuclear waste (Phys.org). While we’re talking about deathly ingredients, who wants some nuclear waste in their soup? The cooks at EU-funded Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure (RI), motivated by their Darwinian death wish, took a field trip to bad places, wanting to get high on poison to achieve hallucinations:

The Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is a spectacular, hostile environment that may resemble conditions encountered on Mars and Titan – as well as in sites containing nuclear waste. From 20-28 January 2018, five teams of researchers and more than 30 support staff visited two locations in the region to study the microbiology, geology and chemistry at the Dallol hydrothermal outcrop and the saline Lake Afrera….

Dallol is a uniquely hostile place for life due to the combination of its extreme salinity, high temperature, and acidity. It is one of the hottest places on Earth, at more than 100 metres below sea level. Upwelling water, rich in many different salts and heated by magma close to the surface, forms brightly-coloured, highly acidic pools. Toxic gases, including chlorine and sulphur vapour, hang in the air.

A photo at the end of the article shows them looking into a toxic pool as if it is a magic mirror, bringing forth visions of life on Mars and Titan – two hostile environments with no known signs of life or even building blocks of life. The trip wasn’t for science, but for the experience. “Seasoned researchers have worked side by side and shared their experience with young scientists,” the report boasts. “It has been a very successful trip.” Everyone got their hallucination – and promises of funding for their next successful trip (pun intended).

‘Handyman of Proteins’ Got Life on Earth Started (Space.com). Here’s an article, for once, that frankly acknowledges the improbability of life by chance. After describing how life translates information from DNA to proteins, Diana Crow writes,

However, proteins pose a problem for scientists who study the beginnings of life. Present-day proteins have had the benefit of billions of years of evolution. They are highly specialized and, compared to most molecules, they are enormous. The odds of such lengthy amino acid chains forming “out of the blue” in life’s primordial soup are beyond astronomical.

So how does Crow fly over this “beyond-astronomical” hurdle? Even if living cells could find any “benefit” in billions of years of the Stuff Happens Law, everybody knows there was no natural selection before accurate replication. She calls on Andrew Pohorille, senior astrobiologist at the NASA Ames Research Center, to act as chief wizard and make the impossible possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. Knowing that having the molecules present does not guarantee life, Pohorille looks for “candidate structures for early proteins” which are “unconventional structures that can perform the same functions as contemporary Earth proteins.” They work perfectly in the imagination, overcoming astronomical barriers in a single bound. Pohorille has to hope his imaginary candidate proteins quickly learn accurate replication, or else “error catastrophe” guarantees they will fall apart in the soup without going anywhere.

Are viruses the new frontier for astrobiology? (Astrobiology Magazine). Since viruses cannot self-replicate, astrobiologists have not considered them candidates for missing links to the origin of life – till now. Desperate for new approaches to the origin of life, astrobiologists have started a new bandwagon to cheer themselves up. They are looking to viruses, or virions, for help: one, because they are so numerous, and two, because they are simpler than cells. “It makes sense to be looking for the things that are likely to be the most abundant,” one convert says. Another, though calls it nonsense in a way astrobiologists will probably not appreciate:

“Astrovirology is no more, nor less, valid than astrobiology,” says Don Cowan, director of the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics at the University of Pretoria. “There is no reason why astrovirology should not be considered with the same emphasis as ‘prokaryote’ [i.e. bacterial] astrobiology, particularly since the lesson from Earth’s biology is that every known organism has one or [sometimes many] more virus parasites.”

Self-replication of DNA by its encoded proteins in liposome-based synthetic cells (Nature Communications). These guys intelligently designed a system using existing lipids, homochiral DNA and proteins that can self-replicate for a few cycles. To the extent their work tries to explain the origin of life, it fits perfectly a well-known cartoon about chance and design. Does their work have anything to do with the origin of life by chance, without highly-trained lab equipment operated by PhD’s? They don’t even pretend to say so. They’re just trying baby steps to get a well-designed system to replicate, using highly sophisticated ingredients they hope might some day lead to synthetic cells. The paper does, however, admit that living cells work with information in sophisticated ways. Look for the word design here:

As a universal attribute, a living cell—even in its simplest representation—must be able to replicate information to enable proliferation. This information is coded in the form of nucleic acid sequences and must be converted into proteins to support cellular functions. The central dogma of molecular biology formulates the general rules for information transfer and is ubiquitous among all organisms: The genomic DNA is replicated and expressed into non-coding or messenger RNAs (transcription), the latter serving as a template to produce one or more proteins (translation). Hence, meeting the challenge to reconstruct a minimal cell involves the in vitro implementation of DNA replication, transcription and translation. Moreover, compartmentalization is an essential design strategy for coupling genotype and phenotype, while containing the spread of replication parasites. Phospholipid vesicles, called liposomes, with cell-like dimensions may provide such an evolutionary unit.

There are, however, no agreed-on “evolutionary units” in Darwinism, as W. Ford Doolittle made clear (2 April 2018). It all comes down to chance, and the chance of a self-replicating, functional organism, with all the essential parts able to accurate transcribe, translate and utilize functional information remains beyond astronomical.

Origin-of-life folly is a pseudoscience funded by your tax dollars. It has absolutely nothing to show for itself. It survives on hope, faith, and fantasy. It only pretends to be scientific, because its devotees know a few facts about organic chemistry and how to use jargon. Only materialistic Darwinians advocate it, because they have to in order to maintain their atheism/deism/pantheism (whichever flavor of unbelief they prefer). Tell the new NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine to pull the plug on this phony science of “astrobiology” that didn’t even exist before 1996.