EDITOR'S NOTE: The Science and Religion feature for this month is a condensation of a presentation made by Dr. Gish at the Creation Convention II in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 18-21, 1974, and published in full in the report of that convention, "A Challenge to Education II." It is republished here by permission of Dr. Gish and Walter Lang, executive director of the Bible- Science Association, P.O. Box 1016, Caldwell, Idaho 83605, which sponsored the convention. Dr. Gish is associate director of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), 2716 Madison Ave., San Diego, California 92116. The material presented in this feature is a condensed summary of a monograph published by ICR
SPECULATIONS concerning the origin of life and laboratory efforts to prove how life began lie outside the scientific domain. Scientifically, man can only postulate what could have happened or what may have happened, but such efforts can never establish what really did happen. Even if life had originated by an evolutionary process, the very nature of this process and subsequent events would preclude the existence on the earth today of any evidence related to such a hypothetical process.
All investigators in this area exclude the possibility of the intervention of a Creator. They maintain (correctly) that if at any point during the process super natural intervention occurred, the process would no longer be natural and, therefore, would not be subject to a mechanistic, naturalistic interpretation and investigation. Furthermore, most, or all, are committed to a materialistic philosophy.
Although all is conjecture in this area of thought, and the design and con duct of related laboratory experiments involve many weaknesses and fallacies, theorists in this field insist that their specialists and laboratory work offer a plausible explanation of how life may have originated.
The spontaneous development of life through natural processes would have involved four crucial basic stages, two of which will be covered in this article and two in a subsequent one.
Stage One: The Primitive Earth
The scientific procedure here should begin with a careful study of all pertinent scientific data (as scanty as this may be) and then, if the data would permit, speculations concerning the nature of the hypothetical primitive earth should follow. Theorists have followed the opposite procedure, however. They first decided what they believe the primitive earth atmosphere and conditions must have been in order to permit abiogenesis (the origin of life from non- life) and then have attempted to make the data fit their theory.
When it was realized by evolutionists that it was thermodynamically impossible for the reduced chemical com pounds (the carbon is combined mainly with hydrogen but with little oxygen as found, for example, in fats and oils), which occur in living things, to have arisen spontaneously in an oxidizing atmosphere (as the earth now has) they postulated that the primordial earth had a reducing atmosphere. Our present atmosphere is oxidizing, that is, it contains free oxygen, which causes things to be oxidized, such as the rusting of iron or the burning of inflammable material. A reducing atmosphere would contain no free oxygen, but would contain such gases as hydrogen and methane. Oparin and Urey, among others, have postulated a primordial atmosphere containing mostly ammonia (NHs), nitrogen (N2), methane (CH4), hydrogen (Ha), and water (HaO). Many origin-of-life experiments, including Stanley Miller’s famous experiment, have been performed using these gases. Phillip Abelson, a geophysicist, claims there is much evidence against the earth's ever having had such an atmosphere. He postulated instead that the primordial atmosphere contained mostly carbon monoxide, nitrogen, hydrogen, and water (Proceedings Na tonal Academy of Science, vol. 55, p. 1365 [1966]).
Many assumptions must be made in order to postulate that the primordial earth had a reducing atmosphere of any kind. There is no real evidence that the earth ever had a reducing atmosphere, geochemical evidence giving no indication that the earth ever had an atmosphere different than the one today. Most evolutionary geologists believe the early earth atmosphere came from outgassing of the earth’s interior. But the effluent gases from volcanoes consist mostly of carbon dioxide (COz) and water (H2O), plus some carbon monoxide (CO), nitro gen (N2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and hydrogen chloride (HCL). If the postulated primordial earth atmosphere came from outgassing, it, therefore, would have been oxidizing rather than reducing, since the above gases are oxidizing, not reducing. That is, these compounds contain elements in combination with oxygen or similar elements.
Furthermore, there is good evidence that large amounts of oxygen, generated by photolytic decomposition of water in the upper atmosphere by ultraviolet light, would have accumulated very early in the history of the hypothetical primordial earth (R. T. Brinkman, in Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 74, p. 5355 [1969]). The hydrogen generated by this process, being the lightest element known, readily escapes the earth's atmosphere, but oxygen, which is sixteen times heavier than hydrogen, cannot escape and so accumulates. The earth's atmosphere must have been oxidizing from very early times, and the origin of life by a purely naturalistic means would, therefore, have been impossible. Summary. All origin-of-life theorists postulate a reducing atmosphere for the primordial earth because of necessity for such an atmosphere. No evidence exists, however, that the earth ever had anything but an oxidizing atmosphere as at present.
Stage Two: Origin of Simple Chemical Compounds
The accumulation of sufficient quantities of even simple organic compounds to produce a significant concentration in the hypothetical primordial ocean seems to be precluded by thermodynamic and chemical kinetic considerations (thermodynamics involve energy considerations that tell us which direction a chemical reaction will go, while kinetics deal with the speed of chemical reactions).
Many experiments have been per formed under a variety of conditions. The production of some of the naturally occurring amino acids (building blocks of proteins), purines and pyrimidines (constituents of DNA and RNA), sugars, and other compounds have been reported. The yields in all cases are very small. Of greatest significance is the fact that even this limited success is de pendent upon imposition of artificial conditions that render these experiments irrelevant to the origin of life.
In the famous Stanley Miller experiment (Science, vol. 117, p. 528 [1953]) the gases methane, ammonia, hydro gen, water, and nitrogen were circulated through a sparking chamber for many days. The reaction products were collected in a trap. Analysis revealed the presence of several amino acids plus a few other compounds found in living things. These results were hailed as pro viding a plausible basis for the origin of life by a mechanistic process.
Criticisms. Only a few simple com pounds were formed. A pile of bricks is a far cry from a building. There is a tremendous difference between a few amino acids and the incredibly complex living cell, containing thousands of different kinds of protein molecules (each one composed of several hundred amino acids), thousands of extremely complex DNA and RNA molecules, and many complex structures. Finally, life requires perfect coordination in time and space.
Most importantly, no detectable amount of products would ever have been obtained without use of the trap. This trap permitted immediate isolation of the products from the energy source (sparking chamber) while permitting the continued circulation of the volatile gases. Had the products remained in contact with the energy source (as would have been the case on the hypothetical primordial earth), they would have been decomposed much more readily than they were formed, and no detectable quantity of product would ever have been found. All origin- of-life investigators employ some such trap.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
D. E. Hull published a paper (Nature, vol. 186, p. 693 [1960] in which he clearly showed that when the destructive effects of ultraviolet light, electrical discharges, heat, et cetera, are considered, as well as their utilization in the synthetic step, no significant quantities of even the simplest organic chemical compounds could have accumulated on the primordial earth. Any product formed in the atmosphere would have been almost totally destroyed before reaching the ocean, and the half-life of any product in the ocean would have been relatively very short. Dr. Hull states (p. 694), "The physical chemist, guided by the proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics cannot offer any encouragement to the bio chemist (origin of life chemist), who needs an ocean full of organic com pounds to form even lifeless coacervates" (coacervates are mere globular precipitates that readily form according to simple physico-chemical properties).
These considerations are in full ac cord with the Second Law of Thermo dynamics. According to this law, all chemical changes which will occur spontaneously always tend to convert complex chemical compounds to more simple compounds, but never tend to convert simple compounds into more complex. The origin of life on a naturalistic basis is in clear violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Another consideration that indicates that no significant quantity of any one particular compound could ever have arisen is the fact that a particular element would have been incorporated into thousands of different kinds of com pounds. The number of different chemical compounds, for instance, that theoretically could be formed containing nitrogen is truly astronomical. The concentration of any one nitrogen-containing compound would, therefore, be so insignificant it could never have contributed to the origin of life. This would be analogous to dividing ten dollars among a million people. The present ocean system of the earth contains about 350 million cubic miles of water. It is obvious that the quantity of a chemical compound required to give a detect able concentration in a volume of water even one tenth of that would be vast indeed, far, far in excess of what could have arisen on the primordial earth.
Another difficulty is the destructive chemical reactions that would eliminate certain biological precursors, that is, chemicals necessary for life. For instance, sugars readily react with amino acids to form compounds useless for life. Since it is postulated that the quantity of amino acids would exceed the quantity of sugars, all sugars would be destroyed. The sugars ribose and deoxyribose are constituents of DNA and RNA, and other sugars form the building blocks of carbohydrates. How did DNA, RNA, and carbohydrates, vital constituents of life, arise in the absence of sugars? The answer is, of course, they could not.
Phosphate is a constituent of DNA, RNA, and other vital compounds. The phosphate salts of the alkaline earth metals, such as calcium and magnesium, are essentially insoluble in water. Since the primordial ocean would have contained excess calcium and magnesium, all phosphate would have precipitated in the form of these salts. How then did DNA, RNA, and other phosphate-containing compounds arise?
Summary. Even at this relatively simple stage impassable barriers to the origin of life would have existed: (1) the rate of destruction of even simple com pounds would far exceed their rate of synthesis; (2) the vast number of different compounds possible by abiogenic processes (ordinary chemical processes) would prevent the synthesis of a significant concentration of any one particular compound; (3) biologically important compounds would be destroyed by interaction with each other and other chemicals; (4) insolubility of alkaline earth phosphates would exclude phosphates from the primordial ocean.
