ANOTHER DEAD-END FOR EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS
by Michael Fishwick
It appears that the most popular evolutionary assumption for the beginning of life has come to an empirically abrupt dead-end. It is dead in the water - marine hydrothermal and volcanic spring water, to be precise.
The Royal Society (Britain's National Academy of Science) reports in a press release (www.royalsoc.ac.uk/news.asp?id=4154) dated 13th February 2006, that a leading U.S. researcher has falsified the widely held idea pertaining to a suitable environment for abiogenesis to take place. Abiogenesis is the unobserved evolutionary assumption that life can form from non-life. Abiogenesis is the opposite of the observable, testable and well-proven scientific law of Biogenesis which states that life only comes from life.
David Deamer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Cruz stated that:
"It seems that hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into 'pioneer organisms'."
The research team experimentally introduced amino acids - the building blocks of proteins, and nucleotides - the building blocks of DNA, into hot water environments. Many evolutionists believe that hydrothermal activity is essential for polymer synthesis, without which organic compounds cannot form. The nearby colder water surrounding the vents is necessary because many bio-chemical elements are quickly destroyed at high temperature. The trouble is, polymerization cannot take place in water. Dr. Deamer explained:
"The reason this is significant is that it has been proposed that clay promotes interesting chemical reactions relating to the origin of life."
The hydrothermal vent hypothesis already suffered greatly from conceptual problems and the presence of clay had been hailed as being able to account for at least some of them. It was believed that clay would provide an environment where the necessary dehydration synthesis of polymers could be achieved. (www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/822)
The underlying philosophical assumption that this experiment was based upon, of course, still begs the extremely important and unresolvable question (for the natural sciences at least) of the origin of amino acids and nucleotides. Experiments in this regard have consistently failed in their objective for the past 50 years. Nothing useful for explaining life process origins has ever been produced. (www.trueorigin.org/abio.asp)
Evolution's much loved fantasy of life beginning in a primeval soup looks increasingly like poorly fed children playing with tinned alphabet soup. No one would choose it over home-made soup, but it's fun to mess around with!
