As many critics have pointed out, evolutionary theory has biased the life sciences with its view of spontaneity. In this universe, things just happen to happen. And that includes the most complicated, least understood thing of all—life. This is the religiously-motivated “just add water” view of biology that makes little scientific sense. Now an evolutionist has appropriately used this very phrase to describe yet another evolutionary take on how life got its start.

New publications from The Center for Chemical Evolution elucidate how peptides can form bilayer membranes with some interesting properties. Could these structures be enlisted to service Darwin's theory? Evolutionists believe life arose spontaneously and so they search for ideas of how this could have occurred. They require several scientifically unlikely events to occur, one of which is the formation of a microscopic compartment in which to hold and safeguard the unlikely chemical combinations that are needed.

Could not the peptide bilayer membranes have provided the compartment? Furthermore, there is the hint that such a membrane, constructed from protein building blocks, could actually perform some protein functions. Perhaps we’re seeing a new pathway to solve thorny problems of how life originated.

Actually what we are seeing is the same old misappropriation of good research—this time with potential nano machinery applications—to junk science. It is yet another in a long list of absurd speculations of how life arose. Did it come from a warm little pond, from the bottom of the sea, or from outer space? Was it DNA or proteins that started things off. No early evolution must have occurred in an RNA world, except that this new research suggests that peptides were the panacea. As one evolutionist explained:

Our studies have now shown that, if you just add water, simple peptides access both the physical properties and the long-range molecular order that is critical to the origins of chemical evolution.

Did you know the most complex thing of all is a piece of cake? Just add water and everything else spontaneously occurs. Religion drives science and it matters.

You were probably taught in high school biology class that life arose from a primordial soup--the twentieth century's rendition of Darwin's "warm little pond." Most textbooks show pictorial-type drawings of the early earth as a dynamic environment, full of activity. Sunlight is beaming through the clouds with its all important energy-bearing ultra violet rays; rain is pouring down as lightning strikes bring more needed energy to the surface; volcanic activity creates hot spots with yet more energy and a few stray comets might be seen bringing their organic chemicals to seed the life-giving processes. The evolution machine is revving up its engines. Another figure might have illustrated an experimental arrangement mimicking those early-earth conditions. A primordial soup of various organic compounds brewed as sparks were set off in a gaseous mixture above steaming water. There's only one problem: it doesn't work.

Charles Darwin had speculated that life may have begun in a warm little pond with protein compounds ready to undergo more complex changes. Strangely enough, a century later experiments were found to confirm this vision. It appeared that Darwin just happened to be right and the headlines proclaimed that scientists had created "Life in a test tube."

But a plethora of problems were ignored in the process which textbooks eventually had to acknowledge. The 2004 version of George Johnson's high school text, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, for instance, includes the primordial soup section but adds a caveat.

In its Principles of Evolution unit, the student reads the usual narrative of organic molecules forming spontaneously in chemical reactions activated by energy from solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and lightning. The text recounts the success of primordial soup experiments in synthesizing certain organic compounds and concludes:

These results support the hypothesis that some basic chemicals of life could have formed spontaneously under conditions like those in the experiment.

But this traditional life-in-a-test-tube narrative is then followed by an awkward caveat. As the next section explains,

Recent discoveries have caused scientists to reevaluate [the experiment]. We now know that the mixture of gases used in [the experiment] could not have existed on early Earth. ... Some scientists argue that the chemicals were produced within ocean bubbles. Others say that the chemicals arose in deep sea vents. The correct answer has not been determined yet.

That's a refreshing admission. Now a new evolution paper goes further. As one author put it, commenting on the paper:

Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings, the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life. But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life.

"It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup," commented another author.

These evolutionists believe deep sea vents are the answer. The vents provide chemical gradients that early life would have used before learning how to create their own gradients. Of course we have no idea, beyond speculation, how this actually could have happened. The cell's energy transfer process (referred to as chemiosmosis), using nutrients to synthesize its own chemical energy (ATP), is astonishingly complex. But no matter, it must have happened:

Far from being too complex to have powered early life, it is nearly impossible to see how life could have begun without chemiosmosis ...

The eighteenth century philosopher and evolutionary thinker David Hume argued that the problem of evil trumped the problem of complexity. Nature may be complex, but it must have evolved because god would not have created this wretched world. Now, two centuries later, complexity is simply dismissed because evolution must have occurred.

Evolutionists Jack Szostak and Alonso Ricardo summarize origin of life research in the current Scientific American (Sept 2009). It is a good summary of the problem, which entails a long list of seemingly monumental steps. There is the creation of the chemical components of genetic material, the assembly of the genetic material, the imperfect replication of the genetic material, the sequestering the genetic material into a protocell, cell division, selection, metabolism, and so forth.

The article also summarizes how far along are the solutions to these various steps. In most cases evolutionists working in the laboratory have been able to devise experiments that produce many of the key players. Sugars, phosphates, nucleobases, membranes, nucleotides, RNA sequences, and so forth can all be synthesized given the right experimental conditions. On the other hand, many of these steps have their limitations. For example, only two of the four RNA nucleotides have been synthesized.

While Szostak and Ricardo discuss several of these limitations, many problems are not discussed. For example, how are the needed concentrations of the key chemicals maintained? How finely-tuned are the experiments and could such a disparate collection of conditions work together? How did biology's chiralty arise?

Beyond such basic issues, even if all their problems disappeared Szostak and Ricardo would only be at the point of having some RNA macromolecules inside a water-filled vesicle. In the laboratory such a system would do nothing. Why should we believe things would be different in a warm little pond? Indeed, from here the problems are enormous and here the evolutionist's credulity moves into high gear.

In fact, a high level of credulity seems to be the theme of abiogenesis / origin of life research. True, with finely-tuned experiments ribose can be stabilized, phosphate can be obtained, nucleotides can be synthesized, RNA can be coaxed to polymerize, duplication can be arranged, vesicles can be formed and divided, and so forth. But this is light years from even the simplest of living cells.

The scientific conclusion is that, given our current level of knowledge, abiogenesis is not likely. Perhaps future findings will change this, but we cannot change this conclusion with bed-time stories of warm little ponds teeming with activity that just happen to lead to the most complex nanomachines we know of.

While Szostak and Ricardo may sound scientific with their summary of the abiogenesis research, the article is firmly planted in the non scientific evolution genre, where evolution is dogmatically mandated to be a fact. Consequently, the bar is lowered dramatically as the silliest of stories pass as legitimate science. As Szostak and Ricardo conclude:

There could be pools of cold water, perhaps partly covered by ice but kept liquid by hot rocks. The temperature differences would cause convection currents, so that every now and then protocells in the water would be exposed to a burst of heat as they passed near the hot rocks, but they would almost instantly cool down again as the heated water mixed with the bulk of the cold water. The sudden heating would cause a double helix to separate into single strands. Once back in the cool region, new double strands--copies of the original one--could form as the single strands acted as templates.

As soon as the environment nudged protocells to start reproducing, evolution kicked in. In particular, at some point some of the RNA sequences mutated, becoming ribozymes that sped up the copying of RNA--thus adding a competitive advantage. Eventually ribozymes began to copy RNA without external help.

It is relatively easy to imagine how RNA-based protocells may have then evolved. Metabolism could have arisen gradually, as new ribozymes enabled cells to synthesize nutrients internally from simpler and more abundant starting materials. Next, the organism might have added protein making to their bag of chemical tricks.

With their astonishing versatility, proteins would have then taken over RNA's role in assisting genetic copying and metabolism. Later, the organisms would have "learned" to make DNA, gaining the advantage of possessing a more robust carrier of genetic information. At that point, the RNA world became the DNA world, and life as we know it began.

What a pathetic and embarrassing example of evolution's influence on science. While great material for a story book, it is astonishing that a scientist would pen such a passage. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution has a high view of itself. Not only is it supposed to be as believable as gravity, but the narratives it generates are uncritically swallowed. For instance, origin of life stories are routinely reported with, frankly, laughable proclamations such as this one:

Mystery of how life on Earth began solved by British scientists: Scientists in Britain have solved the mystery of how life on Earth evolved from molecules when the planet was devoid of life four billion years ago.

Such non scientific reporting of science is by no means restricted to journalists. If they have exaggerated further it is only because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. Consider biochemist Nick Lane's new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. A compendium of such extreme overstatement one would think it a parody. But alas, never underestimate the evolution genre. Evolutionists seem to be ever raising the ante of hyperbole at this high table. Consider, for example, how Lane describes the evolutionary tales of the origin of life:

The origin of life is one of biology's biggest conundrums. How prebiotic chemistry gave rise to biochemistry, how the first cells formed, what kind of energy first powered metabolism and replication -- all these questions are serious challenges. Remarkably, all are answered in broad brush stroke by the amazing properties of alkaline hydrothermal vents, which form naturally chemiosmotic, self-replicating mineral cells with catalytic walls. They concentrate organics, including nucleotides, in impressive quantities, making them the ideal hatcheries for life.

I guess we should thank our lucky alkaline hydrothermal vents. (Which, by the way, were not needed by the British scientists extolled above who also, remarkably, solved all the problems). Lane lists nine other "inventions" of evolution which, believe it or not, are as absurd as this one. I have no doubt Lane is a smart fellow. That is why evolution is all the more amazing--and all the more dangerous. Religion drives science, and it matters.

It is one of the silliest of all the icons of evolution. Abiogenesis, the notion that life springs forth on its own from a lifeless pool of chemicals, is not motivated by science. There are no observations to suggest it occurs. (If anything science’s law of biogenesis, which states that all life comes only from pre existing life, suggests the exact opposite). Instead, abiogenesis is motivated by the religious ideas that mandated evolution. It is, frankly, an outrage that taxpayer money is used to fund abiogenesis research. Nonetheless, a new study does give evolutionists some good news.

The new study reports on a way to spawn two ribonucleic acid (RNA) nucleotides. The formation of such nucleotides, without too much experimenter interference, is quite difficult. And yet RNA is thought likely to be needed in the hoped for abiogenesis process. The bad news for evolutionists is that this finding does nothing to mitigate enormous problems with the whole idea of abiogenesis. Yes, it does improve the picture slightly, but big obstacles remain.

The good news for the rest of us is that science writer Nicholas Wade does a good job on providing a balanced view of this new study. To be sure, his article in today’s New York Times gives, on the whole, a much too rosy interpretation of the finding. The worst part is the headline (“Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life”) which greatly exaggerates the findings. But headlines are headlines. Otherwise, much of the article is a vast improvement over the sort of reporting we are accustomed to seeing.

For instance, Wade gives mention to the problem of investigator interference and fine-tuning (e.g., the starting point for the experiment includes an unstable chemical). Wade quotes one critic, who suggests it would be a fantasy to think the chemical would be naturally available in its pure form. Also, Wade explains that even the lead author has reservations about the results.

Wade also mentions the problem of chiralty. Just as our right hand is different from our left hand, so too important organic molecules come in two mirror image forms. But only one form is present in our biochemistry. The new study does nothing to explain why or how this is so. As Wade explains:

A serious puzzle about the nature of life is that most of its molecules are right-handed or left-handed, whereas in nature mixtures of both forms exist. Dr. Joyce said he had hoped an explanation for the one-handedness of biological molecules would emerge from prebiotic chemistry, but Dr. Sutherland’s reactions do not supply any such explanation. One is certainly required …

It is good to see more accuracy in the reporting of evolutionary research.