When Explanation Attempts Are Like Ring Kissing

The ancient philosopher Aristotle helped science get started, but for centuries Aristotle's followers helped retard the growth of experimental science. Again and again, Renaissance writers would speak as if there was no need to experimentally determine something, because Aristotle had taught what the truth was about some matter. It was eventually discovered that many of Aristotle's opinions were wrong, such as his idea that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter bodies. 

Scientific academia has failed to draw the right lesson from Aristotle fervor, which is never become some kind of devotee of any previous thinker on scientific matters. Nowadays in academia and its satellite  press workers, we see a blind devotion to the thought of the nineteenth century biologist Charles Darwin, a kind of fanboy fervor as astray as any Aristotle avidity of the Renaissance era.  The custom of kissing the ring is something some people do to pledge their allegiance to someone else, such as a pope or an organization head.  Darwin devotees keep pledging their ideological allegiance by writing pieces that are like kisses on the ring of a dead man. 

The latest "kiss the dead man's ring" piece in the science press is a laughable BBC article attempting to persuade us that Charles Darwin was some brilliant origin-of-life theorist.  Entitled "Darwin's hunch about early life was probably right," the piece is laughable partially because Darwin's published works contain no deep thoughts about the origin of life.  The only thing Darwin wrote having any relevance to the origin of life was a mere sentence he wrote in some letter on February 1, 1871. All he said was this: "But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter will be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."

Our BBC writer insinuates that this single statement was some theory about the origin of life. It was no such thing. It was merely a speculation about the origin of a single protein compound -- a very incorrect speculation, since proteins are not created from either ammonia or phosphoric salts.  The origin of even the simplest living thing would require the origin of many different types of proteins, almost certainly well over 50, along with a lot more, such as DNA.  There is a world of difference between a single protein and even the simplest living thing.  

We have two possible belief options here. Option 1 is you can believe that Darwin did not advance any such thing as a theory of the origin of life, but merely wrote a sentence suggesting a single protein may have originated in a warm pond. In that case, you cannot say that Darwin was probably right about the origin of life,  as you believe that he said nothing about it. Option 2 is you can believe that Darwin somehow thought the origin of a protein was equivalent to the origin of life, and that therefore he did advance a theory of the origin of life. If you take that belief option, then you must believe that Darwin was very wrong about the origin of life, because the difference between a single protein and the simplest living thing is like the difference between a single page and a book.  

So either Darwin did not advance a theory of the origin of life, or he advanced a theory that is dead wrong. It is quite false to claim (as the BBC article does) that Darwin advanced an idea of the origin of life that was "probably right." After describing his thoughts as a mere "beginning of a hypothesis," the BBC article confesses "it reads as if Darwin was thinking his hypothesis through even as he wrote it down," which makes it sound like Darwin gave no more than a moment's thought to such a question. So what is our BBC article doing trying to pass off such a fleeting half-thought as something profound?  

In the BBC article, we have the standard baloney about the Miller-Urey experiment: "In 1953, a young American student named Stanley Miller showed that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could form in a simple apparatus that mimicked the primordial ocean and atmosphere."  This very false claim (which has been told for seventy years in origin-of-life literature) continues to be repeated endless times by writers and scientists trying to persuade us that life may have naturally originated.  It is has been admitted for many years that the Miller-Urey experiment did not use a realistic mixture of gases corresponding to the gases that would have existed in the early Earth's atmosphere.  A second reason why the enclosed glass apparatus of the Miller-Urey experiment never "mimicked the primordial ocean and atmosphere" is that you cannot mimic the vast expanses of the ocean and atmosphere by using an enclosed glass apparatus that will tend to produce concentrations of chemicals something like 1,000,000,000,000,000 times more concentrated than would ever form in the open atmosphere and ocean.  A third  reason why the enclosed glass apparatus of the Miller-Urey experiment never "mimicked the primordial ocean and atmosphere" is that it used lightning-like energy running continuously for days, while in nature lightning only occurs at rare instances.  Claiming the Miller-Urey experiment was a realistic simulation of the early Earth is like claiming that a shaken Christmas snowglobe is a realistic simulation of a snowstorm.

We also have in the BBC articles some references to papers behind paywalls, references attempting to make us think that scientists have made some progress in figuring out some realistic chemical pathways by which building blocks of life could originate in a warm pond.  Scientists have not done any such thing, and they have made no real progress in substantiating the idea that life might have naturally arisen from chemicals. To the contrary, everything that has been learned about the functional complexity of life speaks against such a theory.  We know that a protein molecule typically consists of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve some specific functional effect, making the accidental appearance of a functional protein molecule as unlikely as the accidental appearance of a poem as good as a Shakespeare sonnet from a bucket of Scrabble letters poured onto the ground.  We know that in countless different ways, life is almost infinitely more organized and functionally complex and fine-tuned than Darwin ever imagined, making claims that he understood something about the origin of species or the origin of life seem like some claim that Aristotle understood how digital computers work.  

The simplest living thing is a cell, and the building blocks of cells are proteins and nucleic acids such as RNA and DNA.  No experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions has ever produced a protein, a DNA molecule, an RNA molecule, or even any of the building blocks of any such things.  The building blocks of protein molecules are amino acids, and the building blocks of RNA and DNA are nucleotides. No amino acid and no nucleotide has ever been produced through any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. 

The BBC article also does the usual trick of referring to experiments producing mere fatty bubbles, and calling such things "protocells." Fatty bubbles are not the beginning of cells.  The BBC article also refers to some research with procedural flaws I discuss here, research which does not at all qualify as the production of amino acids or nucleotides through an experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions.  The article makes this untrue claim: "There is also a lot of evidence that the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight can drive the formation of key biological chemicals – especially RNA, a nucleic acid similar to DNA thought to have been a crucial component in creating the first life." No, you can't use ultraviolet radiation to make RNA or any of the building blocks of RNA or DNA or a protein in any realistic experimental simulation of the early Earth; and ultraviolet radiation would have done more to hinder a natural origin of life than to help it.   

The BBC article conveniently fails to discuss the functional complexity required for even the simplest thing, fails to discuss the very high complexity and functional specificity of protein molecules, and fails to tell us that a self-reproducing cell would require many different types of protein molecules, each a different complex invention. Using a photo display size larger than any I have ever used on any of my blogs, the article includes a huge picture of Darwin, a picture that fills up my whole PC monitor.  That's the kind of thing that fanboy devotees do: they put up huge pictures of their idol like Marxists or Maoists erecting huge building-sized posters of Marx or Lenin or Chairman Mao. Of course, if you're trying to sell people on some accidental origin of life, it's much better to show some huge Darwin portrait than some visual that might give someone a clue about how organized the matter is in a cell, something like a visual of a protein molecule. 

An exquisitely organized protein quaternary structure (see here for image credits )

In general Darwinism fails to explain the first stages of useful structures. This was pointed out very clearly in Darwin's time by the biologist Mivart, who wrote the following at the beginning of Chapter II of his book On the Genesis of Species: "Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may later become." Mivart devoted Chapter II of that book to many examples of "incipient stages" that Darwinism could not explain well, and asked, "how are the preservation and development of the first rudiments of limbs to be accounted for— such rudiments being, on the hypothesis in question, infinitesimal and functionless?"  A similar objection was made by physician Gustave Geley in his interesting work From the Unconscious to the Conscious.  He mentioned "embryonic" organs or structures that are "merely adumbrated" to refer to some mere useless preliminary fragment of an organ, limb or structure. He stated the following: 

"It is not difficult to show that neither the Darwinian 

nor the Lamarckian hypothesis enables us to understand 

the origin of characteristics that constitute a new 

species...In order that any given modification occurring in 

the characteristics of a species or an individual, should 

give to that species or to that individual an appreciable 

advantage in the struggle for life, it is evident that this 

modification must be sufficiently marked to be utilizable. 

Now an embryonic organ, a modification merely 

adumbrated, appearing by chance in a being or a group 

of beings, can be of no practical use and give them no 

advantage....Now an embryonic 

wing, appearing by chance, one knows neither how nor 

why, in the ancestral reptile, could not give that reptile 

the capacity or the advantage of flight, and would give 

it no superiority over other reptiles unprovided with the 

unusable rudiment. It is therefore impossible to attribute 

to natural selection the transition from reptile to bird. 

...Rudiments of legs and lungs would give no 

advantage to a fish...It is  indispensable that its heart, lungs, and organs of locomotion should be already sufficiently developed to allow it to live out of the water."

Exactly the same objection applies a thousand-fold when we realize that protein molecules (intricate and very "have to be just right" things that degrade in function very much under small changes) are not at all useful in some preliminary quarter-form or half-form.  A science site tells us that "proteins are fragile molecules that are remarkably sensitive to changes in structure," and a biology textbook tells us that "proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." There are more than 20,000 types of such protein molecules in the human body, each a different complex innovation. What good is half of a protein molecule? No good at all. And what good is the whole protein molecule? No good at all, unless it is a part of some fantastically intricate functional system requiring enormous teamwork between very many types of protein molecules and other types of fine-tuned molecules. Such enormously fine-tuned teamwork involving so many intricate parts acting together with such teleological harmony would never accidentally arise in a warm pond.