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 article at TheDebrief.org with the false headline "DARWIN’S THEORIES ABOUT LIFE ON EARTH GAIN FRESH SUPPORT, MAY AID THE SEARCH FOR LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS." We have an attempt to persuade us that Charles Darwin was some brilliant origin-of-life theorist. The article starts out with a gigantic photo of a statue of Darwin.
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."
This was no theory of the origin of life. 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.
Here are some of the misstatements in the article at TheDebrief.org:
(1) The claim that "theories postulate that life came from outside Earth and was seeded here by comets and meteors" have "gained some support as researchers have discovered amino acids and other building blocks of life on objects that originated outside Earth." No, that's not true, because the amino acids were found in only the tiniest trace amounts (like 1 part in a billion), and because amino acids are not correctly described as "building blocks of life." The complex subunits of one-celled life are organelles; the complex subunits of organelles are protein complexes; and the complex subunits of protein complexes are proteins consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acids. In none of these cases is it correct to be using the term "building blocks" because the components are so complex and well-arranged organizations of matter that they are not properly compared to building blocks, which are things like bricks that are not well-organized units of matter.
(2) The claim that "Early efforts to understand how life first emerged were able to create amino acids from lifeless matter, essentially marking the first step from a lifeless Earth to one teeming with life." Amino acids have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. The famed Miller-Urey experiment was not such an experiment, for reasons discussed here.
(3) The untrue claim that "researchers were able to coax these amino acids into forming the building blocks of RNA, which is essentially the backbone of DNA and all life." This did not happen. The building blocks of RNA are nucleosides and nucleotides, which are not amino acids, and are not built from amino acids. And RNA is not the backbone of DNA, but a type of nucleic acid different from DNA.
The article refers us to some paper that did no experiments offering any progress in explaining the origin of life. The paper merely discusses measurements of phosphate levels in two little lakes in Canada that are high in phosphates. These are kind of like ponds of soda. That's no progress in unraveling the origin of life. In the paper we learn that virtually every pond or lake on Earth has much too little phosphorus to be a credible origin of life spot. That's hardly something that supports Darwin's "warm little pond" idea.
We can excuse the TheDebrief.org article writer making all these errors, because it seems (based on his LinkedIn profile) that his main writing work in recent years has been in fantasy and science fiction. But it's harder to excuse the scientist quoted in the article, who makes this misleading statement: "This study adds to growing evidence that evaporative soda lakes are environments meeting the requirements for origin-of-life chemistry by accumulating key ingredients at high concentrations." The origin of life would require a huge amount of information origination and a very high degree of organization, about the same as the information origination and organization needed to produce a well-written useful technical manual of 100 pages. You don't get such a thing by merely "accumulating key ingredients at high concentrations." The scientist quoted has given us more of the accumulation nonsense that has been coming from Darwinists for 160 years, the erroneous idea that great works of innovative biological engineering can be produced by mere accumulation. This is the hogwash of trying to explain information-rich marvels of gigantic hierarchical organization by merely spouting some soundbite that is the equivalent of "stuff piles up."
Almost as bad a treatment is found on the press release here. Every time any origin-of-life article uses the term "building blocks of life" we are being misled. The term is very misleading for two reasons:
(1) Speaking of "building blocks of life" suggests the idea that life can arise from an unordered "nothing special" arrangement of building components, because building blocks do not have to be arranged in any special order or sequence. But things such as functional proteins require an arrangement of parts as special as the arrangement of letters in a functional paragraph.
(2) Speaking of "building blocks of life" suggests that life can be assembled from simple components, because building blocks are simple things with no structure. But life can only be assembled from very complex well-arranged subunits with very special structures.
Similarly, every time any one talks about life arising from an accumulation of ingredients we are being misled. Terms such as "adding the right ingredients" are suitable only when talking about the creation of things that have no special arrangement, things such as salads and soups and potions.
There is a strong reason for excluding the idea that there could have even been such a thing as a "warm little pond" at the time when scientists claim that life first originated. It is claimed that life first originated 3.5 billion years ago. But at the time (according to solar astronomers) the heat from the sun was much less, and temperatures on Earth therefore should have been much lower -- so much lower that every pond on Earth should have been frozen. This is the paradox called the Faint Young Sun paradox, and it is still unsolved. All claimed solutions to the paradox are speculative and not well-supported by evidence. I may note that the article quoted above has referred us to lakes in Canada as being some place being like the "warm pond" imagined by Darwin, but 3.5 billion years ago Canada would be the least likely place to have something like a "warm pond."
- "The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists, 2018.
- "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules." John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411.
- "The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature." -- 3 scientists (link).
- "The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter.
- "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins} represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid' from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
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