For 70 years people have been told one of the most outrageous fictions of materialism: the groundless claim that lightning did something to "jump-start" life. This fairy tale began when the Miller-Urey experiment occurred. Using a very specially constructed glass apparatus bearing no resemblance to anything that would have existed in the early Earth, an apparatus they filled with gases that did not match the atmosphere of the early Earth, Miller and Urey subjected the gases to intense levels of lightning-like electrical bombardment vastly greater than any part of Earth ever would have experienced billions of years ago. Running this utterly unnatural contraption for a week, they succeeded in producing some amino acids, which are some of the components of proteins.
Because of its utterly unnatural arrangement, the experiment did nothing to support the idea of abiogenesis, the idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. But materialists began hailing the Miller-Urey experiment as some great breakthrough showing that lightning could produce what they called "building blocks of life." For the next seventy years, the science press told us the groundless fiction that the Miller-Urey experiment did something to show that lightning could have produced "building blocks of life." The lies about the Miller-Urey experiment continued full blast, for many years after scientists reached a consensus that the early Earth had an atmosphere vastly different from the gases used in the Miller-Urey experiment. That's how things go in the ideology-entangled world of science literature. When stories seem to provide useful talking points that help bolster some cherished dogma of scientists, the stories just keep being told year after year, no matter how clearly the stories have been debunked.
Recently the science press gave us additional evidence that it has no credibility when writing on topics related to the origin of life. Harvard researchers did an experiment trying to see what chemicals might arise from lightning strikes in the early Earth. The experiment was a dismal failure, failing to produce even one of the amino acids produced by the Miller-Urey experiment. The experiment produced no chemicals that are any type of building block of life, and produced only outputs very, very slightly more complex than its inputs. But the science press reported this failure as glorious evidence that lightning can jump-start the origin of life.
The experiment is described in the paper "Mimicking lightning-induced electrochemistry on the early Earth." The paper is behind a paywall, but in a case like this you can very safely assume that the best results are described in the paper's abstract, which you can read here. The abstract states this:
"To test the hypothesis that an abiotic Earth and its inert atmosphere could form chemically reactive carbon- and nitrogen-containing compounds, we designed a plasma electrochemical setup to mimic lightning-induced electrochemistry under steady-state conditions of the early Earth. Air-gap electrochemical reactions at air–water–ground interfaces lead to remarkable yields, with up to 40 moles of carbon dioxide being reduced into carbon monoxide and formic acid, and 3 moles of gaseous nitrogen being fixed into nitrate, nitrite, and ammonium ions, per mole of transmitted electrons. Interfaces enable reactants (e.g., minerals) that may have been on land, in lakes, and in oceans to participate in radical and redox reactions, leading to higher yields compared to gas-phase-only reactions. Cloud-to-ground lightning strikes could have generated high concentrations of reactive molecules locally, establishing diverse feedstocks for early life to emerge and survive globally."
Don't be fooled by that last sentence, which is actually an indication of failure. When people doing origin-of-life experiments fail to produce anything interesting, they lamely appeal to "feedstocks," a term meaning raw material. The result described above is a failure to produce anything that encourages the idea that life could have arisen naturally from non-life. We have no mention of the production of any amino acid, and the authors surely would have reported such a production in their abstract if any amino acids had been produced. We have no mention of anything other than the simplest chemicals.
The "formic acid" referred to is a very simple five-atom chemical with a formula of CH202. The "nitrate" referred to is a very simple chemical with a formula of N03. The "nitrite" referred to is a very simple chemical with a formula of N02. The "ammonium" referred to is a very simple chemical with a formula of NH4. We can contrast these chemicals (each having five atoms or fewer) with amino acids. There are twenty types of amino acids used by living things. The simplest (glycine) has ten atoms, and has a formula of C2H5N02. The most complex amino acid (tryptophan) has a formula of C11H12N202, and has a total of 27 atoms.
So the experiment mentioned failed to produce any of the simplest components of living things, failing to produce any amino acids. But how did the science press describe this failure? With utterly misleading headlines or with articles containing false claims about what the experiment produced. Newsweek gave us a phony headline of "Scientists Explain How Lightning May Have Kick-Started Life on Earth," along with the false claim that "a new study suggests that cloud-to-ground lightning might have been key in creating the building blocks essential for life on Earth from nitrogen and carbon." Similarly, www.phys.org gave us an equally bogus headline of "Study suggests cloud-to-ground lightning strikes may have generated building blocks for life on Earth." An article on the experiment at www.space.com tells us the experiment "performed an updated version of the Urey-Miller experiment" and tells us incorrectly that the experiment "created the right building blocks for life." None of the chemicals yielded by the experiment can truthfully be called building blocks of life. Even the simplest one-celled life is a state of enormous complexity requiring a very special arrangement of more than 100,000 atoms. The experiment produced only outputs very, very slightly more complex than its inputs.
None of the press stories on this experiment gave us the truth here: that the latest experiment trying to produce results like that of the Miller-Urey experiment has in fact completely failed to produce any of the amino acids produced by that experiment. The performance of science journalists in covering the "Mimicking lightning-induced electrochemistry on the early Earth" paper has been appalling. We are left with the impression of science journalists acting as the most careless cheerleaders. Their dismal performance was similar to their recent handling of a NASA announcement about a rock discovered on Mars. There was zero evidence provided that the rock was any sign of life, but the science press parroted the groundless "potential sign of life" storyline, one that seemed to have been created to help drum up funding for a floundering Mars sample return mission. The failure to discover any amino acids on Mars makes the claim of "potential sign of life" unbelievable.
The past seventy years of literature about origin-of-life research has been a literature filled with deceit and misleading statements. Never has so much boasting and hype been written by so many when the results were so minimal and meager.
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