Nonsense in an Episode of "How the Universe Works"

The long-running TV series "How the Universe Works" can now be watched on HBO Max. Let us look at an episode where the series showed scientists saying things that were misleading or stupid. 

In Episode 4 of Season 10 we have an episode entitled "Dark History of Earth."  At the 23:56 we have a description of a Japanese experiment. We are told that Japanese scientists simulated the conditions of the early Earth and then tried to reproduce what would happen if you smashed a meteorite into the early Earth. We are told that amino acids were created (without any mention of the amounts). 

A look at the scientific paper ("Impact-induced amino acid formation on Hadean Earth and Noachian Mars") shows that the scientists tried to simulate a meteorite impact using a gun which fired at a speed of 1 kilometer per second. Meteorites hitting the earth hit the ground at a speed of only about 100 or 200 meters per second. The amino acids reportedly detected were claimed to have been detected at only the most negligible trace amounts of about 1 nanomole, roughly 1 part per billion (Figure 2). Because the reported levels were so miniscule, they probably are mere amino acids already present in the sample, before the gun fired. No robust evidence was provided that amino acids are created by meteorite impacts. The authors mention that amino acids supposedly produced by similar experiments may be the result of mere contamination, but fail to specify safeguards they took to prevent such contamination in their experiment. 

Around the 25:00 mark the TV show incorrectly claims, "The experiment proves that meteorite impacts can help build the components for life." No, it did not, because of the negligible amino acids amounts reported, and because of the impossibility of telling whether they arose from any activity simulating a meteorite impact. The narrator then says something more is needed for life to arise. We then hear around the 25:10 mark an astrophysicist compare the origin of life to making a cake from the right ingredients. This is an enormously misleading analogy. Even the simplest life would require a state of organization exponentially greater than the minimal amount of organization to make a cake. A three-layer cake with frosting is not a highly organized structure, but merely a structure with the most minimal organization. 

What would be a realistic analogy for the accidental origin of life from non-life? It would be the analogy of a 100-page technical manual arising from accidental ink splashes. Because even the simplest living thing requires hundreds of types of protein molecules each requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids, the probability of life accidentally arising from non-life is roughly comparable to the probability of accidental ink splashes producing a 100-page well-written useful technical manual. 

Misleading us very badly and teaching absurd nonsense, the narrator says at the 25:30 make, "We thought that the violence of asteroid impacts prevented life from forming. Now, we think they could be an essential ingredient." Senselessly, some woman talks about ideal "Petri dish" conditions for early life, just as we see some visual of a meteorite plunging into a sea of lava. The show has gone crazy, it seems. A Petri dish is a glass container protecting some microbes from harm, which is the exact opposite of the sterilizing conditions visually depicted while the woman refers to a Petri dish. It's like someone claiming that your poodle will have an ideal spot to relax if you put him in your tumble dryer for a 40-minute spinning cycle. 

We then around the 27:00 mark hear the astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell saying, "The sort of chemistry that goes on in these hydrothermal fluids seems to be the right kind of chemistry for creating life." Hogwash. BS. Baloney. No scientist understands any such thing as a "kind of chemistry for creating life" from lifeless matter. Any scientists claiming to understand any such thing is misleading you very badly. All experiments trying to create life from lifeless matter have been the most dismal failures.

The narrator then talks equally bad nonsense, saying around the 27:15 mark, "Once again Earth got lucky. Impacts that could have destroyed everything may have helped spark life into existence." The idea that you can "spark into existence" life from non-life is very bad nonsense. Even the simplest living thing is an information-rich state of very high organization. You can no more "spark into existence" such life than a thunderbolt striking a tree can produce a 100-page book. 

Around  the 30:20 mark the show starts to discuss homochirality, without decently explaining it. Chemicals such as amino acids and sugars can be either left-handed or right handed. A left handed amino acid looks like a mirror image of the right-handed amino acid, and a right-handed sugar looks like the mirror image of a left-handed sugar. Homochirality is the fact that in living things essentially all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA are right-handed. But when such things are synthesized in a laboratory, you see equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids and equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed sugars.

Based on the fact that it is just as easy for left-handed amino acids to form in the laboratory as right-handed amino acids, and just as easy for left-handed sugars to form in the laboratory as right-handed sugars, we would expect for there to be a symmetry in the handedness of amino acids, with an equal amount of left-handed and right-handed amino acids. We would also would expect a symmetry in the handedness of sugars, with equal amounts of left-handed sugars and right-handed sugars. But what we see is a puzzling asymmetry, with living things having only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars in DNA. This puzzling asymmetry is the long-standing unresolved mystery of homochirality. Homochirality is a major reason for suspecting that the origin of life required purposeful design, and could not have occurred by accident. 

At the 30:30 mark the TV show laughably suggests cosmic rays as an explanation for homochirality, saying, "The reason may have been cosmic rays." I won't bother to summarize the speculation that followed, merely telling you that it is one of those "some scientists believe" affairs. You can read my post here for an explanation of why cosmic rays do nothing to remove the mystery of homochirality. 

In the last quarter of the show, we have all kinds of nonsense, such as the claim at 35:43 that an asteroid striking Earth 66 million years ago "gave us a push forward." At the 38:49 some scientist witlessly describes himself as a "furry primate," mentioning an asteroid impact, and claiming he is "here because of it." An event getting rid of dinosaurs does not actually explain the appearance of mammals, nor does it explain the appearance of humans. 

We have a nonsensical attempt to account for the origin of flowering plants.  We hear this:

"Before the asteroid strike, conifers and ferns dominated the tropical forests of South America. But afterwards, falling ash from the impact enriched the soil. And fast growing flowering plants took over. "

Actually, the fossil record shows flowering plants first appearing about 120 to 140 million years ago, long before the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs (believed to have occurred about 66 million years ago). Such plants appear in a sudden burst that is not explained by Darwinian evolution. Here is a relevant quote:

"Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University 

of London.

No one familiar with the Cambrian Explosion should be too shocked to read the quote above. In the Cambrian Explosion, almost all of the animal phyla (the main types of animals) appeared in a relatively short period of time, contrary to what is predicted by Darwinism. The diagram below depicts when animal phyla appeared during the past billion years. 

At the 41:06 mark in the TV show we hear a scientist saying "we need these disasters for evolution to work," thereby suggesting some giant hole in evolutionary explanations, which prior to the year 1980 did not appeal to disasters caused by things such as asteroid collisions. The truth is that with or without asteroid collisions, evolutionary ideas and Darwinist ideas fail to provide any credible explanations for the origin of species or the origin of very complex biological innovations. 

Postscript: There's another deus ex machina abiogenesis believers appeal to: the possibility of comets colliding with the early Earth and providing some of the "building blocks" of life. On the day of this post's publication, there was published the paper here. It states this:

"Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event. Our results therefore challenge the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth."