Better Living Through Chemistry

The next problem to confront us is the explanation of how the present molecular complexity came to be in the first place. Although occasionally evolutionists will protest that their theory applies only to the study of changes in life once it has appeared, the exclusively materialistic nature of the theory demands a natural explanation for life's origins as well as its progress.

So what came before the cell? Charles Darwin had a thought on this question: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could never have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." He wrote that in 1871. Little has changed in 140 years.

We are actually less close to a naturalistic answer now than we were sixty years ago. And before that, in the 1920s biologists Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane proposed a theoretical model of life that (in brief) had four postulates:

1) The atmosphere of early earth was made up of reducing gases, with little or no free oxygen.

2) Into this atmosphere entered various forms of energy, such as lightning.

3) Essential organic compounds, formed by the interaction of energy with pre-organic chemicals, accumulated in pools.

4) From this hot prebiotic soup life emerged.

A famous experiment conducted by Stanley Miller in the early 1950s seemed to corroborate this model. At least, obligatory pictures of the Miller-Urey experiment grace practically every biology textbook, so it must have been a slam-dunk proof, right?

Maybe not.