Why Life Couldn’t Have Evolved
from Non-Living Chemicals
Why do chemical scientists formally reject the premise that life came from primordial soup?
The chemistry opposes the possibility.
See how below.
Here is a summarized version of the transcript in 5-10 bullet points:
- Information vs Matter/Energy (00:00): Information is distinct from matter or energy, but it often relies on them. For example, the information in a book is not from the ink molecules but from the author’s arrangement of them into meaningful content.
- Primordial Soup Theory (00:22): The idea of a “primordial soup” is widely presented, but there’s no geological evidence that such a soup ever existed on Earth.
- Abiogenesis and Chemical Evolution (01:16): The concept of abiogenesis, or life originating from non-living chemicals, is closely related to chemical evolution, but the chemistry doesn’t align with how life would form in practice.
- Richard Dawkins and Evolution (02:14): Evolutionary biology textbooks often discuss the origin of life, which implies that life came from non-living matter, suggesting that both evolution and abiogenesis are interconnected.
- Miller-Urey Experiment (03:32): The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment aimed to simulate the origin of life, but its conditions were flawed. For example, they used a reducing atmosphere not supported by evidence for early Earth.
- Problems with Miller-Urey Results (04:19): Even if amino acids were produced, the conditions used in the experiment would destroy any complex molecules formed, and further steps needed to synthesize life from these amino acids were not feasible.
- The Problem of Polymers (12:09): For life to form, complex polymers like RNA and DNA are necessary, but the Miller-Urey experiment didn’t provide the necessary building blocks in the right forms, especially in terms of the molecular structure.
- Chirality and the Origins of Life (24:32): The specific “handedness” of molecules (chirality) is crucial for life, and forming only one type of chirality is required. However, experiments have shown that it’s nearly impossible to achieve this without interference.
- DNA and Information (30:50): DNA contains complex information necessary for life, but the origin of that information is a challenge. Information cannot arise from matter alone—it requires a language or system to make sense of it.
- Irreducible Complexity and the Need for Intelligence (20:00): The complexity of DNA and life forms implies that intelligence is needed to create life. The idea of life emerging from random chemical reactions without guidance or design seems untenable.
These points highlight the scientific challenges to abiogenesis and the origin of life from non-living chemicals.
Title: “Why Life Couldn’t Have Evolved from Non-Living Chemicals”
Transcript: “(00:00)
– Information is not matter or energy, but often it rides upon matter and energy.
– Explain that.
– Take a paper book. It’s written in ink molecules on paper, but the information in the book, did not come from the ink molecules. It required the author to have the ink molecule arranged into letters and words and paragraphs, but it did not come from the ink. (00:22)
– We’ve all read that billions of years ago, there was a primordial soup.
– There’s no geological evidence that such a soup e ver existed on planet Earth. They’re relying on a scenario that has no geological evidence whatsoever.
– We’ve all read in science textbooks that billions of years ago, there was a primordial soup of chemicals that over those billions of years combined and recombined. (00:52) And from these random chemical reactions, the first cells emerged. And we call this abiogenesis, life coming from non-life. Now, Dr. Sarfati, I know that you have a PhD in chemistry from an accredited secular university. Yo u’ve written some of the bestselling creation books of all time. So to start off, talk to us about chemical evolution. (01:16) Is this the same as abiogenesis and the origin of life?
– Well, first of all, I wanna say that the bestselling creation book is the Bible. Okay, now, yes, I am a PhD chemist. And in fact, some of what I’ve done in the lab actually is very relevant to what we’re talking about. Now, abiogenesis is also called chemical evolution. (01:36) In fact, that’s an official title in many scientific papers, even academic departments with the title “Chemical Evolution.” And it’s the idea that life came from non-living chemicals. But in my experience, the chemistry goes in the wrong direction in many different respects.
– Okay, and we’ll get into that a little bit further on. (01:56) But also, some people will say that the issue of life’s origin is separate from evolution, and evolution doesn’t need to account for it. What do you say to that?
– Well, I mean, that would be new s to many of the biology textbooks, around on the evolutionary biology textbooks, which often have a discussion of the origin of first life. (02:14) You read Richard Dawkins, famous atheist and evolutionist, he would always discuss origin of the first life in his evolutionary propaganda books, okay? And the general theory of evolution as defined by G.A. Kerkut from Southampton University, who’s an evolutionary biologist, well, he’s dead now, but he defined the general theory of evolution as the theory that all living things, evolved from a single-celled creature, which itself came from an inorganic form, i.e. non-living chemicals. (02:48) And also to have Darwinian type evolution starting with natural selection, natural selection is defined as differential reproduction, which really means this thing is fitter than this thing, therefore this thing will leave more offspring. So what you need, you need to have something, these two things that will reproduce. (03:09) So, you must explain w here those reproducing things came from. Otherwise, Darwinian evolution is dead on the starting block and materialism is dead in the water.
– Right, that makes sense. Well, one of the icons of evolution in some ways that people will point to to talk about the origins of life is the Miller-Urey experiment. (03:32) Can you talk to us about what that experiment was and whether it can in fact explain the origins of life? – Well, the Miller experiment was published in 1953, quite an interesting year. That’s when the DNA double-helix structure was published and also when they climbed Mount Everest and when Queen Elizabeth II was coroneted, okay? Now what they would do, they sparked a mixture of gases and they applied either UV light or electric discharge. (03:59) And then they collected the results in a trap and using very sophisticated chemical techniques, which had been invented, just invented, they could find traces of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. But I think th e Miller-Urey experiment is good evidence of how life could not have happened. (04:19)
– Okay. – Okay. There are several things wrong with it. For instance, they use what they call a reducing atmosphere, which means rich in hydrogen-containing chemicals, like methane, ammonia, hydrogen itself, okay, which was on Jupiter and Saturn. But there’s actually no evidence that it was ever there on Earth, okay?
Now, they’re pointing towards carbon dioxide and nitrogen, which are much more inert and are m uch less favorable. (04:47) And also there seems to be evidence that oxygen was there, just almost from the beginning. Even if you look at evolutionary dating methods of very old rocks, there’s evidence of free oxygen. Now, oxygen is a very reactive chemical. We don’t think about it. We need oxygen for life. But in fact, we have machines, mechanisms to deal with excess oxygen. (05:11) Otherwise, it would poison us. I mean, antioxidants, you’re familiar with those, okay?
And oxygen in that mixture would stop anything from forming and would destroy anything that had been formed. But one paradox is that you need oxygen to have an ozone layer, okay? And so if you didn’t have oxygen, you have the ultraviolet light, pounding everything to smithereens, okay?
That’s one issue. (05:35) And the other thing is they had to have a trap, because the very energy sources that produce these things would destroy them even quicker. And is that really what would occur on the primordial Earth? See, even th e ocean would not be much of a trap, because ultraviolet can penetrate to tens of meters deep. (05:55)
I mean, you know you can get sunburn while swimming. You can get sunburn on a cloudy day. So, water is not very good at protection from UV, okay? And that’s incidentally an argument, against the canopy theory being so protective. Well, actually it wouldn’t be. It’s not a very protective stuff, protective shield against ultraviolet radiation, which would destroy those chemicals. (06:16) And especially if you argue for millions of years, because millions of years, means more time for destruction to occur.
– Right, so what I’m hearing you say is that, some of these conditions that were part of this experiment to create the building blocks of life, those very conditions, if they were not carefully managed by somebody in a lab, for example, those very conditions would actually destroy everything that they were trying to create. (06:40)
– That’s a real problem for them. And another thing is no one will take the results of the Miller experiment and try to do the next step, because even if they found traces of amino acids, they were a grossly contaminated gunk, extremely dilute, and the contamination would stop reactions going on, any further, okay? As they say they needed sophisticated chemistry to even separate the amino acids so they could detect them, okay? But you haven’t got that on a primordial Earth. (07:09) You’ve just got the amino acids in a whole sort of gunk, which woul in formation.
– Okay, so we’ve gotta ask, could this experiment produce life?
– Well, no. (07:44) They’d never use that because what they all do, okay, they say, we hear the Miller experiment produces a trace of this amino acid. So, let’s buy this amino acid from a chemical company and then do the next step in the reaction and produce a trace of another chemical, maybe two or three amino acids lined up together. (08:02) Oh, let’s go and buy that from the next chemical company. So, at every step red in water?
– Well, in fact, water is a last place I’d want to try to build up the big molecules from the little ones, because, for instance, when two of the amino acids form, it’s called a peptide bond and the protein is just a continuation of that. (09:21) See, every time they form that bond, they kick out a water molecule. So, the process is called condensation, and it’s polymerization, ’cause they’re making many different things as a polymer, okay, so condensation. But the thing is, you do o during the questions, I’ve actually asked him personally, I mean, would you ever use water in your reaction mixture? And he sort of, well, of course in those sort of things, I don’t ask a question unless I know the answer, okay? He sort of said, “Are you kidding me?” Well, that’s the whole point, yes. (10:49) That’s the whole point you, yeah, I was kidding him. That water is a ridiculous phase to do any sort of condensation reactions.
– Got it. And I know we’re about to start getting into some nucleic acids like RNA and DNA, which are involved in the information storage and processing systems of life. (12:09) And both of those are polymers. And therefore you need to explain how polymers, could have arisen from the monomers they assume arose in a Miller-type experiment. – Right, so uni-functional and bifunctional molecules are really important to this discussion.
– Okay. – So, can you talk to us a little bit about those?
– Okay. (12:31) I talked about the monomers, the individual build r stuff and where they meet nylon forms and you can take off that film and make it into a fiber and more as the film was drawn off, more comes, okay? And I showed how you could sabotage that by putting a uni-functional, a drop of uni functional theory and the film broke and it just, you couldn’t draw any more nylon out of it. (13:56) Okay, so I’ve done this myself. But the problem is the Miller-Urey experiment, produced about five times more of the uni-functional than the bifunctional. When I sa e half a percent you were saying, or like you put a drop in, if you drop any amount of that substance in there, it’s going to stop that reaction. And the whole thing is literally dead in the water.
– It is, correct. – So on that subject, let’s talk about cross reactions and why they’re important to this discussion. (15:21)
– Well see, any chemist trying to do a multi-step synthesis, trying to make something that requires a lot of different steps at every stage in the way he will try and purify the conditions to produce them. (16:32) And I’ll go into that when we talk about how to produce sugars. But also, they actually have undergo a cross reaction, because the amino acids have an amine group on one side, the sugars have what’s what’s called a carbonyl group, and they’re well known for reacting with each other to form what’s called amine group, okay? But that is what causes browning in foods. (16:56) They’re called Maillard reactions, okay? Like when you bruise an apple, what happens? That it’s a soup. It’s all just kind of a slurry blending together.
– And by the way, as an incidental thing, there’s no geological evidence that such a soup ever existed on planet Earth. (18:06) I mean, you’d expect to find certain traces of such a thing. There’s certain chemicals you expect to find if such a soup ever existed. But there’s no trace of that in the geological record. So, they’re relying on a scenario that has no geological evidence whatsoever.
– Right. So how far have they got with the grant that they did. Imagine they could go further in the future and start the genome, the cell structure, the enzymes and make them all from scratch. But how would that show that life could have arisen without intelligence? Because an enormous amount of intelligence was needed to make that self-reproducing cell, which seems to show that you need and intelligence to make life and not bundling chemicals. (20:00) And I’m talking about bundling, very advanced kinda chemicals, not just the simple for metabolism. So, sugars are important for metabolism and the information storage, so you need them. But in fact, sugars are quite unstable. And we’re talking about sort of years rather than the, I mean, millions of years, sugars I’d expect to break down in a primordial soup. (21:18) Now, how do they make them in these supposed simulations? Well, there’s a reaction called the Butlerov for the foremost reaction. And what they do is they take formaldehyde, which is a simple thing. It has one car 7)
– Correct, yeah. And yet, one of the most popular theories of origin in life is called the RNA world, which they assume that an RNA molecule, could do both the machinery of life like enzymes do, as well as the information part of life. But to get RNA, you have to have sugars. And that itself is enough of a problem for the RNA world. (22:56) So it’s interesting, a biochemist in New Zealand even wrote a paper called, “Why the RNA World is the Worst Theory of Origin Life, “Except for All the Oth t-handed sugars, okay? You need to have exclusive one handedness for the molecules of life. You see, the proteins, the enzymes are often tuned to atomic level precision. And you couldn’t get that if you got the other hand throwing off the orientation. (24:32) And when it comes to DNA or RNA, they had to form a double helix. And they also have to bond with the other. So, it’s a two a double strand. They had to have a sort of, what they call base pairing, that again, needs to have this spatial ori les that are physically shaped in two different ways. (25:53) And there’s basically one, we can call it left hand or right-handed in my case and one that’s left-handed. And basically, in order for life to form, you need essentially all of them to be of one hand or the other. Because if you drop even a small amount of the other handed molecule in there, it’s gonna throw off everything and stop the reaction, right?
– Well, in the case of forming, say RNA on a template, because it will throw off th to destroy sugars once they’re made. (27:25) But also alkali helps to undo the handedness you build up.
– Okay. – So again, another example of incompatible reaction conditions to make the sugars and to make the proteins, ’cause the alkali is just what you don’t want when you try to make a protein, because of the racemization, going to 50/50 mixture when alkali is present. (27:46)
– Right, and so to clarify, when we’re talking about racemization, what we mean is we have our one-handed mixture, l with one hand or the other. (28:51) And where do those things come from? They come from living things, okay? So it’s interesting, where did the first chiral stuff come from? Because when we do a chemistry lab, we actually assuming the chirality is already there from living things, okay? So, that’s how I separated the two. But then you add activated charcoal to the mixture and it quickly went back to the racemate, the 50/50 form. (29:18) And this is what would’ve happened, even if you somehow got totally the opposite of what you need.
– Exactly. Okay, well let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about DNA, because we’ve been talking a lot about the basic building blocks and the conditions that need to happen to turn those into something complex like DNA. Why can’t evolution explain coded information within DNA? – Well, first of all, let’s talk about DNA, that is the coding molecule of life, okay? It’s quite an interesting molecule. (30:50) It stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. Now remembe ry cell in your body probably has 3 million, letters worth of damage every day, out of the 3 billion letters you got. (32:01) You got a million every day. So, you have to have repair machines to make sure that’s not gonna happen. But of course the primordial soup, wouldn’t have repair machines. Now, that’s a problem. And the thing is, DNA has the instructions to build its own repair machines.
– Yeah. – But unless you had repair machines, those instructions will be degraded and therefore not make e as a fertilized cell, okay? So, it’s a very important molecule for life. But the thing is, where does the information come from?
– Right. (33:30) – See, information is not matter or energy, but often it rides upon matter and energy, but it is not from the matter and energy.
– Explain that, yeah. – Okay, well see your computer screen or take a paper book. Okay, take a paper book, okay? It is written in ink molecules on paper. But the information in the book, did not come from the ink molecules. k. You’d have to have the flexibility. – You could write one book and that was it.
– That’s right. And the other thing, my books aren’t any used to you, unless you know language, right? You have to know English. And again, DNA, you had to have certain languages to make sense of the instructions. (35:14)
– Right, so the DNA, not only does it contain, we’ve talked about how it contains the instructions for life. We’ve talked about how DNA contains a lot of information and how that information not d, perfect. And what we see is it’s deteriorated. It’s coming downhill. It’s not coming from down here, ’cause it couldn’t be down here, ’cause it would actually get worse. It would never get better. But actually everything would degrade if it was down here. (36:38) Another thing is that DNA, well think about it’s several feet long and in your cell you’ve got a microscopic cell and your DNA might be two nanometers in diameter, the thickness of it, very thin, but it’s feet long if it was straight ircle. – And to reproduce them. Yeah, yeah. Well, for instance, there’s an antibiotic class, it’s called fluoroquinolone. Okay, that’s a type of antibiotic that you have. And what that does is stops these machines from putting the DNA back together again.
– Oh, okay. – Oh, that’s a problem, because it goes through, snips the DNA apart, but then doesn’t put it back together again. (38:15) – And that’s the end of it. – That’s the end of it. – And that kills the organism. – Yeah, so that’s how some the irreducible complexity emphasize the actual structure, while Sanford’s term emphasizes the function, but they sort of mean the same thing. (39:33) You had to have a certain function, before it could even be working in the first place, okay?
– Can you break that down a little bit more for us? – Well, okay. So, the topoisomerase has to do three different things. And if it didn’t do all three, it would actually do more harm than good. So, until it got to that level, it’s actually, it may as we language from DNA to proteins. That’s one language. (41:02) But you also got language on how the proteins, which ones are made and which are not made. And also things about where it is in this spatially located in the cell. And even as far as the time is concerned. Okay, I mean think about your eye cell, okay? Your eye cells have bone and muscle information, but it’s all switched off. (41:26) – Interesting.
– Yeah, but which means the eye cell, probably have the information for making eyes sort d so for for decades, people didn’t work out the incredible function that the junk DNA has, because the ENCODE project show that, about at least 90% of DNA is transcribed into RNA and then the words RNA copy of the DNA information is made, which means it’s doing something which means it’s part of the operating system. (42:49) And Australian biogeneticist, John Mattick, he said last millennium that the junk DNA is the biggest blunder of molecular biology. And then he became the head of the Genomi d class expert in carbohydrates, in other words sugars and the things coming from it, he gave three lectures to a introductory class on origin of first life, okay? (44:09)
And he invited me to have one lecture, just one to his three to try to take it apart. But he admitted afterwards that if a vote was taken, he would surely have come off worse. He realized I’d made some major hurdles to his theories, but in fact it wasn’t that hard, because I used the chemistry I had learned from him. (44:25) – y guide and it talks about lots of different aspects, including origin of first life, which I do a bit of talking in that one. But it also even ends with the ethical and moral implications of your worldview, goes into the evolutionary foundations of the Holocaust for instance. (45:44)
It’s interesting, a long age Christian apologist, Frank Turek actually played a clip from “Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels” when he debated an atheist about the need for a God to have founda”