No evidence life arose near seafloor hydrothermal vents.
While secular scientists believe life began on earth about 3.8 billion years ago, they are still mystified as to how it could have happened. One popular theory states that simple metabolic reactions around ancient seafloor hot springs could have enabled the jump from non-life to a living world.
In 1977, scientists were surprised to find biological communities without the benefit of sunlight existing around seafloor hydrothermal vents. They were thriving on a chemical soup consisting of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfur which was spewing forth from geysers. That discovery led to a new hypothesis—a simple sulfur-containing carbon compound called "methanethiol," which is thought to be a geologic precursor of the Acetyl-CoA enzyme found in many organisms including humans, could have been the "starter dough" from which all life emerged.
Geochemists Eoghan Reeves, Jeff Seewald, and Jill McDermott set out to research this idea. Knowing that hydrogen, carbon dioxide and sulfide are common ingredients in the hydrothermal smoker fluids, Reeves said, "The thought was that making methanethiol from these basic ingredients at seafloor hydrothermal vents should therefore have been an easy process." It turned out not to be easy at all.
The researchers first went to the hydrothermal vents where the chemistry was favorable for finding abundant methanethiol and to other vents where little methanethiol was expected. They thought they would find a lot of methanethiol especially where there was a lot of hydrogen. After doing measurements of 38 hydrothermal fluids from multiple sites, the scientists were forced to admit that little methanethiol was found at hydrogen-rich environments while, surprisingly, more methanethiol was found at low-hydrogen sites.
"What we essentially found in our survey is that we don't think methanethiol is forming by purely chemical means without the involvement of life. This might be disappointing news for anyone assuming an easy start for hydrothermal proto-metabolism," says Reeves. But, “the hydrothermal environment is still a perfect place to support early life, and the question of how it all started is still open."
Still, the researchers tried to salvage something from their research. "Our finding that methanethiol may be readily forming as a breakdown product of microbial life provides further indication that life is present and widespread below the seafloor and is very exciting," Reeves said. The scientists believe the new understanding could cause changes in how astronomers go about searching for life in space.
The research was supported in large part by the tax-supported National Science Foundation and NASA. Many creationists and other Christians will likely see a problem with this. Numerous attempts to create life from non-life in the laboratory have failed. Therefore, it seems to be a product of secular faith to think life from non-life could have happened or is happening somewhere in nature. Some may wonder then why the government is financially supporting a secular faith while denying any direct financial support for religious faiths.
Nevertheless, Bible believers don’t have to spend a dime to discover the answer to how life arose on our planet. It’s right there in the book of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds’ And it was so” (Genesis 1:11). “And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky” (Genesis 1:20). “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).
Also, unlike secularists who see no purpose in man being here, Christians know the reason. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). Having been given saving faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior from sin, we now desire to please the Lord for all His gifts by living a holy life full of good deeds, not because we have to but because we want to. Perhaps the best good work we can do is to use God’s Word to convince unbelievers of their need for a Savior and to lead them to their one and only Savior, the God-man Jesus Christ.
Reference: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “Study tests theory that life originated at deep sea vents,” Science Daily.
(Photograph of carbon dioxide shooting out of a vent in the Marianas Trench, from Wikipedia, by NOAA.)
(Thanks to B N for suggesting this story.)
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QUESTION OF THE DAY
What is one way of preserving bread?
If bread often goes stale before the loaf can be finished off, it may be worthwhile to try putting three slices each of fresh bread into sandwich bags and then freeze them. Remove the little bags from the freezer as needed. The bread likely will be fresher tasting and avoid freeze burn too.
Source: USA Weekend (March 28-30, 2014)
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NOTE ON VISITOR COMMENTS: Visitor comments are invited including those containing alternate views. However, comments containing profanity, personal attacks or advertisements will not be published. After posting a comment, please allow several hours for it to appear on the blog.
If sectarian "science", aka religious apologetics, is to erroneously characterize science in the manner of how "biblical historians" erroneously characterize history, this is an excellent example. The submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life (SAEL) was not "squashed" as the authors of the paper themselves note, " “the hydrothermal environment is still a perfect place to support early life, and the question of how it all started is still open."
ReplyDeleteThe result has been made somewhat irrelevant due to the amazing progress on SAEL. It was proposed as an alternate, redundant, pathway to formate, purely from the thermodynamics considerations now shown wrong. More crucially, it was thought to be a provider of methyl groups in the earlier separate methanogene and acetogene pathways of SAEL cells. [Martin and Russell 2007, http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/362/1486/1887.long ]
However, the recent find of a phylogenetic UCA metabolism has shown that the methyl group is provided by a non-enzymatic pathway from vent-produced CH4 rather than from CO. The UCA had both CO2 and C4 as substrate with the help of a potent oxidizer such as NO2 that was present in high steady state concentrations in the Hadean. ["Beating the acetyl coenzyme A-pathway to the origin of life", Nitschke and Russel 2013]
I think a heads up is warranted. We can now, since 2013, tie extant life biochemical systems to extant almost-life geochemical systems such as the Lost City alkaline vents by way of phylogeny. The Hadean submarine alkaline vents shared relative element ratios, cell compartments, membranes, pH differentials, import part of chemiosmosis and the crucial Atwood engines of metabolism that electron bifurcating atoms makes with early cells and some modern cells still. It remains to fill in details such as these on the importance of methanethiol, but it won't likely move the generic find of a fully testable emergent process between chemical and biological evolution. [For a review of this flowering field, see this: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-115 ]
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ReplyDeleteFinally, I don't care for magical ideas and their apologetics of assuming ever shrinking gaps, especially now that the gaps are gone. (We know the way life emerged, and we also know the way the universe emerged with BICEP2's recent result on inflation - making creationism even more insanely erroneous than homeopathy seen as the claim given on dilution of a putative "magic seed" volume.) But it is erroneous on science to claim that science is attempting to "create" life in the laboratory anymore than it is attempting to create planets, stars or universes. I care for science, which is why I wrote this in the first place, and I wanted to point out that you should be ashamed of yourself!
Also, it is laughable to claim that science looks for purpose, it has long since shown that nature has no purpose but follows physical laws derived out of conservation of physics. Without laws, with "purpose", we would have no nature. The social purpose of science on the other hand, the only form or purpose observed and known to exist, is to arrive at useful information such as the one that allows me to post this comment and you to read it.
But since we now ventured into the asylum of magic ideas trying to be protected from what we know for a fact, most damning is to point to badly scrounged together mythical texts on magic and claim that they are relevant for nature. Or even useful for arriving at "answers": the same two chapters are detailing two mutually incompatible myths (different time ordering) on the same subject, informing the reader to his face that "I am lying to you". That myth claim is not selling at all in the outside world. The tragic is that it is the best you have to sell.
[Note: As a visitor, one is a bit lost on the requirement for no "profanity, personal attacks or advertisements" and its interpretation. I know from experience that criticism of magic ideas is taken as criticism of the person adhering to them, as opposed to the Enlightenment and now science idea of that criticism is good and that no subject that has intrinsic worth is should be protected unduly.
Be as it may, if my criticism is interpreted as "personal attack" or "advertisement" for science, you can take it down. "Profanity" is a sectarian term, so I won't pretend to know first thing as how it is used or can be interpreted.]