Hovind's strange interpretation of the Urey-Miller experiments.

[AronRa]

For the last couple months, I've had great fun steamrolling Kent Hovind's seminar of [supposed] "Lies in the Textbooks". I've already done 17 episodes plus an intro correcting his many errors there. Supposed lies #18 and #19 both concern the Urey Miller experiment. I have my script for #18 already mostly written. That should be out on August 1st. I have notes for much of episode #19 too. But before I finish that one, I would like to see your responses to Hovind's seminar from 1:53:00 to 2:00:00. Particularly, I'm interested in Hovind's claims about how the Urey Miller experiments allegedly produced so much poisonous pollutant. But any other input y'all have will be welcome too. I don't want to overlook anything.

 

[We are Borg]

His view is weird because what he is talking about is how life started it has noting to do with evolution at all.

 

[Sparhafoc]

I assume that, as with all the garbled witterings that come from Hovind's mouth, it's just made up bullshit. I am, for example, not at all clear what 'poisonous pollutant' could even mean in this case. Poisonous to what?

But I can't say as I have a deep knowledge of the experiments beyond the level of say Wikipedia.

However, there is an interesting paper I read a few years back which outlines how one can go about conducting the same form of experiments:

Conducting Miller-Urey Experiments

In 1953, Stanley Miller reported the production of biomolecules from simple gaseous starting materials, using an apparatus constructed to simulate the primordial Earth's atmosphere-ocean system. Miller introduced 200 ml of water, 100 mmHg of H[2] , 200 ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Conducting Miller-Urey Experiments​

In 1953, Stanley Miller reported the production of biomolecules from simple gaseous starting materials, using an apparatus constructed to simulate the primordial Earth's atmosphere-ocean system. Miller introduced 200 ml of water, 100 mmHg of H2, 200 mmHg of CH4, and 200 mmHg of NH3 into the apparatus, then subjected this mixture, under reflux, to an electric discharge for a week, while the water was simultaneously heated. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide the reader with a general experimental protocol that can be used to conduct a Miller-Urey type spark discharge experiment, using a simplified 3 L reaction flask. Since the experiment involves exposing inflammable gases to a high voltage electric discharge, it is worth highlighting important steps that reduce the risk of explosion. The general procedures described in this work can be extrapolated to design and conduct a wide variety of electric discharge experiments simulating primitive planetary environments.

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

As you know, Aron, we discussed the Miller-Urey experiment in various threads over the years - with Dandan/Leroy, Gilbo, Elshamah, OFNF, TrueEmpiricism, etc.

Threads such as:
Evolution as a fact
TrueEmpiricism (irony alert)
Onceforgivennowfree
Creationists and DNA
DNA errors are scanned electrically
Science law - life comes from life

Those were the days...

Kindest regards,

James

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

@Rumraket! We need you!

 

[Nesslig20]

Opinion:

Miller-Urey type experiments (or primordial "soup" hypotheses in general) have little to say about abiogenesis, except as to disprove the old "chicken and egg" problem of needing life in order to get organic compounds like amino acids (organic compounds used to be defined explicitly as the compounds that only come from life). So the Miller-Urey is a historical footnote that kick-started the modern research into the origin of life, but the adherence to "soup" thinking has distracted the field for a long time too, but recently there has been push-back.

Here is a 1-hour summary from Nick Lane that pretty much summarizes my position:




So Hovind is right for criticizing Miller Urey as an answer to the origin of life, but he is attacking it for all the wrong reasons...since criticism is not coming from a place of intellectual honesty.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Is it even true that UV light would destroy all the ammonia? He didnt really spend a lot of time on that.

We eat foods that contain carboxylic acids, so I'm not sure how poisonous he is claiming carboxylic acid to be. The effect of pollutants on living organism normally depends on the level of exposure and concentration. He doesnt really talk about this..

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

These, and other objections, were dealt with in the various threads to which I linked.

For example, his carboxylic acid claim.

What he fails to mention is that the main ingredient of the "soup" is water.

What happens to carboxylic - or any other - acid in water?: it's neutralised. Therefore, it can't dissolve the organic compounds.

Lightning likewise has no effect at suitable distances - yes, at the point of a lightning strike, the organics are destroyed but at a sufficient distance, the organics won't be harmed. Somewhere between these two distances, the electrical effect is just right to catalyse chemical reactions.

UV light is another canard: it only penetrates so far into the ocean - beyond that, organics will be unaffected by it.

Ergo, his objections are just Creationist red-herrings.

Kindest regards,

James

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Greetings,

These, and other objections, were dealt with in the various threads to which I linked.

Sorry Dragan Glas, I didn't actually view your links. I just posted what first came to mind after watching part of Hovinds video.

 

[AronRa]

I just spent the last few days driving four states away to help my daughters move. Now I'm behind schedule. So maybe y'all can help me with this script.

So have they really produced life in the laboratory? Oh, they haven’t even come close. Here’s what they did. They took four gases, they took methane, amonia, water vapor and hydrogen, ran ‘em through these tubes to a spark chamber, ran ‘em through a spark chamber that was supposed to simulate lightning (blgch!) and say we’re gonna see, we’re gonna put ‘em together and make life in the laboratory. At the bottom of the flask, they got this red goo, and they kept draining the goo off, because if it went through the spark again, it would destroy it. So they had to make the goo and then save it from the next spark, OK. They said in the textbook here, it was rich in amino acids, that’s what this red goo was. Well, that’s simply a lie, OK. They didn’t come close to making life.

I will remind the audience that anyone reading the Urey-Miller papers will know they were trying to find a natural synthesis of amino acids, that they never intended to create life.

The problem is they had a reducing atmosphere. In other words, they excluded oxygen. You can look at his four gases. There’s no oxygen there. He knew if he had oxygen in there, it would oxidize whatever chemicals tried to combine. You know, you cut a banana open, lay it on the table, it turns brown. It oxidizes. You don’t paint your car, and it oxidizes, it rusts. Well, living cells will oxidize quickly in the presence of oxygen. So he didn’t put any oxygen in there. That creates a serious problem. Because if you have oxygen, you cannot get life to come from non-living chemicals.

I have a reference to a couple examples of anoxic organisms.

The problem is that ozone is made from oxygen, and ozone blocks UV light, and UV light destroys ammonia, and ammonia is one of the four gases he’s got. So you cannot get life to evolve with oxygen, and you cannot get life to evolve without oxygen. Because if you don’t have oxygen, you don’t have ozone, and now your ammonia gets destroyed. It’s just not gonna work either way.

I plan to compare O3 to CO2 and remind the audience that Carbon-dioxide was thought to be the dominant gas rather than oxygen. If he thinks O2 is the same thing as O3, just because they're both made of oxygen, then he should try breathing it. Likewise, he might enjoy drinking H2O2 since it's just water with an extra oxygen, and who doesn't want more oxygen, right? Except that look what happens to plants when you remove one of the oxygens from CO2, because Carbon monoxide poisons everything.

I might also mention 2 Peter 3:5
New King James Version
For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water,
New American Standard Bible
For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water

And the earth has always had oxygen even more than today. This guy says “what evidence is there for a primitive methane ammonia atmosphere on earth? The answer is that there is no evidence against it, but much against it.

I am reading the quoted citation now.

We find in general no evidence in the sedimentary distribution of carbon, sulfur, uranium, etc., that an oxygen-free atmosphere ever existed on the earth.

I have to read that citation too.

If somebody tells you the early earth had a reducing atmosphere, you tell ‘em Kent Hovind said they’re confused or they’re deliberately lying. ‘Cuz it’s not true. The earth has always had oxygen. This article said, it is suggested from the earliest dated rocks at 3.7 billion years ago, earth had an oxygenic atmosphere. They’ve always known the earth had oxygen, even more than we have today. We cover that on Seminar Part II, how the early earth probably had even more oxygen, made ‘em live longer.

I am not going to watch that whole seminar, but I suspect that it just his own speculation based on nothing but religious apologetics.

This textbook says, there was no oxygen on the earth (which is a lie) and then it says the rocks absorbed it. Hehe. Hello? How can they absorb it if it wasn’t there? Think about it.

I will explain how free O2 was absorbed into the rocks and into the oceans before remaining free in the air.

Second problem they had with the Miller experiment, they filtered out the product. That is not realistic for nature, OK. They saved the goo from getting sparked a second time, because it would have destroyed it.

I will explain how lightning doesn't usually strike twice in the same place, and that the confined space of the experiment makes sense to filter the product.

What he actually made in this experiment was 85% tar, 13% carboxylic acid. Now both of those are poisonous to life. If you make a mixture that’s 98% poisonous to the other 2%, I don’t think it’s logical to say you’ve succeeded in creating anything that’s gonna help make life, OK.

Tomorrow I will read through the posted notes about this, and maybe adapt them.

The problems are, he made mostly only two amino acids. There are twenty different ones required to make life, twenty different amino acids. Now, these amino acids are kinda like letters of the alphabet, OK. You have to have 26 letters in the English alphabet to make all the words that we have. Well, you have to have twenty different amino acids to make all the proteins that your body has. With those twenty different amino acids, your body can build a bazillion different kinds of proteins, kind of like you can make a lot of different words with the same 26 letters, OK. What he actually made were a couple of letters like, two of the letters of the alphabet by combining these gases. This creates a real problem since half of them were left-handed and half of them were right-handed. What he actually made was amino acids, only two of them, and half of them were backwards. I mean, if I drop letters of the alphabet, there’s a 50/50 chance that some of them are gonna land upside-down. They don’t do any good. You have to have them all facing the right way. The smallest proteins we know of have 70 to 100 amino acids, all of them facing the right way. This greatly compounds the problem, OK.

I will cite how biochemists now know of a ribozyme that can use either left or right-handed RNA templates to exclusively synthesize right-handed versions, solving the problem of homochirality.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/chiral-key-found-to-origin-of-life-20141126/

DNA and RNA are all right-handed. All of the proteins are left-handed. This is a very puzzling fact, all of the proteins that have been investigated from animals, plants and higher organisms, and from simple organisms, bacterias, molds, even viruses are made of left-handed amino acids. They’re all that way. So he’s really got a problem since half of his letters were backwards.

I will explain how this is indicative of the LUCA.

And there are hundreds of amino acids required to combine in just the right way to make a protein, and they unbond in water faster than they bond, and they claim this all happened in the oceans. The oceans are completely full of water, all the way to the bottom.

I'm not sure of the best way to explain this one. I'm sure one of y'all has a much better summary than I could think of.

And Brownian motion’s gonna drive ‘em apart. It’s not gonna put ‘em together.

Does he think that these proteins are the only things in the "prebiotic soup" of the oceans? What does he mean here?

One of the lies in the textbooks is that they made life in the laboratory. They have, all they’ve done, every experiment has made the problem worse for the evolutionist, OK. Spontaneous generations do not occur spontaneously in water. Life is not gonna get started in this way.

He's quoting another creationist here, and misrepresenting/conflating abiogenesis with Spontaneous Generation.

 

[We are Borg]

When i hear people like Hovind speak about abiogenesis its like they are thinking that only on one spot combinations where tried. They forget that the whole planet was trying to combine the chemicals. It was never the question if there was going to be life but when.

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

I just spent the last few days driving four states away to help my daughters move. Now I'm behind schedule. So maybe y'all can help me with this script.

I will remind the audience that anyone reading the Urey-Miller papers will know they were trying to find a natural synthesis of amino acids, that they never intended to create life.

I have a reference to a couple examples of anoxic organisms.

I plan to compare O3 to CO2 and remind the audience that Carbon-dioxide was thought to be the dominant gas rather than oxygen. If he thinks O2 is the same thing as O3, just because they're both made of oxygen, then he should try breathing it. Likewise, he might enjoy drinking H2O2 since it's just water with an extra oxygen, and who doesn't want more oxygen, right? Except that look what happens to plants when you remove one of the oxygens from CO2, because Carbon monoxide poisons everything.

I might also mention 2 Peter 3:5
New King James Version
For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water,
New American Standard Bible
For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water

I am reading the quoted citation now.

I have to read that citation too.

I am not going to watch that whole seminar, but I suspect that it just his own speculation based on nothing but religious apologetics.

I will explain how free O2 was absorbed into the rocks and into the oceans before remaining free in the air.

I will explain how lightning doesn't usually strike twice in the same place, and that the confined space of the experiment makes sense to filter the product.

Tomorrow I will read through the posted notes about this, and maybe adapt them.

I will cite how biochemists now know of a ribozyme that can use either left or right-handed RNA templates to exclusively synthesize right-handed versions, solving the problem of homochirality.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/chiral-key-found-to-origin-of-life-20141126/

I will explain how this is indicative of the LUCA.

I'm not sure of the best way to explain this one. I'm sure one of y'all has a much better summary than I could think of.

Firstly, although there are several hundreds of amino acids currently known, in cotrast to what he claims, you only need 21 to make all the proteins needed for a human (we need another 9 that we can't make ourselves from food, etc). [Most textbooks say 20 and 8, respectively but due to recent discoveries, the textbooks are behind the times.]

Secondly, amino acids can be broadly split into two categories, hydrophilic and hydrophobic. The former have no issues with water! The latter try to minimise contact with water and, as a result, clump together to form stable, globular proteins due to the "Hydrophobic Effect. [1] (The surface of a sphere presents the minimum contact area to the water.) These amino acids - and the globular proteins they form - survive in water as a result. They tend to end up with the hydrophobic amino acids on the inside with hydrophilic amino acids on the outside. [2]

Does he think that these proteins are the only things in the "prebiotic soup" of the oceans? What does he mean here?

It seems he thinks that this activity only occurred in one place on the early Earth, and that Brownian motion causes the amino acids to drift apart, never to be seen again.

He doesn't seem to realise that this activity is occurring all over the Earth - lightning strikes occurring here, there and everywhere, with the result that amino acids have nowhere to go where they won't bump into other amino acids with resultant chemical reactions forming proteins.

He's quoting another creationist here, and misrepresenting/conflating abiogenesis with Spontaneous Generation.

I'd add more but I'm sure you have it covered.

Kindest regards,

James

 

[Deleted member 619]

I will explain how lightning doesn't usually strike twice in the same place, and that the confined space of the experiment makes sense to filter the product.

It's also worth pointing out that he's arguing against idealisations in experiments, when the vast majority of experimental protocols require idealisation in order to narrow the variables as much as possible for greater confidence in results.

It's experimental design 101.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Greetings,

Secondly, amino acids can be broadly split into two categories, hydrophilic and hydrophobic. The former have no issues with water!

With all due respect, I think of the hundreds of known amino acids, only 8 or 9 are said to be hydrophobic. The rest are dissolved in water. I dont have a good cite for this but I think I am not wrong.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

I will remind the audience that anyone reading the Urey-Miller papers will know they were trying to find a natural synthesis of amino acids, that they never intended to create life.

Personally, I think this says enough. It's factual and to the point and gives him no room to obfuscate. I have listened to Kent from time to time and I kinda think he's cool but I can tell you he is putting no real work into this debate. I am pretty sure he has been talking about carboxylic acids and other bullshit for like 30 years. He used to believe in the Vapor Canopy Thing. I think it would be best for you to just keep it clear and precise and this will force him to address the issues he is wrong about or never really address in the first place.

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

With all due respect, I think of the hundreds of known amino acids, only 8 or 9 are said to be hydrophobic. The rest are dissolved in water. I dont have a good cite for this but I think I am not wrong.

Depending on the pH of water, they're soluble: if it's greater or less than pH neutral (~7), then they're soluble but at pH ~7 they're not that soluble. [1][2][3]

I meant to mention that some amino acids give off molecules of water during chemical reactions, which also raises questions about Hovind's claims.

Kindest regards,

James

 

[Led Zeppelin]

Or AronRa can make history, by offering his hand in friendship to Hovind. I am sure they have both made great sacrifices for what they believe but can't prove. I don't understand why they are fighting in the first place. Why should they be enemies?

 

[ldmitruk]

Or AronRa can make history, by offering his hand in friendship to Hovind. I am sure they have both made great sacrifices for what they believe but can't prove. I don't understand why they are fighting in the first place. Why should they be enemies?

There is no love lost between Hovind and AronRa and I think a great deal of it is the way Hovind approaches science and will never give a straight answer to any question he is asked. Hovind can't prove anything and keeps on trying to get his twisted falsehoods about science taught in the public school system where they do not belong. I complete get why AronRa has to keep battling against Kent. And it's not just evolution Kent goes after, it's all science. Here's of Kent totally getting how far stars are away wrong.

As long as people like Hovind are trying to corrupt what science is, people like AronRa have to keep fighting against them.

 

[AronRa]

Or AronRa can make history, by offering his hand in friendship to Hovind. I am sure they have both made great sacrifices for what they believe but can't prove. I don't understand why they are fighting in the first place. Why should they be enemies?

Except that I CAN prove my position and all Hovind ever does is lie.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

There is no love lost between Hovind and AronRa and I think a great deal of it is the way Hovind approaches science and will never give a straight answer to any question he is asked. Hovind can't prove anything and keeps on trying to get his twisted falsehoods about science taught in the public school system where they do not belong. I complete get why AronRa has to keep battling against Kent. And it's not just evolution Kent goes after, it's all science. Here's of Kent totally getting how far stars are away wrong.

As long as people like Hovind are trying to corrupt what science is, people like AronRa have to keep fighting against them.

I would say both Hovind and his opponent are wrong here, since we dont really know the "one way" speed of light.