Textbooks of the Living Dead

I remember in junior high school science class seeing Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings that supposedly prove common descent, and hearing that the Miller-Urey experiment showed how life could emerge from non-life. In Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells shows in this excerpt, courtesy of the Discovery Institute Press, that such propaganda worked on children for a while but proves nothing.

If you’ve fallen for tree-of-life charts or lectures on how eyes slowly evolved and how “god” (if there were one) botched the job, you’ve fallen for zombie science. The same goes if you applauded science illuminati who waxed on about “junk DNA” and thought “vestigial organs” had no purpose.

Zombie Science made WORLD’s short list for 2017 Book of the Year in the Origins category. —Marvin Olasky

The Miller-Urey Experiment

After the first edition of The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Darwin concluded later editions with the statement that life had been “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” A few years later, Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion” by using the biblical term, when what he really meant was “appeared by some wholly unknown process.”¹

In 1871, Darwin wrote to Hooker again and outlined his true thinking about the origin of life: “If (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,— light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”²

Maybe the first cells actually did live in a warm little pond, but Darwin clearly believed that they were not created there. Instead, he believed they formed by some material process involving the spontaneous self-assembly of various chemicals.

In the 1920s, Russian scientist A. I. Oparin and British scientist J. B. S. Haldane suggested that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere consisted mainly of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor.^3,4 The first three are what chemists call “reducing” gases, as opposed to neutral gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen, or oxidizing gases such as oxygen. In a reducing atmosphere, according to Oparin and Haldane, natural energy sources such as lightning could have produced the chemical building blocks of life, which could have then dissolved in the ocean to form a primordial “soup” from which the first living cells emerged.

An interesting idea, but could it be tested?

An intelligent agent had to orchestrate matters to make the residue hospitable to life.

In 1953, University of Chicago graduate student Stanley Miller announced that he had shown experimentally (in the laboratory of his Ph.D. adviser, Harold Urey) that lightning in the Earth’s primitive atmosphere could have produced amino acids, the chemical building blocks of proteins.⁵ Miller used a closed glass apparatus in which he boiled water, circulated the steam with a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen past a spark discharge, and then collected the products in a container at the bottom. After a week he analyzed the result (a brown tarry mixture) and detected some of the amino acids that occur in living cells. The experiment was widely advertised as evidence that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life.

By 1980, however, most geochemists had concluded that the Earth’s early atmosphere probably wasn’t a reducing atmosphere, as Oparin and Haldane had supposed, and as Miller had assumed when constructing his experiment. Instead, the early atmosphere likely consisted of neutral gases like those emitted from modern volcanoes—mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen (though some carbon monoxide, a reducing gas, is also emitted). Since hydrogen is the lightest element, if there had been any in the early atmosphere it would probably have escaped into space.

In 1983, Miller reported that he and a colleague had sparked an atmosphere containing carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide instead of methane and ammonia, and they were able to produce a small amount of the simplest amino acid—but only if the atmosphere contained more hydrogen than carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. In order to produce other amino acids they needed not only an excess of free hydrogen but also methane.⁶ Harvard geochemist Heinrich Holland came to a similar conclusion.⁷

So the Miller-Urey experiment could not produce amino acids from a realistic mixture of gases. Furthermore, the brown tarry mixture that it produced contained not only amino acids, but also substances that would have interfered with the origin of life. For example, the mixture contained cyanide and formaldehyde, which a skilled chemist can use to synthesize biologically useful molecules, but which by themselves are extremely toxic to living cells. In 2015, an international team of scientists reported that bacteria could survive in the residue from a Miller-Urey experiment, but only after the residue had first been purified to remove these toxic substances.⁸ In other words, an intelligent agent had to orchestrate matters to make the residue hospitable to life.

The Textbooks Respond

So how did the biology textbooks respond to these discoveries showing that Stanley Miller’s experiment missed the mark? Many of them in 2000 persisted in using images of the Miller-Urey apparatus to convince students that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life. And many biology textbooks are still doing this. For example, Kenneth Mason, Jonathan Losos and Susan Singer’s 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson’s widely used Biology acknowledges that there is a controversy over the composition of the Earth’s early atmosphere, but it proceeds to tell the standard story anyway. It concludes that Stanley Miller demonstrated that “the key molecules of life could have formed in the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth.”⁹

Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine’s 2014 Biology includes a drawing of the Miller-Urey apparatus with the following caption: “Miller and Urey produced amino acids, which are needed to make proteins, by passing sparks through a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor. Evidence now suggests that the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere was different from their 1953 experiment. However, more recent experiments with different mixtures of gases have produced similar results.”¹⁰