www.ArgumentCenter.org - Where hard questions are answered

 

< "Nobody knows for sure what the early atmosphere was like, but the consensus is that the atmosphere was not at all like the one Miller used."

“Miller chose a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and
water vapor, which was consistent with what many scientists thought
back then. But scientists don’t believe that anymore. As a geophysicist
with the Carnegie Institution said in the 1960s, ‘What is the evidence
for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on earth? The
answer is that there is no evidence for it, but much against it.’11
“By the mid-1970s, Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin was
declaring that the concept behind Miller’s theory of the early atmosphere
‘has been abandoned.’12 Two of the leading origin-of-life
researchers, Klaus Dose and Sidney Fox, confirmed that Miller had
used the wrong gas mixture.13 And Science magazine said in 1995 that
experts now dismiss Miller’s experiment because ‘the early atmosphere
looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.’”14

- Lee Strobel from Case for a Creator.

Notes
11. See: Philip H. Abelson, “Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences USA 55 (1966), 1365–72.
12. See: Michael Florkin, “Ideas and Experiments in the Field of Prebiological
Chemical Evolution,” Comprehensive Biochemistry 29B (1975),
231–60.
13. See: Sidney W. Fox and Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and the Origin
of Life (New York: Marcel Dekker, revised edition 1977), 43, 74–
76.
14. John Cohen, “Novel Center Seeks to Add Spark to Origins of Life,” Science
270 (1995), 1925–26.

---

< Prev		Next >