Almost six decades ago, when Stanley Miller was just a 22-year-old PhD student, he and his professor Harold Urey did an experiment that became legendary in science: Miller mixed basic chemicals that were present in primordial earth and added electric sparks to stimulate a thunderstorm. The result? Miller found traces of amino acids - the building blocks of proteins.
After Miller died last year, his former student found a (scientific) treasure trove: the vials containing dried samples from his groundbreaking 1950s experiment. And when they tested the samples using today's more sophisticated equipments, they found a lot more stuff:
"We found not only did these make more of certain amino acids than in the classic experiment, but they made a greater diversity of amino acids."
Miller, using the old methods, had found five amino acids; Jeffrey Bada and his teams tracked down 22. What is more, the overall chemical yields were often higher than in the first set of experiments - the mixture appeared to be more fertile.
Professor Bada points out that today, almost all volcanic eruptions are accompanied by violent electric storms. The same could have been true on the young Earth. "What we suggest is that volcanoes belched out gases just like the ones Stanley had used, and were immediately subjected to intense volcanic lightning.
"And so each one of those volcanoes could have been a little, local prebiotic factory. And so all of that went into making the material that we refer to as the prebiotic soup."
Comments (9)
The paper discusses the transportation of uranium through oxygen rich water 3.7 billion years ago, indicating that photosynthetic organisms existed some 200 million years earlier than previously believed. Instead of invalidating the experiment, the paper only pushes the origin of life back a little, geologically speaking.
Lacking valid peer reviewed alternatives, the creationist community simply relied on one of their usual tactics, misrepresentation, to create yet another straw man in their unflagging efforts to discredit the truth of evolution.
Back to the drawing board for the creationists.
back to the drawing board....
1. Bridezillas
2. Extravagant Italians (possibly links to the mob)
JackAss lll.
See - that just leads to playground taunts. We all have opinions, and many of us voice them. No one is immune to criticism and we all have the right to judge other people, that's what holds society together. If no one were allowed to voice criticisms anyone could do just anything they like - that's not a great place to live.
Where did this attitude that it's not OK to judge people come from, anyway? Why can't I say it's silly? I don't mind other people saying things I do are silly - if we were only allowed to be nice to people we'd soon have someone complaining that we weren't being nice /enough/ or were nice in the wrong sort of way.
The turkey give-away episode of WKRP was the funniest sitcom episode EVER!!!
But then I was a blue collar photographer not many extravagant weddings in my portfolio. Sorry someone got hurt but it's still funny, just not as funny as wkrp and the flying turkey.