Miller experiment

From PhiloWiki

Miller's experiment was intended to demonstrate that the elements of life could form in the laboratory, given the correct mix of chemicals and electricity.

The Miller experiment has validity

"The classic experiment demonstrating the mechanisms by which inorganic elements could combine to form the precursors of organic chemicals was the 1950 experiment by Stanley Miller. He undertook experiments designed to find out how lightning--reproduced by repeated electric discharges--might have affected the primitive earth atmosphere. He discharged an electric spark into a mixture thought to resemble the primordial composition of the atmosphere. In a water receptacle, designed to model an ancient ocean, amino acids appeared. Amino acids are widely regarded as the building blocks of life.

Although the primitive atmosphere is no longer believed to be as rich in hydrogen as once thought, the discovery that the Murchison meteorite contains the same amino acids obtained by Miller, and even in the same relative proportions, suggests strongly that his results are relevant.

Others have made similar experiments. A group at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, exposed sulfur-bearing molecules like those thought to have been present before the Earth formed to low levels of light. The presence of the light was enough to generate organic compounds - molecules containing carbon, which form the chemical basis of life as we know it.

The new compounds had a distinct isotopic (atomic makeup) signature, not normally found on Earth. In fact, the peculiar part is that these isotopes have only been found one other time, in compounds removed from the Murchison meteorite."

Making Organic Compounds: The Stanley Miller Experiment & Others - Origins of Life from

The Miller experiment was discredited

The Miller experiment to show the origin of life was proved false [p 37] and is not evidence for evolution [p 228].

Case for a Creator from   Lee Strobel

There are major mistakes in, and misconceptions about, the infamous Miller-Urey experiment. The most prominent among which being the underestimation of the complexity of even the simplest life forms and their biological composition. It is true that using "the wrong gas mixture" Stanley Miller was able to synthesize certain amino acids (2-3 of the protein forming ones out of the 22 that exist), but that is an incredibly small step towards even the minimally complex living cell.* Many of the right kinds of amino acids would have to combine in the right order and proportions under their own volition to make one type of protein, and a protein itself has a minimal complexity threshold for it to function of at least 75 amino acids. Even if nature could, against all odds, create a functional protein, it takes between three hundred and five hundred proteins to make the simplest of cells. On top of that, all of this would have to happen within a mere 100 million years, the time between Earth's cooling and he earliest discovery of microfossils.

*When you use the realistic atmosphere, you do end up with relatively simple organic compounds, as most naturalists will tell you. This, however, is very misleading, due to the fact that those organic compounds (things like formaldehyde and cyanide) are actually detrimental to life!