New Problems for Origin of Life Theories

Some scientists now suggest that life began in an undersea thermal vent

Psalm 36:9

The usual theories for the origin of life have the first genetic material assembling itself by chance in a hot setting. Some have suggested that this may have happened in an undersea thermal vent or the side of a volcano. Trying to explain the origin of life without God suffers from many scientific problems. New research has now uncovered yet another problem.

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego examined how stable the chemical bases of genetic material are under various conditions. Origin of life theories must assume that wherever life began, these chemical bases had to build up to a concentration to make it likely that they would find enough of each other to make meaningful genetic material. This, they theorize, would have taken hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years. Researchers discovered that heat breaks down the four bases that make up genetic material. This effectively rules out thermal vents as a source for the first life. In a temperature at the boiling point of water, one of the bases lasts only 19 days. None of them lasts long enough to build up enough concentration for life to start. Even at 75 degrees none of these chemical bases lasts long enough to be geologically important to evolution. Only freezing conditions allow the bases to last long enough.

All attempts to explain the origin of life without God's direct action and design are doomed to failure. Perhaps this is why evolutionists now suppose that life began in outer space!

Notes: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7/98, pp. 7933 7938.
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