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David Coppedge: The Miller-Urey experiment sparked, zombie-like, back to life

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But only “twitching on the table,” he says:

Three geophysicists from the Technical University of Denmark, writing in Geophysical Research Letters, simulated the requirements to light sparks in the assumed prebiotic atmosphere. They used Miller’s original mixture and the revised mixture by Kasting (1993) that was more weakly reducing than Miller’s mixture of hydrogen, methane, and water vapor. The results were not encouraging. The possibility of spark generation is too doubtful to raise the Miller-Urey zombie to walking position…

No sparks; no amino acids. No amino acids, no life. Perhaps some molecules would form from UV light or cosmic rays, but those energy sources lack the pizzazz of sparks. The textbook cartoons would be boring without those blue sparks in the flask. Everybody seems to have assumed that sparks in the flask were a good proxy for sparks in a prebiotic atmosphere. One should never assume such a key piece of the story without evidence. These authors believe it “might have been more challenging… than previously thought.”

It’s not clear what the team accomplished if anything.

David Coppedge, “Zombie Science: Miller-Urey Experiment Is Back from the Dead, Barely” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 10, 2022)

Coppedge: “It’s not clear what the team accomplished if anything.” The main accomplishment is to have something to write a journal paper about, keeping the idea alive.

The paper is open access.

Comments
How much life did he create? How much of the solution was sludge? How comparable to early earth conditions was his experiment? When his experiment was redone without a glass beaker, what happened?zweston
March 14, 2022
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So the researchers only ran computer simulations and found nothing? Meanwhile, far from being Wells's "zombie science", the original experiment actually did better than expected, which is not what you'd hear from Wells but Wells's version is most probably what you want to hear.
We all know the story of the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, a young graduate student named Stanley Miller ran an off-the-wall experiment: he ran water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sealed flask with a pair of electrodes to produce a spark, and from those simple building blocks discovered that more complex compounds, such as amino acids, were spontaneously produced. Stanley Miller died in 2007, and in going through his effects, the original apparatus was discovered, and in addition, several small sealed vials containing the sludge produced in the original experiment were also found. […] Now the cool part, though: the scientists who unearthed the old samples ran them through modern analysis techniques, which are a bit more sensitive than the tools they had in the 1950s. In 1953, Miller reported the recovery of five amino acids from his experiment. The reanalysis found _twenty two_ amino acids and five amines in the vials. He was more successful than he knew!
Seversky
March 14, 2022
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One should never assume such a key piece of the story without evidence. These authors believe it “might have been more challenging… than previously thought. here you go ... Darwinists assume :))) without evidence :))) This is Darwinism ... and of course, here we go again: "might have been more challenging… than previously thought."martin_r
March 14, 2022
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It’s not clear what the team accomplished if anything.” The main accomplishment is to have something to write a journal paper about
exactly ... Darwinian clowns ...martin_r
March 14, 2022
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Straight out of an alchemist's cookbook, including the sparks. The purpose of these recipes was not to produce gold, but to keep the purchaser of the recipe busy for years before he realized the recipe was fake.polistra
March 13, 2022
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