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.
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.
exactly …
Darwinian clowns …
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.”
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.
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?