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COMMENTARY
February 6, 2010
Primordial soup
There was a stop-the-press item in science news this week. I was sorry to see it float by without serious media attention. We are finally out of the "Primordial Soup!" Let me explain.Around 1929, Darwinists began recovering the ground they lost to the success of Mendelian genetics earlier in the century. Readers acquainted with the history will recall that followers of Darwin -- the crusading, anti-religious zealots who formed the "smart set" in later Victorian biology -- had no time for Gregor Mendel. When they mentioned him at all, they dismissed his meticulous cross-breeding experiments as trivial, and mocked the man himself as a Catholic priest. Mendel was working without so much as a microscope, in the obscurity of a monastic garden. What a laugh. Indeed Mendel, who also made significant contributions to physics and meteorology, had to give up science, after his genetic breakthrough, to devote the rest of his life to fighting the Austro-Hungarian tax authorities who were threatening the very existence of monasteries such as his own in Brno. It was not till the dawn of the 20th century that his ideas were exhumed, tested, and found to be brilliantly true and game-changing. They put the older Darwinism into eclipse, since "natural selection" could predict nothing, nor give a single result that could be replicated. It took the once-fashionable Darwinian atheists three decades to recover from this setback. They did so by announcing the formation of the "modern evolutionary synthesis" -- i.e. pure Mendelism, relabelled as "neo-Darwinism." That is one leg upon which our contemporary Darwinism stands: appropriated genuine science. The other is in what has long been known colloquially as the "Primordial Soup." J.B.S. Haldane proposed this in 1929: that the whole evolutionary process was kick-started by ultraviolet radiation, providing the energy to turn methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds. This murk was desperately needed to cover the scandal of origins. Darwin had titled his famous work The Origin of Species yet could himself see that he had explained no such thing. He had only told just-so stories about how one sort of pre-existing creature might evolve into another under environmental pressures. Few have ever disputed "common descent," but many have asked: What sort of "accident" hatched the first reproducing creature? The sort of environmental flukes on which the Darwinian depends for his salvation are all very well if you have infinite time. But as we began to realize, about the time Primordial Soup was first served, the universe wasn't nearly old enough -- by a factor approaching infinity -- for any meandering and purposeless scheme to achieve the sort of results we see all around us. The alternative, of course, is that the universe was in some sense "programmed," that biological and ultimately human life was implicit in the Big Bang. This is called the "anthropic cosmological principle," and it fits with every observable fact of nature. It is resisted by atheists, however, because it is highly suggestive of Creation by God, and is described with great clarity in for example the Book of Isaiah. (See 45:18, for starters.) In a series of laughable experiments through the 1960s and '70s, Darwinian biologists mixed various recipes for this hypothetical soup, then zapped them with energy this way and that, without any success whatever. Frankenstein's monster simply would not stir from their puddle. This soup nonsense is still presented in biology textbooks, as if it were true. But in an important paper in the journal BioEssays this week, William Martin et al., of the Institute of Botany III in Düsseldorf, spilled the last drop of it onto the trash heap of history. They summarize effectively why it not only did not work, but could not work, under laboratory or any other conditions. Instead, following footsteps of the geochemist Michael J. Russell, they guess the first simple cells originated in geothermal vents under the oceans, where concentrated energy could work upon a rich variety of minerals. My reader must go to the sources to read the new "kick-start" hypothesis. And good luck to it. I wish this hypothesis well, if only because it has long seemed to me, from observing the way nature works, that the seeds of biological life will be found in the earth's interior, rather than on its surface. God would more likely work that way: out of a womb, as it were. But wherever we look, let us bid a braying adieu to the Primordial Soup. It was the last thin gruel supporting Darwinist atheism, and we don't have to drink it any more. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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