http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2015/01/30/creation/abiogenesis-not-fast/
Evolutionists, since Darwin, have based their assumption of a God-less origin of life on abiogenesis. That is, they hold life began from non-life. Now a professor of physics thinks he can show, not exactly how that happened, but that the universe
bound it to happen. Even some of his fellow secular scientists find that hard to believe. But even they won’t ask themselves an obvious question he missed.
Professor of abiogenesis?
Meet Jeremy L. England, Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like Erwin Schrödinger
before him, he knew living systems must stay organized, and organize certain chemicals they take in, even as their surroundings disorganize. Any closed or especially
isolated system disorganizes over time. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us this. Scientists have a name for the “state property” that measures this disorganization. They call it “entropy,” from the Greek preposition “en-” meaning “within” and the noun “tropos” meaning a way of doing things or even a way of life. In other words, scientists say, “Systems disorganize because that’s the way things happen.”
Before moving forward, let us define our terms.
System means any group of things that
stand together. Two things exist when one treats any system: the system itself, and the surroundings.
Isolated systems do not exchange matter or energy with their surroundings.
Closed systems may take energy from the surroundings, or give it back.
Open systems may gain or lose energy, matter, or both.
Black smoker in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Some scientists suppose this is a source of the primordial soup from which life arose from non-life. Photo: P. Roma/NASA
Any living thing is an
open system. The earth itself is also an open system. The sun shines on earth all the time, and comets and meteors fall into it.
Dr. England recognizes the first principle of what happens to energy: it wants to dissipate. And like any spilled liquid, it will follow the path of least resistance when dissipating. Dr. England suggests certain kinds of molecules, with a heat bath (either ocean or atmosphere) to surround them and an outside energy source (like the sun) to drive them, will
self-organize to
create that path of least resistance. Under the right circumstances, those molecules will then self-replicate.
Dr. England treated two kinds of problem in his paper: self-replicating nucleic acids, and bacterial cell division. Concerning nucleic acids, he concluded RNA, not DNA, formed first in the “primordial soup” (or “biological ylem”) out of which, as he supposes, life arose from non-life.
Dr. England
published a detailed mathematical model and argument in the
Journal of Chemical Physics nearly two years ago. (See also
here.) He also has lectured on the subject around the world. (The video shows him giving one of these lectures.) More recently, Natalie Wolchover at
Quanta magazine interviewed England, and several of his supporters and critics, for
this article. (
Scientific American and
Business Insider reprinted this article in the past week.)
Reaction
Everyone, supporter or critic, recognizes one thing above all. Jeremy England claims to have the secret of abiogenesis. Not only did it happen; Dr. England insists it had to happen. He specifically told Ms. Wolchover:
You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.
He even said as rocks roll downhill, so life will
always arise from non-life, under the right kind of sun and in the right kind of “heat bath.” To back up the idea, he pointed to other examples of highly organized objects in the wild. Most notably, he pointed to snowflakes. But perhaps he would cite any kind of crystal or polymer as examples proving his point.
Actually the Mrs has just chided me for contributing to your apparent emotional state as evidenced in your posts.
