Re:I've always found it pointless. . . (Score 1)

Fisrt of all, where did these "complex organic compounds come from"? As far as what happened at Cornell, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey obtained amino acids using electrical sparks. Sagan, who was a professor at Cornell, showed the experiment on an episode of Cosmos. However, amino acids are NOT life! Interestingly, forty years later, Miller himself admitted that the question of the origin of life is much more difficult than he, or anyone else, had thought! As an example. the cell itself is an extremely complex machine that could not have come about in piecemeal fashion. The major biochemicals in living cells are proteins and nucleic acids. No biologically significant proteins or nucleic acids have been made in ANY experiments such as those of Miller or those who have followed him. Proteins are strings of amino acids whose enzymatic activities arise from active groups within a specific three-dimensional shape. These are due to a precise sequence of the amino acids. Peptization, the joining of the amino acids to form a protein by the elimination of water, is difficult to accomplish by non-biological means. Proteinoids are unstable in the presence of water. Since they cannot replicate themselves, natural selection cannot be a driving force in their improvement. The precise order of amino acids in proteins in cells is governed by information on the nucleic acids that code for them, so this could not be achieved by chance. Since proteins are needed to make proteins, how could a first protein have occurred by chance?