Page 19 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The NAS's Error Regarding the Origin of Life

tain manner of speaking as the NAS writers, and accept that the subject
of the origin of life is an unknown as far as the theory of evolution goes.
Just the realization that the primeval Earth's atmosphere contained suf-
ficient quantities of oxygen to tear apart any organic molecules (the es-
tablishment of the fact that it was not "reducing" as chemists put it)

places the theory of evolution in a most difficult position as regards the
origin of life. Noam Lahav, for instance, the evolutionist author of the
book Biogenesis: Theories of Life's Origins, says:
[B]y challenging the assumption of a reducing atmosphere, we chal-
lenge the very existence of the "pre-biotic soup", with its richness of
biologically important organic compounds. Moreover, so far, no
geochemical evidence for the existence of a pre-biotic soup has been
published. Indeed, a number of scientists have challenged the pre-
biotic soup concept, noting that even if it existed, the concentration
of organic building blocks in it would have been too small to be
meaningful for pre-biotic evolution. 1
In other words:
The high level of oxygen in the primeval atmosphere is an obsta-

cle to the emergence of "the building blocks of life."
Even if it is assumed that these did emerge, it is impossible for
them to have given rise to proteins, RNA or DNA by means of chem-
ical reactions or chance. That is because proteins, RNA or DNA con-
tain the most concentrated amounts of information and it is
statistically impossible for that information to emerge at random.
Careful attention reveals that the NAS authors ignore both facts,

and attempt to gloss over the second in particular by employing a
style that gives them away: many people hearing the words "the
building blocks of life" might well think that "these building blocks
exist, which means that life can emerge by itself." (This is the impres-
sion the NAS authors hoped to create.) This is mistaken, however,
and also deceptive (from the NAS' point of view), because the "build-

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