Biochemical evolution is the idea that life came into existence through
natural processes. This idea presents the view that life spontaneously
arose from non-living matter i.e. that in effect, it created itself. It's
a romantic idea that has been thoroughly discredited by modern science.
 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Rats & Toads
------------
Belief in the spontaneous generation of life is as old as man himself.
Our earliest written records go back roughly five thousand years when, in
3000 BC, rats seen running out of wheat were believed to be the
spontaneous creation of life. Toads hopping from ponds were likewise
believed to be the result of water spontaneously generating life.

Jelly Fish, Worms & Maggots
---------------------------
When it was later learned that the rats and toads ran and hopped into
wheat and ponds before then ran and hopped out, life's advent turned to
jelly fish floating in the sea, and worms crawling out of mud. This too
proved a dead end. Later, maggots crawling out of meat became a
fashionable belief for life's advent. By the eighteenth century it was
realized that covering the meat caused the maggots to disappear.

Protozoa & Bacteria
-------------------
About that time Van Leeuwenhoek proposed that the protozoa seen in pond
water under a microscope might somehow explain the start of life. In
Paris they went further, suggesting that the very advent of life itself
occurred whenever clear broth in an open glass bottle became cloudy.
Pasteur (a Christian) rejected this, and demonstrated that the broth
remained clear if the bottle was corked.

Pasteur's adversaries did not accept this, and claimed that in closing the
bottle, Pasteur had denied life access to air, which `everybody knew was
the substance necessary for the spontaneous generation of life'. So
Pasteur invented the Pasteur flask.

Pasteur's Flask
---------------
The "Pasteur Flask" is a large glass bottle that opens into a long glass
tube that goes up, curves down, and then curves back up again. The end of
the glass tube is open, and therefore air can reach the broth. However
the dust particles ON WHICH BACTERIA RIDE are trapped in the lower curve
of the tube. There are reports that Pasteur's broth stayed crystal clear
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris France for more than one-hundred years
after Pasteur did the experiment.
 

HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT

Of significance here is not man's failed attempts at locating life's
source, but instead the mistaken belief that it lay at the next, unseen
smaller level. Acceptance of toads and frogs changed to worms, and then
maggots. These were later abandoned for protozoa which, in turn, were
replaced by bacteria. Each time man was able to see the folly of his
ideas, he turned to the next unseen smaller realm. The driving force into
these realms was NOT EVIDENCE. It was the philosophical conviction that
all that exists is matter and its motion, and that if one looks far
enough, life's ultimate material cause will be found.

In the late forties and early fifties attention turned to living cells
and, in particular, to protein. When it was realized that a protein
molecule could replicate when submersed in a bath of nutrients of which
it is composed, reductionists (materialists) seized upon this as the
"next smaller realm," and quickly embraced the protein molecule as life's
basic building block. All that remained now was to show how physical
matter produced it-- or so they thought.
 

ELECTRON MICROSCOPY

In the late 1800's De Broglie had discovered that atomic particles had
wave properties, and in the early 1900's German scientists showed how
very high magnification could be achieved using electrons rather than
light. The world's first practical electron microscope was reduced to
practice in my laboratory in the early sixties by Jim Hillier's group
(David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, NJ.

For the first time, we were able to see the structure of living cells. It
was staggering! Whereas Darwin had understood a cell to be as complicated
as a ping pong ball, here before us was complexity on a scale that was
utterly unimaginable. Billions of infinitesimal universes so tiny that
heretofore it was impossible to see inside them, and yet so complex that
it required a room 60 feet on a side to model just one cell using objects
as small as marbles.
 

INFORMATION THEORY

Protein was just one of the thousands of components in each cell. Not
only was electron microscopy now available to closely examine protein's
structure, but we also were able to quantify its complexity by use of
knowledge obtained through "Information Theory." This foundational
discovery was first announced by Shannon in 1949 at Bell Laboratories,
Murray Hill, NJ. Twenty-one years later, Arthur Hobson combined
Information Theory with Classical Mechanics, creating Quantum Statistical
Mechanics. This later proved to be one of the most powerful mathematical
tools ever devised by man to understand physical reality.
 

HUBERT YOCKY'S WORK

Measured values of the internal structure of living cells were published
and compared with the theoretical knowledge that was now available from
Information Theory. In 1977 materialists suffered another important
defeat when Hubert Yockey (an international name in Information Theory at
the Army Pulse Radiation Facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland)
published two papers in volume 67 of the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

The first was 32 pages "On the Information Content of Cytochrome c", and
the second was a 22 page paper entitled "A Calculation of the Probability
of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory" (J. Theor. Biol. 67:377).

He concluded with, and I quote:

"Geological evidence for the "warm little pond" is missing. It is
concluded that belief in currently accepted scenarios of spontaneous
biogenesis is based on FAITH, contrary to conventional wisdom."
 

AMINO ACID RESIDUES

It is important to realize here that Yockey's work was NOT about the
spontaneous generation of a cat or a mouse or, for that matter, even a
living cell. These structures have vast complexity. Yockey confined
himself to "simple" protein called "Cytochrome c" that was composed of
only 101 amino acid residues. By way of contrast, hemoglobin contains
about 400 amino acid resides. Moreover, the complexity of protein rises
geometrically as amino acid residues are added to the peptide.

Amino acid residues can be thought of as railroad cars, and protein as a
train composed of cars attached end to end. Just as railroad cars carry
different kinds of goods e.g., cattle, lumber, coal, milk and so on, so
too amino acid residues contain different kinds of chemistry which, when
attached end to end, create varying kinds of protein.
 

SELF ORGANIZATION NOT SCIENTIFICALLY VALID

Four years later, in 1981, Yockey published another paper. This 19 page
manuscript was entitled: "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and
Information Theory" (J. Theor. Biol. 91:13). A small part of his
conclusions follow:

"self organization must yield only genetic message ensembles
of information content much too low to constitute a genome.
It is concluded that at present there are no scientifically
valid origin of life scenarios"
 

FRANCIS CRICK

In effect, Yockey had scientifically evaluated the feasibility of life's
spontaneous generation at "next unseen smaller level" and, like each of
its predecessors, had found that it was simply not possible. Moreover, he
was not alone in this conclusion. That same year Francis Crick, a
biochemist and Nobel laureate who 28 years earlier had done pioneering
work in DNA, concluded life was far too complex to have happened from
natural processes on earth.

His book: "Life Itself" (Simon & Schuster> addressed the question: If
life didn't arise through the action of physical matter, how then did it
arise? Crick's answer was, 'directed panspermia' i.e., we were "planted"
here. In effect, Crick realized life's explanation lay in design, but
chose for his god a hypothetical super civilization that was somewhere
'out there'. Crick's proposal suffered two problems: The first was that
it was based on blind speculation. The second is that Crick failed to
explain how THEY arose i.e., "Where did they come from?"
 

SIR FRED HOYLE

In 1982 Sir Fred Hoyle likewise concluded life could not have arisen from
natural processes on earth and, like Crick looked elsewhere for its
source. His book: "Evolution From Space" (Enslow Publishers) conveyed his
belief that if life had evolved, it would to have done so in a realm of
the size of the universe rather that earth.

One year later, in 1983, and after reflecting on the miracle of 2000
enzymes in each of 50 billion body cells, Hoyle published a second book:
"The Intelligent Universe" (Michael Joseph Publishers> in which he had
come full circle with Crick viz., if life is to be explained, then
'intelligence' must in some way be identified with its origin. Hoyle,
however, identified this "intellect" with the cosmos.
 

THAXTON, BRADLEY & OLSON

In 1984 Charles Thaxton (Ph.D. Chemistry), Walter Bradley (Ph.D.
Materials Science) and Roger Olson (Ph.D. Geochemistry) authored: "The
Mystery of Life's Origin" (Philosophical Library) in which they hammered
home the conclusion that apart from intelligence, life's origin from
natural causes was disallowed from basic chemical thermodynamics (see,
in particular, Chapter 8). However unlike Crick and Hoyle, they believed
that a divine Intellect lie behind the chemical miracles.
 

A.G. CAIRNS-SMITH

One year later, in 1985, A.G. Cairns-Smith (a Biochemist) wrote: "Seven
Clues to the Origin of Life" (Macmillan) in which he highlighted the
fatal flaws that existed in ALL of the currently accepted origin of life
scenarios that had been put forth by materialists. However, he then
joined them by postulating that life's origin may lie in clay. He was
quick to see the failings of other reductionist proposals, but blind to
his. Several years later his ideas about clay were refuted and dismissed.
 

ROBERT SHAPIRO

In 1986 (one year after Cairns-Smith's book), Robert Shapiro (chemistry
professor active in DNA research at NY University) authored a definitive
work entitled: "Origins: A Skeptics Guide To the Creation of Life On
Earth" (Simon & Schuster). This well documented book took pot-shots at
virtually all known origin of life scenarios, showing that they were all
bankrupt. It's central conclusion: Not only isn't there anyone who knows
how life began, there are no rational proposals on the table.
 

ROBERT GANGE

That same year I authored: Origins & Destiny (Word Books) which showed,
in part, that modern thermophysics disallows the existence of a rational
basis for such proposals. In particular, the new First Law of
Thermophysics (formerly the old Second Law of Thermodynamics) states that
a natural process cannot systematically increase complexity (information)
within a thermodynamically closed system. This means that not only is
there no scientifically valid chance process that can explain life's
origin, but that this constraint teaches that it will NEVER BE FOUND.
 

CONCLUSIONS FROM SCIENCE

In summary, when electron microscopy allowed us to measure the "next
smaller level," a wealth of scientific knowledge from no less than ten
fields of study (biochemistry, geochemistry, astrophysics, geophysics,
geology, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, information
theory, material's science and thermophysics)
INDEPENDENTLY CONVERGED TO THE SAME CONCLUSION: TO GET LIFE YOU MUST FIRST HAVE LIFE.
Otherwise it can not, and will not happen. Moreover when life DID appear on earth,
something beyond physical matter caused the systematic rise in complexity
that is apparent in the fossil record (discussed later in another paper).