Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”.

Darwin’s speculation went untested until the Miller–Urey experiment in 1952 at the University of Chicago. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey successfully produced some of Darwin’s “proteine compounds” by building on Alexander Oparin‘s and J. B. S. Haldane‘s hypothesis that the primitive conditions on Earth were favorable to the chemical reactions that synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors. Oparian and Haldane’s favorable conditions required a nitrogen-rich reducing atmosphere without oxygen.

The Miller-Urey experiment advanced the question to center stage—were the conditions of primitive Earth the same as proposed by Oparin and Haldane? Was early Earth nitrogen-rich? Was oxygen absent?

Since 1952, research on the actual chemical conditions of the primitive Earth has been on the investigative frontlines of origin of life research. After over 50 years, the consensus is inconclusive. Wikipedia, under the topic of “Origin of Life” in, now more commonly referred to as “Abiogenesis,” concludes: “There is no truly ‘standard model’ of the origin of life. Most currently accepted models draw at least some elements from the framework laid out by the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis.”

Irrespective of primitive Earth conditions, an even more challenging question emerges—what is the statisitcal probability for functional proteins to arise de novo from the “prebiotic soup” of amino acids by chance? 

Stephen Meyer, in his new book entitled Signature in the Cell, reviews the extensive research into answering this daunting question on chance. Based on the works of Robert Sauer at MIT, Douglas Axe at Cambridge University, and British cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, Meyer, concldues that “the improbability of generating the necessary proteins by chance—or the genetic information to produce them—to balloon beyond comprehension.”

Meyer writes, “The odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebioitc soup is no better than 1 chance in 10¹⁶⁴.” Meyer continues, “Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specific particle among all the particles in the universe.”

The evidence for the probability of origin of life arising from Darwin’s “warm little pond” seems to have vanished beyond the realm of any possibility—regardless of any early Earth scenario.

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