What Darwin Didn't Know - Part 7: No Soup for You!

One of the most bizarre Seinfeld episodes was the one involving the "Soup Nazi", the owner of this soup kitchen who, if he didn't like you for whatever reason, would not serve you soup. It was a hilarious episode, as were most Seinfeld episodes. He would say, "No Soup for you!" to George Costanza and George would feel humiliated. Here's the video of the episode.

I wonder what Darwin would have thought, or better yet, would he have changed his theory if he could have been shown that, despite all the years of rock exploration since Darwin's theory, absolutely no evidence of a primordial soup has been found in the chemical signatures (residues) of the oldest rocks on Earth. Here's a quote from a great book by Michael Denton, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" from pages 260 and 261:

"The basic outline of the traditional evolutionary scenario is well known. It has been expounded over and over again during the past twenty years on television, in the press, in popular scientific journals. The first stage on the road to life is presumed to have been the build up, by purely chemical synthetic processes occurring on the surface of the early Earth, of all the basic organic compounds necessary for the formation of a living cell. These are supposed to have accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth, the so called "pre-biotic soup". In certain specialized environments these organic compounds were assembled into large macro molecules, proteins, and nucleic acids. Eventually, over millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules occurred which were endowed with the property of self-reproduction. Then driven by natural selection ever more efficient and complex self-reproducing molecular systems evolved until finally the first simple cell system emerged."

Denton goes on to state; "The existence of a pre-biotic soup is crucial to the whole scheme. Without an abiotic accumulation of the building blocks of the cell no life could ever evolve. If the traditional story is true, therefore, there must have existed for many millions of years a rich mixture of organic compounds in the ancient oceans and some of this material would very likely have been trapped in the sedimentary rocks lain down in the seas of those remote times." He continues to state that from the oldest rocks on Earth dating to close to 3.9 billion years ago, "in none of them has any trace of abiotically produced organic compounds been found." So Paleontology "has again failed to substantiate evolutionary presumptions." Here's the rub, as Michael Denton sums it up: "Considering the way the pre-biotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence."

It's also apparent that even if a pre-biotic soup did indeed exist, any compounds resulting from it would be rapidly oxidized and degraded in the presence of any oxygen in the early Earth's atmosphere, and there is no evidence which conclusively rules out the possibility that oxygen did exist in the early atmosphere. But even if the oxygen was absent, this would mean that there would be no ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to protect the organic compounds from lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, which would destroy them.

Here's a great audio discussion on the topic of the problems that result to the natural process evolutionary models in the absence of a pre-biotic soup.

Here's an excellent article from Reasons To Believe on the Pre-Biotic Soup problem:

What I have talked about so far is what we don't see in the geologic record (rocks), namely, the chemical residues of pre-biotic compounds. So what do we see? Instead, we see fossils, or what can be called "post-biotic" life. Life is intrinsic to the Earth. From the oldest rocks, we see evidence for complex life with no evidence of any transitional or ancestral forms coming before them.

What we see in the rocks are yet more evidences for the existence of the God of the Bible. The remnants of life that we see are more fingerprints of God preparing the planet for the advent of humanity.

Not only is the no pre-biotic soup a serious problem for a naturalistic approach to the origin of life, but there is also the problem of a lack of sufficient time. I'll explain next time.

I hope you are enjoying this beautiful summer. God is truly great!

Yours

Tom