POSTSCRIPT TO THE ORIGIN OF LIFE HURDLES.
So there you have it! Life cannot emerge from the primordial soup. It would have to surmount too many insurmountable hurdles. Starting with the Minimal Complexity Hurdle:- A self-replicating organism must be vastly, vastly, vastly complex to survive. Anything simple (“evolving” on its way to complexity) could not possibly survive in the interim. If proteins emerged from the primordial soup, they could not replicate themselves. Nucleotides might theoretically replicate themselves, but would be impossible to synthesize in the first place. The formation of life would be hampered by The Clutter Problem Hurdle – lots of inappropriate chemicals would create interfering cross reactions. Many of the monomers of the molecules of life cannot be synthesized. If RNA did form, it would be useless unless proteins were already in existence. Different isomers of the monomers would join together to form misshapen, and therefore non-functional, molecules of life. Any molecules of life would decompose in water (hydrolysis). Any molecule of life would require a multi-stage process of synthesis, each stage representing entirely different environmental conditions. The formation of life molecules flies in the face of The Second Law of Thermodynamics (ie:- entropy), which requires a progression towards DISorder, rather than a progression towards order, which the emergence of life from the primordial soup implies. The ribose required for RNA cannot be synthesized under the same chemical conditions as the chemical conditions required for the synthesis of RNA’s other components. There is no available phosphorus to make the phosphate group required by RNA. In a primordial soup, the chirally uniform molecules required for biological life cannot form. If, by some miracle, a self-replicating RNA molecule formed, there would be errors in the replication process that would cause “error catastrophe” and degeneration. In any case, RNA, in general, cannot self replicate. If the molecules of life could form, ultraviolet light would destroy them. If there were oxygen in the atmosphere, life could not get started; but, once started, life could not survive WITHOUT oxygen. In any case, a cell membrane would be required to protect the molecules of life from chemical pollution and inevitable death. Such a (highly complex) cell membrane would be unavailable in the primordial soup. If life did form, it would have no form of nutrition, unless the highly complex process of photosynthesis were already in place – which it could not be. In any case, the molecules of life would require an input of information in order to function – but there was no information source in the primordial soup. The idea that life started with minerals is a non-starter. Minerals are crystals that cannot contain the necessary quantity of information required by life forms.
Going back to the quote from Francis Crick:- The origin of life (if it could have occurred) would be “almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going.”
The notion that life emerged from the primordial soup is effectively pseudoscience – wishful thinking – an ideology adopted in the teeth of the scientific evidence. This notion should be consigned to the ranks of scientific curiosities and fads, such as The Flat Earth Theory, The Phlogiston Theory, The Hollow Earth Theory, Alchemy etc - - - . The only reason scientists support the primordial soup theory is because they have been bullied into it (basically with threats of job-loss, loss of funding, loss of tenure, etc. - - - ) by atheists who have seized control of the scientific community, and exert a sinister stranglehold.