Diamonds May Have Jumpstarted Life on Earth – Foolishness Alert

When people stop believing in God they’ll believe in anything (no matter how foolish or far fetched).

LiveScience | Robert Britt | July 26, 2008

One of the greatest mysteries in science is how life began. Now one group of researchers says diamonds may have been life’s best friend.

Scientists have long theorized that life on Earth got going in a primordial soup of precursor chemicals. But nobody knows how these simple amino acids, known to be the building blocks of life, were assembled into complex polymers needed as a platform for genesis.

Diamonds are crystallized forms of carbon that predate the oldest known life on the planet. In lab experiments aimed to confirm work done more than three decades ago, researchers found that when treated with hydrogen, natural diamonds formed crystalline layers of water on the surface. Water is essential for life as we know it. Also, the tests found electrical conductivity that could have been key to forcing chemical reactions needed to generate the first birth.

When primitive molecules landed on the surface of these hydrogenated diamonds in the atmosphere of early Earth, a few billion years ago, the resulting reaction may have been sufficient enough to generate more complex organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life, the researchers say.

The research, by German scientists Andrei Sommer, Dan Zhu, and Hans-Joerg Fecht at the University of Ulm, is detailed in the Aug. 6 issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal Crystal Growth & Design. Funding was provided by the Landesstiftung Baden-Wurttemberg Bionics Network.

Another theory, called panspermia, holds that life on Earth arrived from space, as organisms rained down inside tiny meteors or giant comets.

The new research does not conclusively determine how life began, but it lends support to one possible way.

“Hydrogenated diamond advances to the best of all possible origin-of-life platforms,” the researchers contend.

. . . more

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5 thoughts on “Diamonds May Have Jumpstarted Life on Earth – Foolishness Alert”

  1. I believe this quote from C.S. Lewis (from his book Miracles) exemplifies the mental contortions and the lengths to which anti-Creation individuals will go to avoid God’s active role in all life and creation:

    “The ordinary procedure of the modern historian [scientist, biologist, etc.], even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of “natural” explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable “natural” explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism or unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie — all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle.” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles, p. 133)

  2. Scientists set up experiments designed to explain the origins of life and never get the irony inherent in building an experiment to support the concept of spontaneously arriving life.

  3. If life is just an accident, then our thoughts must be just accidents, therefore expecting universal “laws” and such concepts as predictability and experimentation are illogical. How can one random accident look at another random accident and say “that’s not true!”

  4. How about this quote?!?!?!

    Did Huxley not believe in evolution?

    “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption … For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

    (REPORT, June 1966. “Confession of Professed Atheist,” A. Huxley)

  5. Huxley didn’t really care about evolution, he just wanted to get his. The propagation of Darwinism and evolution has always been linked to replacing Christianity in both faith and practice.

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