Thirty-eight years ago what is arguably the greatest mystery ever puzzled over by scientists—the origin of life—seemed virtually solved by a single simple experiment.” This is how the February 1991 issue of Scientific American begins a review of theories of the origin of life.¹
   The simple experiment, carried out by a University of Chicago graduate student named Stanley Miller, involved placing a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water in a sealed flask and zapping it with electrical sparks. The result was a tarry goo containing amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins found in living organisms.
   To Miller it seemed but a few inevitable evolutionary steps from this primordial soup of water and biomolecules to the first living organisms. And from that day, college science students have been taught that science has explained life’s origin. Indeed, many students are under the impression that life itself has been synthesized in a test tube. Unfortunately, as the article in Scientific American points out, scientists are far from understanding life’s origins.
   First of all, some scientists have argued that the conditions on the primordial earth would have been unsuitable for amino acids to form in. Miller’s theory calls for a reducing atmosphere rich in hydrogen-based gases such as methane and ammonia. But the primordial atmosphere, some say, consisted mainly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, so that the raw materials for amino acids and other small biological molecules would have been missing. In fact, scientists can only guess about what the earth was like billions of years ago, and the guesses they make can agree or disagree with Miller’s theory.
   Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that amino acids would have formed on the primordial earth. And let’s suppose they would have piled up with other simple biological molecules without being naturally destroyed or dispersed. We’d then run into another problem: Although the rules for chemical bonding may allow simple biological molecules to form, these same rules don’t guarantee that the higher forms of organization found in living organisms will arise.
   We can illustrate this by a simple example. We all know the story of the monkeys that randomly hit typewriter keys and by chance write Shakespeare’s plays. Monkeys who strike keys completely at random are unlikely even to come up with English words, apart from short words like is or at. But we can improve on the monkeys’ performance by introducing a simple rule.
   Here’s how the rule works. If a monkey has just typed th, we require that the next letter be fit for an English word including th. For example, the next letter might be e, forming the word the, or it might be r, since thr appears in throw. But the letter couldn’t be q or x, since thq and thx don’t come up in English words. By this rule, the monkey always randomly chooses a letter that in English could follow the last two letters he typed.
   Another part of our rule is this: we instruct the monkey that the more often a letter appears in English after the two he has just typed, the more he should tend to choose it. For example, e follows th more often than r does, so after th the monkey is more likely to choose e than r. (We also let the monkey choose spaces, commas, and periods along with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.)
   You can think of this rule as an imitation of chemical bonding. An e or r can bond to th, but q or z can’t. Allowing the monkey to type sequences of letters by this rule is like letting molecules form in a primordial soup by the rules of chemical bonding. I compiled a table of allowed three-letter combinations (letter-triples) by running an essay of mine, on Vedic astronomy, through a computer. Then I programmed the computer to generate sequences of letters according to the resulting rule. I call these sequences of letters “sentences,” even though they’re generally not punctuated properly. Here’s an example:

“To the local thers an ut once scorpith ese, ar and astar. The ma, wers a godern the sky srittailis othicein volumn of the onsmilky way, thears”

   Evolutionists, this seems promising. The computer-monkey is coming up with many English words, and some even seem to convey a faint glimmer of meaning. One can imagine that in just a few evolutionary steps the computer will begin to express profound thoughts—with impeccable English grammar.
   But unfortunately if we read a few pages of this stuff we find no signs of emerging complex order. We find short English words, often relating to astronomy, since the letter-bonding rule comes from such words. But there are no signs of the more complex order needed for the grammatical expression of thoughts. In the bonding rule, the information for these complex patterns is simply not there.
   Biological chemistry puts before us a similar problem. By the rules of chemical bonding, atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen will tend to form amino acids and similar compounds under appropriate conditions. But these rules are not enough to bring together the highly complex structures found in even the simplest living cells. . . .

Copyright © 2004 by Richard L. Thompson