[Hunble]

I will ask you once again:

The Miller experiment demonstrated how hydrocarbon gases, when subjected to an energy source, were able to combine and produce Amino acids.

This experiment has been reproduced so many times, and under so many different conditions, it would be difficult to list all of them.

So, what was the flaw in this experiment?

[Leonine]

The primitive (Oh, no! I used the word "primitive!") earth never had any NH3, CH3, or H2. Instead, NASA (in the 1980s) found that it was composed of H2O, CO2, and N2. And as one scientist put it, "you absolutely cannot get the same experimental results with that mixture." And yet many textbooks still reference the Miller (nee Soviet) experiment--sounds like an agenda.

[Hootowl]

Boy, they're almost too numerous to mention, but I'll give it a shot. Urey and Miller used a carefully selected variety of organic gases in concentrations designed to favor the formation of soem of life's building blocks. Nor suprisingly, they got the result they wanted. However, did it replicate actual conditions on earth? No. Earth's original atmosphere (as posited by scientists, not creationists) couldn't hold heavy gases like xenon and krypton, let alone the lighter ones like methane and ammonia. Urey and Miller's experiment subjected the test gases to carefully controlled electrical stimulation to get their result. A real lightning bolt would have fried the potential result. Going farther, Urey and Miller carefully screened their experiment from real-world concentrations of ultra-violet light, which would have been as plentiful then as now. They did this because ultra-violet light breaks down ammonia faster than it can form, so in the real world the combination of ingredients used by Urey/Miller wouldn't have had a chance of working. Plus, if all these things were in on the beginning, sedimentary rocks ought to show significant amounts of organic stuff. They don't. Need more? Real life amino acids are all of one special form, called left-handed molecules. Urey/Miller's experiment produced a "racemic" mixture of amino acides, approximately equal proportions of left- and right-handed amino acids. If that had been the case from the beginning, we'd still have left- and right-handed molecules, but we don't find right-handed molecules in any life form today. All for now. I'm tired of typing. ;^)

[bluejay]

The Miller experiment demonstrated how hydrocarbon gases, when subjected to an energy source, were able to combine and produce Amino acids. This experiment has been reproduced so many times, and under so many different conditions, it would be difficult to list all of them. So, what was the flaw in this experiment? There is nothing wrong with the Miller experiment. There is some thing wrong with the conclusion that the experiment offered a potential model for how basic organic compounds were first synthesized: 1. Most now do not believe that ancient atmosphere was a predominantly reducing environment (as required by the experiment). 2. The energy requirement for the experiment is tremendous. It is unlikely that early Earth lightning storms would have produced enough energy to generate the vast amounts of organic molecules. 3. Recently, meteorites have been found to contain amino acids. It is unlikely that these compounds were created by the method that Miller proposed.