Posted on 02/18/2002 4:59:53 AM PST by cracker
No, that's creationist urban legend. Before Pasteur, people thought that diseases "just happened," sort of supernaturally. He demonstrated that they came from bacteria (no miraculous spontaneous generation). Thus Pasteurized milk. But his "no spontaneous generation" demonstration has absolutely nothing to do with the ultimate origin of life.
Sigh. Where to find fresh meat?
This really isn't difficult to find, and it's a great example of how creationists love to take stuff out of context and then spin it to fit their weird views. In the case of Pasteur, the creationists take the expression "spontaneous generation" and give it a totally different meaning. Some of them must know how they're twisting the truth, and the rest just read the perverted versions of "science" on the creationist websites:
The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation (1668-1859) .
From the time of the ancient Romans, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some life forms arose spontaneously from non-living matter. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.[snip]
The theory of spontaneous generation was finally laid to rest in 1859 by the young French chemist, Louis Pasteur. The French Academy of Sciences sponsored a contest for the best experiment either proving or disproving spontaneous generation. Pasteur's winning experiment was a variation of the methods of Needham and Spallanzani. He boiled meat broth in a flask, heated the neck of the flask in a flame until it became pliable, and bent it into the shape of an S. Air could enter the flask, but airborne microorganisms could not - they would settle by gravity in the neck. As Pasteur had expected, no microorganisms grew. When Pasteur tilted the flask so that the broth reached the lowest point in the neck, where any airborne particles would have settled, the broth rapidly became cloudy with life. Pasteur had both refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and convincingly demonstrated that microorganisms are everywhere - even in the air.
I am not wiggling. A prebiotic soup needs an abiotic world (with nothing to eat the soup). The world we have now does not provide these conditions. That's what the lab is for. You're simply grasping at straws.
Even more damaging is that the conditions required by that experiment are now evidently discredited. The early atmosphere was not a reducing atmosphere as the experiment requires.
Abiogenesis had been a subject for speculation long before the Miller experiment. Darwin had supposed something of the sort. Miller consulted Urey for the best available (early 1950s) guess concerning the nature of the atmosphere. The experiment's dramatic results (a soup dark as coffee in about a week) electrified the scientific community. Obviously, the results were very tentative, but they showed that it's not hard to make carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen (what Schopf calls CHON) do its stuff).
The estimates of the early atmosphere were wrong, and it may have been oxidizing rather than reducing. (But the synthesis still works even if it's only a little bit reducing.)
And the synthesis doesn't have to happen in the presence of the atmosphere. It can happen at deep sea vents or in other sheltered places. And the earth was seeded with a good jumpstart of bio-organics from space. Comets and other space ice seem to be full of the stuff now, so there's no reason to suppose it wasn't so then.
The important demonstration was that you don't need life, or even some guy in a lab coat, to make simple compounds form complex organics. It's easy, as simple chemistry had long suggested that it should be. You can't throw all the lessons out by picking nits.
Not yet, but wait until the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are examined. If there's liquid water under the ice, there is a very good chance of either prebiotic soup or life itself.
Why do I bother?
man creates nonsense--evolution!
the dmz--God built a false trail to keep the fools out---
and evolution paves---free busses it!
Liberal-humanist-commies sand bag the sides....float--sail on canal of blood--misery!
All this any of us could do to see the evidence for evolution - but where is the similar evidence for creation? (other than in a single uncorroborated, non-peer reviewed, very old text of uncertain authorship)
349 posted on 2/22/02 8:34 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by cracker
Evolution is what keeps empty souls from overgrazing the heavens---happy in the feedlots over at the spam mill!
Dumb heifers--steers--ox/commies!
God did say he left an angel to guard paradise to keep the riff-raff out---flaming sword of TRUTH---invisible to you---but you're left with the alternative--the flaming sword of lies---EVOLUTION(dialectical materialism)!
352 posted on 2/22/02 8:56 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by f.Christian
Pre-biotic soup is living matter. Pre-biotic soup is non-living matter. Which is it?
Well then don't. I posed my original question to someone other than you. Still, no evidence for a pre-biotic ocean.
You people are pathetic. The sooner we seceed from you rightwing bible-thumping nitwits the better off we'll all be.
528 posted on 2/23/02 9:23 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by New Englandite
You people are pathetic. The sooner we seceed from you leftwing fossil/chest-thumping baboons the better off the human race will all be.
And you can accept cans of soup as evidence of pre-biotic soup. Fine if you wish to accept a questionable experiment as evidence. I don't. Pasteur showed something. If you have evidence that the other side, you know the "spontaneous generation" folks, showed life arising please reveal it. Until then, the contest was won 1-0 by Louis.
And you base that on what?
Andrew, I gave you a link. Go there. Put on your thinking cap. Read the article. You canot do so and still believe that the work of Pasteur has anything to do with the origin of life on earth.
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