The Holy Grail of Science Discovered!!

Science Daily posts snippets of scientific discoveries and other interesting science related news.  Like most popular media every announcement from the evolutionary sciences is met with astonishment; preparing to claim fame for some ultimate truth about life, the universe and human beings.  This has gone on for 150 years and more in what has become an aimless attempt at pushing the godless myth of evolutionism down the throat of the scientifically reverent public.  In the U.S. it has not worked as most Americans can see the weakness of “evidences” for evolution.  This intelligent insight stems from a well inform and highly educated public that has been spoon fed evolutionary biases for decades and unlike scientists, still can’t swallow the pill of mythology as fact.  The National Education Association believe that teachers have failed to teach the evolutionary paradigm but in fact it has been taught so well that even the lay person can see the frailty of its purported facts about life.  Not to be outdone, another scientist has now claimed to have discovered the “Holy Grail of science” last year when presenting his personal theory of the origin of life. If you have not heard of this astounding news it is no surprise since Dr Chatterjee simply rehashes the same old primordial soup in a different kettle minus the details that count.

It has baffled humans for millennia: how did life begin on planet Earth? Now, new research from a Texas Tech University paleontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the bowels of hell (2).  Sankar Chatterjee, Horn Professor of Geosciences and curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet’s early geology.  “This is bigger than finding any dinosaur,” Chatterjee said. “This is what we’ve all searched for – the Holy Grail of science.”  Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth’s surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.  Crater basin may have been the crucible of

Crater basin. For life, just add water.

life.  He will present his findings Oct. 30 during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver (2).  As well as discovering how ancient animals flew, Chatterjee discovered the Shiva Meteorite Crater, which was created by a 25-mile-wide meteorite that struck off the coast of India. This research concluded this giant meteorite wreaked havoc simultaneously with the Chicxulub meteorite strike near Mexico, finishing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The Holy Grail of Science was discovered recently by a Texas paleontologist.  The one man who discovered how ancient animals flew has now discovered the crucible of life.  He presented his findings in October of last year at the 125^th anniversary of the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.  I am surprise

why so many around the world have not heard this news or of Dr. Chatterjee! It is not everyday that one can claim to have discovered how life came to be on this planet.

What scientific evidence does Chatterjee give for repeating the worn out claim that life originated from a chemical soup?  Chatterjee found a meteor crater basin off the coast of India.  The publication repeatedly asserts that Chatterjee did some kind of research to conclude that this meteor crater also killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  From finding an underwater crater he extrapolated this to imagine how life started. (This cannot be science.)  Here is his findings.

 “Thanks to regular heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth’s surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.  Crater basin may have been the crucible of life.”  Chatterjee presented his findings last year.

Thank you heavy bombardment.  Wait…What findings?  May have been?  I thought this was Holy Grail stuff?

Chatterjee’s latest research is nothing more than a repeat of Fred Hoyle’s speculations that the organic chemistry for life  (and possibly genetic coded information) must have rained down from outer space to jump start and even direct the evolution of life on this planet.  This is convenient for telling make-believe stories about the origin of life but it has no basis in fact.  “He believes he knows how the first single-celled organism formed in hydrothermal crater basins.”  What work did Chatterjee do to discover this information?  He studied three other sites containing the world’s oldest  fossils. Somehow these sites inspired him to fabricate a new

story of life’s origin.  Chatterjee says,  “When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms,” Chatterjee said. “It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. One billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life – the ancestors to all living things.”   How Chatterjee knows this information about he world 4.5 billion years ago (4.500,000,000,000 years ago) is completely beyond any scientific means of data collection; but somehow Chatterjee knows this information!  Maybe he is great!?

 

So incredible is Dr. Chatterjee’s ability to formulate the past that he is able to conjure up knowledge that the planet was bombarded by showers of meteors.  His studies of three ancient fossil sites gives him incredible

insight into just how the first living cell came to be.  Following his train of thought we learn that a meteor 350 miles in diameter filled with the basic building blocks of life punched through the Earth’s crust.  This created volcanic geothermal vents that concentrated and polymerized these chemicals in the crater basin.  Craters formed deep, dark and hot environments that captured comets and, because of the perfect distance of the earth from the sun, the comets melted to water filling these basins and dissolving the cosmological ingredients of life to form a thick primordial soup.  The thermal venting created just the right amount of convection currents to move the soup and mix the chemicals to form compounds that grew and grew and became more complex.  “The geological stage provides special dark, hot, and isolated environments of the crater basins with the hydrothermal vent systems that served as incubators for life,” he said. “Segregation and concentration of organic molecules by convective currents took place here, something like the kinds we find on the ocean floor, but still very different. It was a bizarre and isolated world that would seem like a vision of hell with the foul smells of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitric oxide and steam that provided life-sustaining energy.”

Fortunately, the “Crater Basin with Hydrothermal Vent System Meteorites brought biomolecules of cell

membrane.”  Crevices and pores acted as scaffolds to hold and concentrate RNA and proteins in such a way that the membranes encapsulated them together and protected them from the surrounding seething, boiling, volcanic, comet smashing, churning, foul, toxic and hellish environment of the crater.  Of course, some of the simple proteins had to be enzymes so they could replicate the primitive RNA and create metabolism. Where did membranes come from?  Why from the meteroite of course. Where did the enzymes come from?  From the crater of course.  Chatterjee refers to David Deamer’s work (1) where he isolated some fatty acids (the basic unit of membranes) from a meteorite that fell in 1969 on Australia.

Deamer tested his hypothesis that these acids could form membranes and act to condense nucleic acid monomers into polymers of DNA.  For his work he bought a mixture of nucleoside monophosphates, a vial of single stranded DNA molecules to act as a template (primer) and cycled the mixture in the presence of lipids to dry and back to moist conditions at 90⁰C while bubbling with carbon dioxide. Only a 0.5% of this mixture seemed to produce double stranded DNA (using picogreen as the indicator of double stranded DNA).  He then amplified the product with a polymerase and sequence the resulting DNA to find that It was 90% identical to the template single stranded DNA. (There seems to be a lot of added precursor chemicals, the convenient absence of the supposedly thousands of interfering compounds and a humanly synthesized DNA molecule to give this intelligently designed experiment a best chance scenario).

(Deamer is You Tubed discussing his lipid experiment for Google audience.  Nothing that he presents has anything to do with reality.  A designed experiment under pristine conditions with only pure monomeric units is said to make RNA.  These conditions cannot exist anywhere in the world or at anytime.  Yet, if this experiment was successful, the most important feature of an RNA molecule remains missing – information content.  The residues on an RNA molecule must be specified for a known function like the directions to make a protein.  Next a complex of some 100+ protein molecules of specified complexity must assemble to read the information of the molecule.  These attempts at making molecules ignore the enormous requirement of specified sequences on any RNA or DNA or Protein molecule.  This only happens in a cell that is programmed for life.  But young and less informed students are required to believe this experiment is meaningful.)

Chatterjee continues:

“Meteorites brought this fatty lipid material to early Earth,” Chatterjee said. “This fatty lipid material floated on top of the water surface of crater basins but moved to the bottom by convection currents. At some point in this process during the course of millions of years, this fatty membrane could have encapsulated simple RNA and proteins together like a soap bubble. The

One 350 mile wide meteor + 12 comets sprinkled in over 500 million years + heat and sunlight. Mix for 500 million years more and there is life! Any questions?

RNA and protein molecules begin interacting and communicating. Eventually RNA gave way to DNA – a much more stable compound – and with the development of the genetic code, the first cells divided.”

How does Chatterjee know the fatty acids would form lipids under these conditions and how do fatty acids or any biochemicals ooze out of rock?  Oh, I forgot, millions of years!  Given millions of years the hot water in the crater undergoing convection sooner or later forced the chemicals to ooze out of the rock left over from the meteorite to make a soup and then the hot water created bubbles of lipids that then captured the RNA and protein.  See!  That wasn’t so hard.  These then interacted and communicated (?) to form DNA.  DNA is a much more stable compound and with the development of the genetic code in several more million years the first cell divided!   From here evolution is simpler as the first cell stored, processed and transmitted genetic information to the daughter cells.  Chatterjee says, “These self-sustaining first cells were capable of Darwinian evolution,” he said. “The emergence of the first cells on the early Earth was the culmination of a long history of prior chemical, geological and cosmic

processes.”

(It is important to make note at this point that Chatterjee never mentions where the information content for the cells metabolism came from.  This is crucial to the story.  No abiotic story given any conditions we can think of will create the minimally needed 300 genes which just so happen to code for 300 proteins which just so happen to be controlled by a cascade of gene networks and epigenetic signals so that they are produced in the right amounts at the right time to make the cell exist. )

So boys and girls, you too can be a paleontologist and origin of life researcher.  Chatterjee and his colleagues have the qualities you will need to model as you grow up.  First, never grow up.  Keep your wondrous

imagination throughout life and never let knowledge get in the way.  As you can see many serious scientists use their imagination to explain how things have occurred in the past.  Modern science encourages this kind of flight of fantasy so long as it does not include any intelligent explanations for the existence of the material world.   Secondly, if you don’t have evidence, make it up as you go along.  You see science doesn’t mean you have to have facts or any real experimental design.  If you do design an experiment be sure to ignore its flaws and its obvious need for intelligent organization.  This gives you flexibility in pondering the many possibilities that nature could have used to create the world and all that is in it.  Thirdly, never be constrained by knowledge.  Knowledge has a tendency to biased our research in the sciences.  If biochemicals don’t actually do what you want them to do, don’t worry.  Just use the words “most likely” or “might have” or “probably” to describe events that you know could not have happened.  This will allow you to continue to write research papers that will not be questioned by authoritative reviewers since they are so used to scientific papers assuming that the impossible happens all the time in science.

“Chatterjee also believes that modern RNA-viruses and protein-rich prions that cause deadly diseases probably represent the evolutionary legacy of primitive RNA and protein molecules. They may be the oldest cellular particles that predated the first cellular life. Once cellular life evolved, RNA-viruses and prions became redundant, but survived as parasites on the living cells.”

“The problem with theories on the origins of life is that they don’t propose any experiments that lead to the emergence of cells, Chatterjee said. However, he suggested an experiment to recreate the ancient prebiotic world and support or refute his theory.  “If future experiments with membrane-bound RNA viruses and prions result in the creation of a synthetic protocell, it may reflect the plausible pathways for the emergence of life on early Earth,” he said.

Chatterjee believes in many impossible things and all at the same time.  He is a truly remarkable man. Let’s be clear here, what is often plausible to a scientist can become “… the Holy Grail of science” if it is published in the

literature.   If you haven’t heard of this astonishing “rigorous scientific work” that has discovered the answer to how life formed don’t feel too bad.  Apparently no one takes it seriously.

1.  Biochimie. 2011 Mar;93(3):556-61. doi: 10.1016/j.biochi.2010.11.012. Epub 2010 Dec 3.  Non-enzymatic transfer of sequence information under plausible prebiotic conditions.  Olasagasti F, Kim HJ, Pourmand N, Deamer DW.
2.  GSA’s 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting & Exposition.  27–30 October 2013. • Colorado Convention Center, DenverPaper No. 300-5.  Presentation Time: 9:00 AM.  IMPACT, RNA-PROTEIN WORLD, AND THE ENDOPREBIOTIC ORIGIN OF LIFE  CHATTERJEE, Sankar, Geosciences, Museum of Texas Tech University, 3301 4th Street, Lubbock, TX 79409, sankar.chatterjee@ttu.edu
3. Science Daily October 29, 2013.