On Friday, an article titled “Life on Earth triggered by meteorites 4.6 billion years ago: study” was posted on MSN.com. One wonders what sort of study this was and how it could look back 4.6 billion years to determine what had happened back then. Let us see.
According to the article,
Life on Earth was triggered by blazing fireballs from the outer solar system 4.6 billion years ago, according to new research.
That sounds interesting; what was this “new research” and how did it determine that “blazing fireballs from the outer solar system” triggered life on Earth?
Alas, as we read through the article, we find nothing to back up the claims. What the study asserts is that meteorites carrying carbonaceous chondrite “made up ten percent of the space rocks that smashed into the planet during its birth … It provided a fifth of its potassium and half of its zinc.”
I’m not seeing anything here about life on Earth being triggered, or anything about life at all. Potassium is not alive, nor is zinc; they are chemical elements. So why the headline? According to the article, zinc “played a vital role in the creation of DNA,” while potassium “helps produce a cell’s fluids.”
Seriously? Zinc interacts with DNA; it does not create it.
See, for example, Nejdl, Lukas et al., “DNA interaction with zinc(II) ions,” Int J Biol Macromol. 2014 Mar;64:281-7
DNA is a complex storage system for information that is extrinsic to the chemical properties of the molecule. As Bill Gates has said, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created,” and the Second Law of Thermodynamics precludes such molecules from ever forming spontaneously by any naturalistic process. Of course, the scientists are welcome to fill a vat with hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous and then toss in some zinc and wait for it to create DNA, but they would be wasting their time.
Potassium, meanwhile, helps maintain normal fluid levels inside cells—but you must first have a living cell before potassium can do that.
So the claim that this study in any way showed that “life on Earth [was] triggered by meteorites 4.6 billion years ago” is not even remotely true. There is absolutely no justification for the headline, to put it mildly; the study found no components of living things (proteins, DNA, RNA), let alone anything that is actually living. In other words, they found nothing that would even suggest that “life on Earth [was] triggered by meteorites 4.6 billion years ago.”
Sadly, this is not the only time I have seen such a thing. It is quite common, in fact, in the abiogenesis/evolution industry to publish articles with headlines that lead an unsuspecting public to believe that more proof for these claims has been found, whereas examination of this putative proof finds that the promised proof is simply not there. One wonders why, if abiogenesis/evolution were true, genuine proof for the mechanisms is never adduced.