"WE ARE STAR STUFF," Carl Sagan used to say in his role as the host of the PBS "Cosmos" series. Evolutionists believe that not only did people evolve from fish, but that fish evolved from chemicals in the ocean, and that these chemicals evolved from atoms that were evolved in Supernova exploding stars or during the "Big Bang" explosion. A new book by Marcus Chown, The Magic Furnace, talks about this theory in almost religious terms. "Every breath you take … Every flower you pick contains atoms blasted into space by stellar explosions that blazed brighter than a billion suns." Evolutionists want to explain where life came from. But first, they have to explain were the atoms came from, to make the molecules that make up living things.

There didn't used to be such a thing as an "exobiologist." This is someone who studies extraterrestrial life. This is hard to do, since we have never seen any ET life forms. What we do find in space is some of the more simple chemicals that make up living things. Because nobody has been able to figure out how these chemicals could ever form here on earth, many evolutionists claim that they must have come here from outer space. But then, they have to figure out how these chemicals could have evolved into proteins and DNA.

The Associated Press carried a story 4/7/01, quoting exobiologist Sandra Pizzarello of Arizona State University. Last January, pieces of a carbonaceous (carbon-containing) asteroid were found on a frozen lake in Canada. Pizzarello and others were disappointed that after a full year of study, they couldn't find very many of the chemicals important for life.

Even if asteroids filled the earth with these chemicals, evolutionists still have the problem of figuring out how simple amino acids could combine to make proteins, which are essential to life. And how could you get nucleotides, in order to make DNA and RNA? And how could other chemicals come together to make cell membranes, which make up the very complex "skin" on the surface of every cell of living things? Membranes are more than just grease bubbles.

Many in the past have tried to answer these questions … Oparin, Miller, Urey. Their experiments are famous in our high school and college science textbooks, but modern biologists know that they really never did answer the question. That's why some evolutionists are now looking to the stars. Others are still betting on the sea. Harold Morowitz and Robert Hazen, of George Mason University, have suggested that metal catalysts around hot geysers on the ocean floor could have caused the chemical reactions that could make the starting chemicals of life. So it goes on.

The EMBO Journal of 4/2/01 describes some new experiments attempting to solve what evolutionists call the "chicken and the egg" problem. Which came first, DNA or protein? DNA contains the information on how to make proteins. But you need enzymes (which are made of proteins) to make DNA. The current popular theory is Harvard University professor Walter Gilbert's "the RNA world." Since some kinds of RNA molecules can do some of the things that some proteins can do, and also can carry information like DNA does, many evolutionists believe that RNA was first. Gilbert says in his 1986 article in Nature that this "is the answer to the problem."

But then, where did the RNA come from? Evolutionists still have the "chicken and egg" problem. Each of the "answers" to the problem so far, have still been nothing but wishful thinking that never answers the original question. There is an alternative explanation.

Dr. Glenn Jackson holds four degrees in science and education from George Mason University and University of Virginia. He has taught elementary through college level sciences for over twenty years and in four states. He is a lifetime member of both American Mensa and the Creation Research Society.


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