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A Note on the Miller-Urey Experiment

A Note on the Miller-Urey Experiment

Last updated on: August 18, 2025 at 9:51 pm by Dan Peterson

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A Note on the Miller-Urey Experiment 2025-08-18T21:51:53-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Celestial Room of the Idaho Falls Temple.
Please note the heavenly reunions depicted in the mural on the wall.

This is an interesting piece — and, given that it comes from CNN, it’s a somewhat surprising one: “An atheist began caring for the dying. What he saw changed his view of faith — and the afterlife”

While in that vein: I recently read several comments lionizing the late “James Randi” (1928-2020) — or, to use his more common stage name, “the Amazing Randi” — and I also came across this relatively short essay, which offers some background on him and a bit of a dissenting view as to his greatness: “The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism.” Some of you may find it interesting. I did.

The Assheton family has attempted to preserve the traditional appearance of Downham, where, as it happens, Elder Heber C. Kimball had some of his greatest success as a missionary in England. Accordingly, there are no obvious television aerials, no intrusive overhead cables, and no white or yellow lines on the (dead-end) road through the village. Which is one of the major reasons for the fact that Downham has often been used in television shows and in movies.

I would like to call your attention, once again, to this forthcoming tour, which will differ in certain important ways from the expedition that Kris Frederickson and Peter Fagg and, well, Dan Peterson accompanied earlier this year: “Church History and Great Britain with the Interpreter Foundation: Operated by Bountiful Travel: May 6, 2026 — May 19, 2026” Incidentally, for those who missed it before, Peter’s moving article “Empty Chairs: Reflections on How Faithful Latter-day Saints Can Handle the Pain Presented by Wayward Loved Ones” went up yesterday on the website of Meridian Magazine.

And, in other news from the moribund Interpreter Foundation, yet another new item was posted today on our completely dead and unchanging website: “The Interpreter Foundation Podcast — August 11, 2025: Gnosis in Early Christianity and Connections to LDS Doctrine; Book of Mormon Geography: Heartland versus Mesoamerican Theories”

For the 11 August 2025 episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Martin Tanner and Brent Schmidt discussed Gnosticism and Book of Mormon geography. You can listen to the discussion segment of the podcast at the link provided immediately above.

A part of Salt Lake City’s Triad Center, where KSL-TV and KSL Radio and the Deseret News are headquartered. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Jacob Hess and Shima Baradaran Baughman have now completed their trilogy of Deseret News articles on sexual violence. I linked here to the second and third installments of the series, but I did not do so for the first, which was probably a mistake since it was apparently intended as something of a methodological preface to the other two:

One aspect of the baneful impact of Latter-day Saint religiosity seems to be starkly apparent in this visual representation.

Now, though, I change the subject quite completely, by turning to Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2018). Matti Leisola, DSc, is a bioengineer and former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology. He is an expert in enzymes and rare sugars, having published 140 peer-reviewed articles and won the Latsis Prize from the ETH-Zürich (the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland’s highly respected Federal Institute of Technology [where, for example, Albert Einstein earned his doctorate]). He served for a time as the research director of Cultor, an international biotech company, co-founded the International Society of Rare Sugars, and was the initiating editor of BIO-Complexity.

During my high school years, at least in my biology and chemistry classes, the sense was that that the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, conducted Stanley Miller under the mentorship of the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, had demonstrated how organic molecules such as amino acids had (or could have) formed from inorganic substances under the conditions that obtained on the early Earth. Scientists were, we thought, on the very brink of actually creating life in a test-tube. The mystery of life’s earthly beginning was about to be definitely solved.

For multiple reasons, we now know that optimistic opinion to have been, umm, premature. The origin of life on Earth remains a very difficult scientific problem. Matti Leisola comments:

In Stanley Miller’s vaunted chemical evolution experiments, what was produced was well short of the hype. The result was a tarry slime with 85% tar, 13% carboxylic acids, and 2% amino acids, from which some of the amino acids present in living organisms could be extracted. Many other compounds, some toxic to life, were also formed in the course of the experiment. Similar experiments have been repeated in different laboratories with the same kind of results. They can be summarized as follows:

Living organisms have twenty different kinds of amino acids, a twenty-three letter alphabet used to “write” protein and protein machines essential to life. But Miller-style experiments produce many amino acids that are not present in proteins. In essence, these amino acids aren’t part of the relevant alphabet for coding life.

The side chains of amino acids determine their chemical nature. These may be hydrophobic, neutral, acidic, or basic. None of the amino acids with basic side chains (lysine, arginine, and histidine) have been formed in Miller-type experiments, and yet these are crucial for life.

In any given experiment, only a few, and at most thirteen, of the twenty amino acids present in proteins have been formed. All twenty are needed for life.

The composition of compounds formed in Miller-type experiments differs from that found in living cells. Monofunctional compounds that inhibit polymer formation are oversupplied in Miller-type experiments. To form a chain from molecules, the molecules need to have two “sticky” ends; if they have only one, there is nothing for the next compound to attach to. Miller-type experiments produce far too few molecules with two “sticky” ends.

Anyone with a little knowledge of chemistry will see that such a random mixture of chemicals is far, far removed from life’s origin. (27-28)

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