Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In other words, the experimental conditions, as intended, were almost "too perfect." The simulation of reality requires some amount of unspecified noise with respect to CONDITIONS, in this case, corroded glass.
How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?
All of them, approximately. There are a few journals like http://www.orgsyn.org/ that consist entirely of rigorously vetted methods, but that is definitely an outlier. The significance of the noise will depend on the specifics, of course.
I'm fairly sure there have been a few high profile retractions of 'metal-free catalysis' that were ultimately traced to metal impurities in the reagents. There was also an incident with the DOE where in the process of refurbishing some of the nuclear arsenal they found that they couldn't reproduce one of the necessary ingredients due to some then unknown change. I am blanking on the (code)name of the material they were trying to reproduce though.
Apparently they've resolved that.
On the computer, many "experiments" (really simulations) are 100% deterministic and therefore have perfectly predictable noise characteristics. Most simulations are not deterministic for a wide range of engineering reasons (order of summation in a distributed environment, inability to specify random seed) but are nondeterministic in a statistically useful way (IE, you can run a few times and get a good idea of the real result).
Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?
Not the clearest way to phrase it, but I agree it most likely means the loose borosilicate bits worked too.
1. It's known to be a catalyst in the chemical reaction
2. They believe that the tiny pits in the corroded glass also speed up the reaction. This could explain why the material of the flask matters.
It would have been more convincing/thorough if they had also tried e.g. a steel and a silicon carbide reaction flask.
They might reasonably expect that the teflon, being far less reactive, did not appreciably influence the experiment.
Yes, the pure borosilicate flask had a much greater effect, but there was also much greater surface area for the solution to work on.
An interesting experiment might be to see if the reduction in PH levels scaled with the amount of borosilicate added to the solution. They may have done that in the paper, but that'd settle the question you posed.
Yes, it would take more experiments to further explore the role of the vessel material.
This is how science works in general; someone gets an idea and runs a limited experiment and gets results. Then other people, seeing the results and understanding the limitations, get their own ideas and test those.
What I’m trying to say is that you’re not wrong to say there is more to test here. But, it’s not a fatal flaw to this experiment. All experiments have limits to what they can prove.
Article Quote: When Miller showed his results to Urey, the latter suggested a paper should be published as soon as possible. (Urey was senior but generously declined to be listed as co-author, lest this lead to Miller getting little to no credit for the work.)
As if Urey doesn't deserve enough respect, the story is better than described:
Sub-article Quote: After Miller showed the impressive results to Urey, they decided to submit them to Science. Urey declined Miller’s offer to coauthor the report because otherwise Miller would receive little or no credit. Knowing that a graduate student could have a difficult time getting a paper like this published, Urey contacted the Science editorial office to explain the importance of the work and ask that the paper be published as soon as possible. Urey kept mentioning the results in his lectures, drawing considerable attention from the news media.
The manuscript was sent to Science in early February of 1953. Several weeks went by with no news. Growing impatient, Urey wrote to Howard Meyerhoff, chairman of AAAS’s Editorial Board, on 27 February to complain about the lack of progress. Then, on 8 March 1953, the New York Times reported in a short article entitled, “Looking Back Two Billion Years” that W. M. MacNevin and his associates at Ohio State University had performed several experiments simulating the primitive Earth—including a discharge experiment with methane wherein “resinous solids too complex for analysis” were produced. The next day, Miller sent Urey a copy of the clipping with a note saying “I am not sure what should be done now, since their work is, in essence, my thesis. As of today, I have not received the proof from Science, and in the letter that was sent to you, Meyerhoff said that he had sent my note for review.”
Infuriated by this news, Urey had Miller withdraw the paper and submit it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Ironically, at the same time (11 March), Meyerhoff, evidently frustrated by Urey’s actions, wrote to Miller that he wanted to publish the manuscript as a lead article and that he wanted Miller—not Urey—to make the final decision about the manuscript. Miller immediately accepted Meyerhoff’s offer, the paper was withdrawn from the Journal of the American Chemical Society and returned to Science, and was published on 15 May 1953.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisi...
There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....
Miller's lab flasks were made of borosilicate glass and this caused more organic compounds to form than a more truly inert Teflon flask. But Earth's crust is over 90% silicates which could have similarly contributed to the formation of organic compounds in ancient pre-life earth.
Just applied linear algebra (or so claimed my professor of linear algebra...)
[1]: me: a complete layperson.
But then again, philosophy is also a domain of human inquiry. The world is just whatever it is, however we think it best to describe. Problem is that our different domains of descriptions and questions don't always fit easily with one another. So to say it's all just the domain of physics is to mistake one map for the territory.
Our definitions are somewhat inadequate and full of edge cases and blurred lines. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them out of hand, especially since the circumstances of life’s origin are so mistifying.
You're essentially arguing that the absence today of simple replicating amino-acid organisms somehow implies that they must spontaneously form far far more complex systems to do so: yet the evidence says otherwise - we know for a fact and can observe the existence of purely RNA-based enzymatic systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world) which are curiously involved in things like protein synthesis in our cells today.
I'm not arguing that life must be rare. I'm not arguing that the smallest Darwinian replicator must have billions of atoms. I'm arguing against the PRESUMPTION that there must be a small replicator, and the inference (from that presumption) that life must be common. There is no evidence for such a small replicator (the RNA world work does not provide it). And understand that even if the smallest replicator were much smaller than this billions-of-atoms thing, it could still present a super-astronomical complexity gap.
Put another way: the most likely ancestor of all replicators was probably close to the smallest molecule that works.
This is bogus, because it ignores Observer Selection. We are not at a randomly chosen planet in the universe (or in a larger multiverse), we are at a planet where there exists observers who could observe life exists. The more uncommon observers are, the more biased our position would be.
Ask yourself: if OoL were exponentially unlikely, requiring super-astronomical numbers of tries to get it to occur, far beyond the number of stars (or even atoms) in our visible universe, what exactly would we see that's different from what we do see? If there is no such thing, how could current evidence rule out that possibility?
I will totally agree that the mechanism by which life arose should be among the easiest routes to life. But this doesn't mean that process was likely in any absolute sense, just that it was among the least unlikely.
But no matter what that probability is, when there are 2 alternative pathways for a step, we should assume the more likely one. I merely claim that
inorganics -> small replicators -> large replicators
inorganics -> large replicatorsIs it really just pure agnostic nihilism along the lines of "We know nothing!"? Or do you know of more reasonable alternative explanations, not investigated in experiments like this?
You seem to be suggesting that a bogus conclusion is better than admitting we don't yet know. This is dishonest and I reject it.
These clusters can be very dense (10,000 stars per cubic parsec, perhaps). With such closely spaced stars, and with residual gas around the stars, it might be much easier for material ejected from one system to be captured in another.
So, IF life arose very early in one such system, it might spread to all the others. The statistical weight of "early OoL" events would be amplified, vs. OoL events that occurred later after the cluster had spread out and dissipated. Observers would tend to derive from these prolific spreading events, just because they'd seed so many systems.
This is a nice scenario for science fiction, since it would allow thousands of life bearing systems in our galaxy (with compatible biosystems!), while evading much of the bite of the Fermi argument. In this scenario, SETI should look for stars with compositions very similar to the Sun, spread on an arc ahead/behind our system on its orbit around the center of the galaxy (the stars would have spread to about 180 degrees along this orbit since their formation).
Yes, it's complexity, that's my point.
> There's this whole idea if entropy in physics
I am aware, you're assuming it's not related, whereas I would say it very much is.
There’s also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a car, a computer, or the planet earth that is made of rocks, than there is for an individual rock. Our solar system is extremely complex, yet is not alive. So complexity doesn’t seem to mark the line between living and non-living things at all.
Saying life is “complexity” seems reductionist and almost information-free, it doesn’t really explain or even shed any useful light on the difference between living things and non-living things, since there are plenty of examples of high complexity, low-entropy inorganic objects & systems. We can synthesize complexity all day, but we don’t know how to synthesize life yet.
On what scale? Can you provide some sources/references please?
https://science.mit.edu/life-away-from-equilibrium/
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/3/423
Edit: Here's a good intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cVVHKCRWw
Personally, I’m a panentropist (my own creation) - I hold that the spectrum of life/consciousness varies depending on the level of entropy. So a flame has a higher level of consciousness than a piece of paper and oxygen molecules. But when you combine them they increase their level. It’s weird but it might be correct - doesn’t address issues of the hard problem of consciousness however
The ultimate organism is then either civilization itself, or the whole universe, depending on how you want to draw the line.
That is one of the postulates of Integrated Information Theory, which aims to give an account of how consciousness can arise from physical substrates. (The idea seems closely related to the concept of entropy.)
If anything, it seems like the reversal of entropy would be a better description of life. To make paper and oxygen from fire would have higher consciousness than a fire itself
Inorganic to organic compounds, sure. But nobody has ever been able to get from there to cells and DNA.
There is just enormous amounts of shoddy thinking out there from people on the subject of Origin of Life. I'm particularly annoyed by the non sequitur "the universe is large, so there must (with high probability) be life elsewhere." (If anyone reading this thinks that's a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.)
That argument is basically "there is a value of N such that for any p > 0, N p is much greater than 1."
But that's obviously wrong. For any N, there are values of p > 0 that make the product N p arbitrarily close to 0.
The dim intution behind the argument was that p can't be "too small". But given our current understanding of OoL, that's not a justified assumption. p could be exponentially small, if OoL requires some extremely unlikely step.
Natural selection is great once the system's reproductive fidelity is good enough to support it. The problem is bridging the gap from small molecules to that system. The smallest system we know of that can independently support Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms.
What we want is the probability for at least one other place other than ours to have life. This would be 1 - (1-p)^N, which does tend to 1 as N gets arbitrarily large.
To get that formula: (1-p) is the probability that life does not exist in a place, so (1-p)^N is the probability that ALL places where life is possible, has no life. Therefore, 1-(1-p)^N is the probability of the opposite of that (where at least one place has life).
Furthermore, proponents of an extraterrestrial origin of life on Earth will doubtless argue that nearby life may have had a common origin.
However, if we found life on Mars that same Bayesian reasoning would imply a meaningful lower limit on p as well, since life on Mars is independent of our existence to observe it.
If we found life on Mars tomorrow, how well-defined would that lower limit become?
Just finding life on Mars that's the same kind of life as on Earth would not tell us much, as it could be explained by panspermia. There are Mars rocks on Earth, so transfer of life in those rocks should have happened constantly. If early Mars were habitable it almost certainly had life, due to this transfer.
That the probability goes to 1 as N goes to infinity FOR FIXED p is just another example of assuming p can't be "too small". The probability also goes to zero as p goes to zero. Why are you fixing p and not N? Why are you assuming p is large enough that N is in that asymptotic range where the probability has approached 1?
The analogy I like here is those "collect the letters" games you see at fast food outlets and grocery stores. Buy a Happy Meal, get a scratch off ticket. If you collect all the letters in some phrase you win $N million. When you start the game, the trend is great. Letters are arriving and the phrase is filling in. But try as you might, that last letter never shows up. The game ends and you've won nothing. Of course, the way the game was designed was that last letter controls how many winners there could be. All the rest were distractions.
I find it weird to use a deliberately rigged game as an example. If one of the previous letters was wrong, the last letter being right means you don't win either. It's like saying the difficult steps are going to be extra difficult because other steps were found easier than expected.
You could argue that the priors were garbage I suppose. I'm not arguing for any particular probability.
The McDonalds example does not have independent variables as X1..Xn-1 are deliberately increased as Xn is decreased. I'd also argue that origin of life doesn't have independent variables. If chemistry turns out to be more or less powerful in one setting, it should do something for our assessment of other settings, especially when it's similar processes.
Of course, if some people don't understand that this one is not an established fact, and that annoys you, I can't say you are wrong.
I agree that it is arbitrary that the dimension of the exponent of n has to be larger than the negative one of p. That probably stems from the assumption that the universe is endless.
You're focusing on (lack of) evidence for a mechanistic explanation but that's not exhaustive.
Also I think you missed my point which is about Bayesian estimation of p, not of N.
Bayesian reasoning (by using the fact that we exist rather than don't exist, as well as other info about our existence, such as how long it took us to evolve) helps us estimate a probability distribution of p, as well as a central tendency estimate.
See e.g. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2019.2149
"exponentially" is not a measure of size, nor is it a measure of relative size. If you think this anything base on "exponentially small" is a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.
"Exponentially small" here means "the probability could be ~ e^-n" where n is a number proportional to the complexity of the minimal evolving system. This would happen if there's some gap that has to be bridged by random chance before we get a system capable of sustaining natural selection.
The point here is that this could easily be vastly smaller than 1/N, where N is (say) the number of atoms in the universe x age of the universe x rate at which atoms might interact to form such systems.
I think you could have easily understood this point if you had made an effort to do so, without me having to spoonfeed it to you here.
There are several steps to go from no life to life as we know it. This experiment illuminates one of those steps. How is that "nothing"?
Sure, an expertly guided experiment in a glass tube can make some basic amino acids but they had to be removed from the experiment immediately before the the product was ruined by further reactions. It was a guided process which we've got no further in accounting for in the wild.
We've made no progress since these experiments to answering the questions posted by the theory of abiogenesis.
We've got no concrete answers, only suppositions.
This is not a popular thing to talk about but the fact remains that we are absolutely nowhere close to solving this in the manner in which we are proceeding in OoL studies. The track record for uncondendable conjecture is abysmal.
There's a great example of Futurama, where the evolutionary naysayer demands an intermediate form, and Farnsworth shows him one... then he demands another, and Farnsworth shows THAT form... and this cycle repeats hundreds of times until Farnsworth has no intermediate form and the naysayer declares victory.
Not that we shouldn't try... it's possible that certain conditions can give rise to self-replicating molecular systems that can adapt very quickly. This doesn't prove that these conditions were the exact ones responsible on primordial Earth, but it does prove that the phenomenon of abiogenesis is categorically possible under plausible early Earth conditions.
There are lots of other phenomena in nature that may be impossible to directly test. Biological evolution for instance is somewhat testable, but only on a small scale in both time and organismal complexity:
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
We can also run computer evolution experiments that validate some of the theoretical assumptions underlying biological evolution in a very abstract way, but these can't validate specific biological hypotheses about physical systems.
Even if we do create a "cell" (whatever that means), it will only give us a possible explanation of how it happened on Earth. It will shrink the possible probabilities of all other methods, such as Aliens engineering us, but we cannot reduce all probabilities to zero... without a time machine.
Unfortunately we live in a world where even 100% definite in-your-face proof will not convince a frighteningly large %age of humanity.
IMHO claiming everything is "still a guess" shows a lack of understanding of science. I'm not judging, because I can't tell what you do and don't know from just three sentences. But it kinda sounds like it.
Interesting. Photo please, anyone?
The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers. You can't just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense. The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best.
I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast.
(Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit. Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)
This is also why there is more to science than statistical analysis. Stats help us understand evidence we have collected. But at some point a new idea needs a new test in order to know if it is useful or correct.
Observe that as you move from one side to the other (math to biology and onwards), you are essentially dragging along a good portion of the stuff as prerequisites you have to know a bit about.
By the time you reach something like immunobiology you can pretty much build a house out of the textbooks and go live in it. :)
I've always liked the view that Physics is just experimental discovery of the axioms "chosen" for our universe. Physics without experimentation just being a specific subset of math.
A few examples. The order in which you add nominally unimportant reagents to a reaction can significantly matter – the enthalpy of mixing is non-zero, and so if you dissolve A and then B in solvent C before letting it reflux for five hours (say), it will be a different initial condition to adding B, then A. Many (most?) chemists weigh vials before adding a mass of x g/mg of a compound, in the process of adding that, and then again when they have removed "x" grams. Lids are pared with volumetric flasks. Tiny variations matter. Room humidity, temperature, and the history of the use of the equipment involved may change the answers. I had one graduate student (who came top in her year in chemistry) make an isotopically labelled molecule for me, with a ~70% yield and a ~100% labelling purity. A few years later, a biochemist following the "recipe" she developed (and beautifully illustrated!) was unable to get above 10% yield and about 80% purity. I never really was able to work out why. Any "debugging" conversation starts with "tell me exactly -- what did you do?". Things occasionally don't go "as well" when certain contaminants are (not) present. The debugger for reality sucks.
And still, despite all the fiddly nature of the work, it's downright dangerous. Organic chemists, as a species, live less long. They get blown up and gassed. I've been in a building when a "small scale" reaction has exploded and you feel the vibrations of it – nobody was seriously injured because the fume hood's shock sensors detected the azide derivatives decomposing rapidly and, within microseconds, dumped a load of cold CO2 down the front of the hood, stopping combustion and redirecting/reducing the blast. Another acquaintance of mine managed to have the building evacuated after ordering a 10 ml bottle of a compound he distilled from a hops extract and identified via GC-MSMS and MS^n spectrometry as part of a project trying to understand beer foam (and make better non-alcoholic beers; this is in about 2000 or 1999, before "good" alcoholfrei bier was available) – he naïvely opened the lid to see what it smelt like outside of the fume hood, and immediately uncontrollably vomited. So did his neighbours. Then the rest of the room. Then the floor. They closed it over a weekend, opened all the doors and windows, put in industrial fans, and it still stank for months.
Chemists do important, undervalued work. They make drugs, materials, batteries. They do everything from quantum mechanics to what I still consider to be not far removed from alchemy. Some of them are slightly odd people, but they are usually very fun to share a drink with...
Also pretty much everything in OC ends up being a yucky resin at the bottom of a flask you can't remove.
When I visited my grad school for the first time, there were ambulances and firetrucks outside the building. I went to the main office and there were EMTs everywhere and firemen. Turns out, they were doing spring cleaning of a fume hook and accidentally touched a bottle of ether. The ether had formed free radicals over time, and just touching the bottle caused it to expose, popping all the windows out 20 feet away. The chemist's face was permanently scarred (although his life was safed by the safety glass). That was later my office, although I did mostly computational work.
I got some major "Things I Won't Work With" vibes reading that. Checked the archives and yep, that's a repeat offender right there.
The people that do this work are ACTUALLY making the world a better place.
I feel so much of this mysticism is driven by over reliance on associative and distributive laws for elementary math. And it is super annoying because I know I do the same thing.
Especially with the first supporting evidence being that order matters on how you mix things. Only in very elementary math, it seems, is that not the case. Yet, we stick on that heavily.
That is, I wasn't trying to counter the point. I intend my point to be a further exploration on why that makes things feel more complicated. Near mystical, in that we can't always explain why an order is important. Sometimes we can, of course.
This isn't true for many orgo chemicals, based on the OP. The scale of sensitivity to initial and intermediate (!) conditions is un-intuitively high.
Even electrical classes started on analog circuits and power transmission later in courses. Early circuits are centered around ready dc connections. Or steady state ac ones.
Your examples of bread or beer avoid this, but then consider whether brewing beer is a good, differentiating counter-example to organic chemistry. ;)
And agreed that for many processes, it is initial conditions. I also consider scaffolding for things like keystone arches. The final result being something that is only doable with items that are no longer there.
[1] https://www.labmanager.com/how-it-works/fume-hood-fire-prote...
So they would try really hard to get it all, scraping the sides and sometimes jamming the paddle down on recalcitrant bits to get them unstuck.
My friend was very nervous about this, and so looked for another job, which was how I met him.
Not long after he was working with us, he got a call and turned white. He explained: the fellow hired in after him was standing behind a technician when the batch went up, turning them both into crackly bits of toast. That could have been him.
Anyway, no I'm not cut out to be an organic chemist.
I walk through a high-tech, massive industrial factory most days I go into the office. I find it harder to remember to look for wires and forklifts than I did when I was in roles closer to the danger. It's clearly a "natural" risk-analysis response, but risk doesn't go to zero, nor should the individual ever completely export their risk management to confidence in systems, processes, and organizations.
The key-cards and clean rooms and smart people can lead us to forget these things.
Man there really is an XKCD for everything: https://xkcd.com/435/
Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 5., a. 1
Even "true living information processing systems", whatever those are supposed to be, are only made up of the same basic parts as said organic soup.
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/miller_urey_experiment...
https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cos...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-fin...
In the modern oceans, there is a very high abundance of calcium and magnesium ions.
This keeps the phosphate concentration in the water low, because when there is much phosphate, it precipitates with the calcium ions, making apatite rocks.
However the oceans at the time when life appeared had a composition different than today.
The oceans have formed by the condensation of the volcanic gases, which are made of water and of acidic substances (mainly oxides of carbon and sulfur and hydracids of halogens and sulfur).
So the initial oceans were very acid. After formation they began to dissolve the more easily soluble rocks, e.g. carbonates and phosphates and then also the easier soluble of the silicates, starting with the alkaline silicates.
So the concentration of phosphate in the initial oceans was much higher than today, due to the very low pH of the water and due to the lack of calcium and magnesium ions in appreciable quantities.
In time the pH of the oceans increased tending towards the neutral value (today the oceans are slightly alkaline, but that changes with the increase of carbon dioxide in atmosphere, which makes them more and more acid), while the concentration of sodium and potassium increased, neutralizing a part of the acids.
Because the rocks with calcium and magnesium dissolve much slower than those with sodium and potassium, the concentration of calcium and magnesium in the sea water remained low for a longer time and it probably reached the current levels much later, after the apparition of life.
Only then the concentration of phosphate diminished to the current values.
So a much higher initial availability of phosphate in solution, in the sea water, is expected, it is not mysterious.
(context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child
Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973):
https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video...
Also a great recipe for shark repellent, that she made for the CIA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180408020021/https://www.cia.g...
>Julia Child and the OSS Recipe for Shark Repellent
>“The answer to the threat of man-eating sharks, the scavengers which infest all tropical waters of the world, was announced here today…” (quote from draft OSS/ERE Press Release on the development of a shark repellent; April 13, 1943)
And she showed how to bone a chicken on Saturday Night Live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ
Previous HN discussion:
Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973) [video] (instructure.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467695
Video: The Primordial Soup with Julia Child. (Click on the small thumbnail in the second row with the (>) "play" icon to see the video.)
https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video...
The National Air and Space Museum used to show this delightful video in its "Life in The Universe" exhibit, in which Julia Child recreates Stanley Miller's famous experiment, cooking up a delicious hot batch of Primordial Soup!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/julia-child-an...
>Julia Child and the Primordial Soup
>Scientists don't yet know how life began here on Earth. Mineralogist Bob Hazen, who is profiled in the October issue of Smithsonian, thinks that rocks were key to the development of life. Reporter Helen Fields wrote:
>It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing with cold water near rocks, and ore deposits providing hard surfaces where newly formed amino acids could congregate—that makes it such a good candidate as a cradle of life. “Organic chemists have long used test tubes,” he says, “but the origin of life uses rocks, it uses water, it uses atmosphere. Once life gets a foothold, the fact that the environment is so variable is what drives evolution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
>The Miller–Urey experiment (or Miller experiment) was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time (1952) to be present on the early Earth and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions. The experiment at the time supported Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's hypothesis that putative conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors. Considered to be the classic experiment investigating abiogenesis, it was conducted in 1952 by Stanley Miller, with assistance from Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, San Diego and published the following year.
https://www.wired.com/2009/05/dayintech-0515
>May 15, 1953: Cookin' Up Some Primordial Soup
>1953: Stanley Miller, just 23 years old, publishes his landmark work on the production of amino acids, a necessary component of life, in a jar.