The new study appears in the journal BioEssays and summarizes solid reasons “why that old and familiar view won’t work at all.”3 Interestingly, many of those same arguments have been presented by creation scientists for decades, but were met at the time with disdain and scorn from the scientific community.

Nick Lane, lead author of the study refuting the “soup” theory, said in a press release that it suffers from “bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings.”3 Bioenergetics deals with energy management that is vital to living cells. This involves production of ATP, the molecule that fuels cells.5 The researchers’ summary shows that not only are scientists still waiting to discover a way to generate ATP in a primordial soup mixture, but that they have also discovered that there are no soup recipes left to try.

In the authors’ words, soup “has no capacity for energy coupling” because ATP production requires protons to be densely packed and separated out.6 What actually happens in a soup is the exact opposite?protons rapidly disperse. The late, preeminent creation scientist A. E. Wilder-Smith made this thermodynamic deal-breaker clear back in 1970:



So, why is it that soup-denying scientific observations?which creation advocates have been pointing to for so long, like the instability of RNA in soup, and the destructive power of ultraviolet light and oxygen?are now permitted a voice in an evolutionary journal?

It is because Lane and his colleagues were able to suggest another purely naturalistic possibility. Instead of primordial soup, they presented “the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent.”