Richard William Nelson
[Originally published as Oxygen-Free Atmosphere]
Scientists have long known that extremely low levels of free oxygen [< 10-5] atmosphere on early Earth are critical for any viable origin-of-life model of evolution. This is because a free-oxygen atmosphere produces an oxidizing atmosphere, which prevents the assembly of organic molecules from reducing gases (primarily methane and ammonia). Scientists have only observed the autonomous assembly of complex organic molecules in an oxygen-free atmosphere.
However, the evidence for an oxygen-free Earth atmosphere has a checkered history.
History of Oxygen-Free Early Earth Theory
Near the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian biochemist Aleksandr Oparin proposed that as the early Earth coelesced from stellar dust and gas, it’s primordial atmosphere was a reducing one — in other words, an oxygen-free atmosphere. British geneticist John B. S. Haldane expanded on Oparin’s theory, coining the term “Primordial soup.”
Riding the then-popular wave, physical chemist Harold C. Urey promoted the “cosmochemistry” theory — life on Earth arose from stellar gases in an oxygen-free atmosphere. Urey’s graduate student, Stanley Miller, performed the famous Miller-Urey experiment in the laboratory in 1953, producing amino acids capable of forming proteins in an oxygen-free atmosphere. Urey’s cosmochemistry theory is more popularly known as abiogenesis — life arising from simple organic molecules.
But life itself depends heavily on an oxygen-rich atmosphere, such as Earth has today. To account for the needed rise in free-oxygen concentration on the Earth, the evolutionary community developed the Great Oxygen Event (GOE) theory, which has also been variably called the Oxygen Catastrophe or the Oxygen Crisis. According to this theory, free oxygen entered the atmosphere after the spontaneous generation of cyanobacteria on Earth.
In the words of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC),
Cyanobacteria, which appeared about 200 million years before the GOE, began producing oxygen by photosynthesis. Before the GOE, any free oxygen they produced was chemically captured by dissolved iron or organic matter… After the GOE, the excess free oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Problems with the Oxygen-Free Early Earth Theory
Despite the necessity of offering some explanation for how we arrived at the reality we experience today, scientists have not reached a consensus on the GOE.
Besides the uncomfort requirement of appealing to abiogenesis, aka spontaneous generation, to explain the rise of the cyanobacteria and the complex photosynthetic capcity scientists need to produce the free oxygen for the atmosphere, such bacteria are cytochrome C oxidase-dependent microbes. This means they depend on their ability to convert free oxygen into water. The bacteria already require the very atmospheric oxygen the evolutionists want to explain arising.
Continued History of Early Earth Oxygen-Free Theory
One of the first to throw the wrench into the GOE theory was geologist Harrison Brown of the University of Chicago in the 1960s, who believed that such atmosphere quickly vanished or never existed on Earth.
By the 1970s, Philip Abelson of the Carnegie Institution gave a simple Q&A:
“What is the evidence for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on Earth? The answer is that there is no evidence for it, but much against it.”
Later in the 1970s, Canadian geologists Erich Dimroth and Michael Kimberly issued the following finding:
In general, we find no evidence in the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium, or iron that an oxygen-free atmosphere has existed at any time during the span of geological history recorded in well-preserved sedimentary rocks.
Belgium Biochemist, Marcel Florkin, joined Dimroth and Kimberly in 1975, noting that “the concept of a reducing primitive atmosphere has been abandoned,” and the Miller–Urey experiment is “not now considered geologically adequate.”
Even molecular biologists Sidney Fox and Klaus Dose joined the discussion in 1977, declaring:
“The inference that Miller’s synthesis does not have a geological relevance has become increasingly widespread.”
In 1982, British geologists Harry Clemmey and Nick Badham, after examining the evidence from the rocks, noted:
From the time of the earliest dated rocks at 3.7 billion years, Earth had an oxygenic atmosphere.
By 1995, Jon Cohen, senior editor for Science, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), explains:
“The early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller–Urey simulation.”
Oxygen-free atmosphere represents a philosophy, not scientific evidence. With the evidence too big to ignore, in 1998, Richard Monastersky, writing for National Geographic, finally broadcast:
Many scientists now suspect that the early atmosphere was very different from what Miller first supposed.
Scientific Evidence for Early Earth Free-Oxygen Theory
An international research team led by Sean Crowe of the University of Southern Denmark published a paper titled “Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago” re-establishing the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere even in the oldest unchanged minerals in Earth’s crust. According to the team representing the nations of Denmark, South Africa, and Germany, early Earth’s oxygen exceeded 30 times the critical concentration of < 10-5.
Earth was far from an oxygen-free atmosphere.
The researchers studied the ratios of different types, or isotopes, of chromium atoms that were present in the rock drilled from 1,000 meters underground in South Africa.
Biogeologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle, in an interview with The Scientist, noted that the new evidence:
“adds greater complexity to our picture of how and when the Earth got its oxygen. It suggests that oxygenic photosynthesis, the ultimate source of most oxygen (sic), evolved long before the Great Oxidation Event.”
The study tips the evidence against the once-popular GOE theory, along with the hope of a cohesive abiogenesis theory for the origin of life on Earth. Evolutionary scientists are now shifting the focus of the origin of life exploration to the cosmos.
As the staff reporter for Nature World News rightly notes:
We might have to take a second look at the evolution of life on earth.
Since Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, the emerging scientific evidence has undermined Darwin’s theory (Darwinism), the more popular neo-Darwinism theory, and now the Great Oxygen Event theory.
Genesis
The Genesis account written by Moses, however, continues to be compatible with scientific evidence. The Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick, in the book Life Itself, conceded:
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.
Evidence from the origin of life underscores why the theory of evolution remains speculative but not scientifically valid.
