Study: Life Evolved When Earth “Was Still Practically a Newborn”

According to this study, in just 300 million years, earth managed to become hospitable to life and life managed to organize and emerge. Note how the article reporting on this news begins:

Once upon a time, Earth was barren. Everything changed when, somehow, out of the chemistry available early in our planet’s history, something started squirming – processing available matter to survive, to breed, to thrive.

What an appropriate beginning to this article—“Once upon a time” tells us we’re reading a fairytale, and yes, that’s exactly what you’re reading in that article! It continues:

By studying the genomes of organisms that are alive today, scientists have determined that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the first organism that spawned all the life that exists today on Earth, emerged as early as 4.2 billion years ago.

Earth, for context, is around 4.5 billion years old. That means life first emerged when the planet was still practically a newborn.

“We did not expect LUCA to be so old, within just hundreds of millions of years of Earth formation,” says evolutionary biologist Sandra Álvarez-Carretero of the University of Bristol in the UK. “However, our results fit with modern views on the habitability of early Earth.”

Now, as we’ve pointed out over and over again, the authors are mixing observational and historical science together. Here’s how the article describes the study:

Their study is based on something called a molecular clock. Basically, we can estimate the rate at which mutations occur, and count the number to determine how much time has passed since the organisms in question diverged from common ancestors. . . .

Moody and his colleagues worked out, based on these similarities and differences, how long it has been since LUCA’s successors started to diverge. And, using complex evolutionary modeling, they were able to learn more about LUCA itself – what it was, and how it survived on an Earth so very inhospitable to its descendants.

The sequencing of the genome of living creatures is observational science. But their interpretation of the evidence involved the naturalistic evolutionary worldview and a host of unprovable assumptions (e.g., that the mutation rate has remained constant over all time) being applied to the evidence. They assumed evolution in their modeling—it’s “baked into” the computer programs used to produce the results.

Life didn’t somehow manage to assemble itself from nonliving matter—an idea that breaks the law of biogenesis and has never been observed.

No, life didn’t somehow manage to assemble itself from nonliving matter—an idea that breaks the law of biogenesis and has never been observed. Life was created by God just 6,000 years ago.

As God’s Word reminds us, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

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This item was discussed today on Answers News with cohosts Dr. Tim Chaffey, Kevin Hadsall, and Rob Webb. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum, broadcast on our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel, and posted to Answers TV. We also covered the following topics:

• Neanderthals didn’t go extinct?
• Is geology linked to white supremacy?
• Transgender ideology—superstition, not science.
• And more!

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Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.