In the beginning God created... Genesis 1:1
"If you pour a little oil in water and shake it up, the oil separates into little round balls called coacervates.
Chemists call oils and fats “lipids.” In the days when microscopes were still too crude to give much idea of the complexity of cells, some people thought that these tiny bubbles of fat must have evolved into cells.
Here is an example:
“When mixed with water, certain lipids will form a bubble that is called a coacervate (koh AS uhr vayt) which has a double-layered membrane much like the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane.… The early oceans probably contained numerous small lipid coacervates, each one forming and then dispersing. Over millions of years, coacervates that could survive longer by taking in molecules and energy from their surroundings would have become more common than the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind. When a means arose to transfer this ability to “offspring” coacervates, probably through self-replicating RNA, life had begun.” {Holt, Annotated Teacher’s Edition, Biology, Visualizing Life, 1998, p. 194}
This simplistic little made up story is contrary to the evidence!
Both lipids and RNA are too complex to form in nature, so the
statement that both formed at the same time, and in the same place with the RNA inside a lipid membrane is also false.
Here is a quote by Cairns-Smith, one of the most prominent first life researchers which explains that lipids, and the nucleotides which make up RNA are only formed in the miniature factories of already living cells:
"Though a few organic substances - for instance certain simple amino acids - can form fairly easily under prebiotic conditions, other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a ‘real factory.’ … The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy." {Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth, 2000, p. 126, 176-177; Quoting Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, 1985, p. 126.}."
Thomas F. Heinze
