Stanley Miller and His Experiments
Reflections on the World’s Most (In)famous Origin-of-Life Experiment
Some time back, we were recoding a series of new episodes for our podcast I Didn’t Know That!. (This is the program where members of the RTB scholar team answer your email questions.) One of the queries directed to me referred to the famous Miller-Urey experiment.
The listener wanted to know if we had any lay-friendly articles that explained why scientists no longer consider this experiment relevant to the origin-of-life question. My answer: We sure do. In fact I have written several articles on Stanley Miller and his origin-of-life experiments for our Today’s New Reason to Believe (TNRTB) Web feature, as some of you regular readers probably already know. But for those less familiar with TNRTB, I thought I would reprise these articles.
And here they are:
Biology Textbooks Get It Wrong on Life’s Origin
Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls
It turns out that these are three of the most liked articles I’ve written for our website. I hope you find them useful.