Stanley Miller and His Experiments

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

Miller-Urey Redo

It turns out that these are three of the most liked articles I’ve written for our website. I hope you find them useful.