In the evolutionary view, early earth was not a pleasant place to live. A recent article summarizing research on the “origin of life” described early earth this way: “Earth’s first few hundred million years brought relentless impacts, intense volcanism and an atmosphere almost entirely devoid of oxygen.” And yet this new research claims the “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA) somehow evolved a mere 400 million years after earth formed.
The article begins this way:
Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago, collided with the body that helped make the Moon and cooled from an ocean of magma. Large objects continued to strike it, volcanoes released the gases of a new atmosphere, and free oxygen was essentially absent. Against that compressed geological background, an estimated age of 4.2 billion years for life’s last universal common ancestor looks astonishingly early.
New genetics research—entirely based on evolutionary assumptions and interpretations of genomes—now places LUCA “astonishingly early” in earth’s history. That’s surprising in the evolutionary view, given how complex life is and how uninhabitable early earth is assumed to be. But the problem is actually worse than that because they don’t believe LUCA was the first life-form.
The name can be misleading. “Last” means most recent in relation to all living lineages, while “universal” refers to the sampled cellular tree. LUCA was not necessarily one individual, the only organism alive, or the first self-replicating system. It is better imagined as a population whose descendants won a vast evolutionary survival contest. . . .
This boundary changes the timing implication. If LUCA already lived 4.2 billion years ago, the origin of life must be older still. The estimate does not say how much older, because lineages that vanished without contributing genes cannot be reconstructed from modern genomes.
In other words, our supposed last common ancestor evolved 400 million years after earth’s formation, but before it evolved, other life-forms surely must have evolved and died out, leaving just LUCA to continue evolving; so the origin of the very first life-form must have occurred even closer to the origin of the earth. Even with over 4.5 billion years to work with, evolutionists are running out of time!
This is why many evolutionists now believe that life didn’t evolve here on earth at all but rather was brought here from a distant planet, either intentionally by aliens or by lucky accident. But that just shifts the same problem to another planet! So the answer to a lack of time for life to have evolved here is to push the origin of life out into the universe where there’s more time (in the evolutionary view, the universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old).
It’s nothing but storytelling!
It’s nothing but storytelling! It doesn’t matter how much the evidence contradicts the evolutionary worldview, the model will mold to fit the new evidence or the problem will just be pushed out to where we can’t study it (the depths of outer space).
Evolution isn’t science; it’s a worldview being used to interpret the evidence we have in the present. And I would argue it’s a bad worldview that doesn’t explain the evidence consistently. The right starting point isn’t man’s ideas about the past; it’s the eyewitness account of history from the Creator God Himself.
By the way, I do agree that life began soon after the earth became habitable. God began creating the earth, life, and the universe around six thousand years ago over a period of six ordinary (24-hour) days. The earth was created on day one and was ready for plant life on day three, sea creatures and flying creatures on day five, and land animals and the first two humans on day six. That is real history!
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.
