The lies behind the Miller experiment

I have an actual undergraduate text book - Mark Ridley's Evolution (2nd Edition - 1996) I would report on what it says about the Miller-Urey experient but it seems to be absent entirely. It's so important to Evolution that one of the most comprehensive textbooks around doesn't even mention it.Nor does Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is - also intended as an undergraduate level text.Perhaps you can explain why you feel that the esperiment is one of the "most popular arguments for evolution".

The Urey-Miller experiment didn't fail - it was a great success. Urey thought that it wouldn't produce anything interesting at all.Here's what Miller said in '96

quote:

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...The first thing he [Urey - PK] tried to do was talk me out of it. Then he realized I was determined. He said the problem was that it was really a very risky experiment and probably wouldn't work, and he was responsible that I get a degree in three years or so. So we agreed to give it six months or a year. If it worked out fine, if not, on to something else. As it turned out I got some results in a matter of weeks.

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Just a moment...

In my mind "didn't fail completely" is rather an odd way to describe a great success. And it did prove something - that abiotic generation of amino acids was easier than anyone thought.

Producing amino acids WAS the purpose of the experiment. If you want to claim otherwise then produce some actual evidence - I've already provided the interview with Miller. And - as I've already pointed out - it was easier to create amino acids than UREY - who was the senior of the two - thought it would be. That was in the interview, to0.