ShmoopTube

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Here’s your shmoop du jour, brought to you by ‘50s era science. [Man using a chainsaw to relieve a man's headache]

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Back when cigarettes cured cancer!

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Okay, here’s our question. [Man smoking a cigarette]

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The Urey-Miller experiments…what?

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And here are the potential answers. [mumbling]

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Endless theories suggest how life may have begun on earth.

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Be it a benevolent creator, an asteroid, or even a giant spaghetti monster. [a giant spaghetti monster in a populated street]

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But Urey and Miller tried to show how organic life could start without religion or sentient

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noodles.

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In 1952, they filled a flask with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide. [chemical substances added to a erlenmeyer flask]

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And in the tradition of all great mad scientists, they zapped it to life with electricity.. zapped it until it tried to come[frankenstein monster zaps an erlenmeyer flask with electricity and breaks]

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to life.

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After the experiment was complete, they discovered the flask now contained amino acids. [erlenmeyer flask with amino acids]

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The point was not to start with organic molecules...

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As a matter of fact, all of the component molecules were deader than Eddie Murphy’s

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film career.

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And Urey and Miller didn’t quite produce prokaryotic cells.

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They weren’t full-on Frankensteining. [Erlenmeyer flask shatters and turns green]

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But just because they didn’t raise a man from the dead, you definitely wouldn’t call

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them unsuccessful.

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Quite the contrary.

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The experiment is considered a landmark piece of research indicating that organic life,

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under the right conditions, could have begun inorganically. [Rocks in a puddle and a turtle appears]

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They’d provided a theory for the origin of life, without a single reference to witchcraft

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or ancient aliens.

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That means that B is the correct answer.

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Anyone else craving spaghetti? [Lots of men with forks chasing a spaghetti monster]

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