I’m currently rereading Bill Dembski’s No Free Lunch. On page 180 we read:

In The Fifth Miracle [Paul] Davies goes so far as to suggest that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from any scientific laws known to date. The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they cannot explain the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. As Davies puts it: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”

But then Davies puts blind faith in the notion that once a self-replicator appears, specified complexity (i.e., complex specified information) can mysteriously be had on the cheap, as though there are known laws that can account for this. Of course, there are no known such laws, and, in fact, such a notion is just as much a get-something-for-nothing scam as the origin of the first cell through chance and necessity is.
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Imagine if you will a rather pathetic little boy oppressed by a domineering father and overshadowed by older sisters assuming maternal roles that directed his every move.  Under such conditions it’s not surprising that certain survival strategies would be employed by the boy to establish his place in the family pecking order.  Thus it was, according to biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, that a young Charles Darwin stole his father’s peaches and plums only to “discover” them later in heroic fashion and would invent “deliberate falsehoods” in order to gain attention.  In school he would regale classmates with stories of fantastic birds and remarkable flowers, flowers he could change into different colors.  “Once,” write Desmond and Moore, “he invented an elaborate story designed to show how fond he was of telling the truth.  It was a boy’s way of manipulating the world” (1).  But what happened when the boy, whose insatiable need for attention never waned, became a man.  How might he then manipulate the world?  This question, which few have dared to even pose, has been asked and answered in a provocative new book by former BBC writer/producer, Roy Davies titled, The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime, just released by Goldensquare Books (http://darwin-conspiracy.co.uk/). 

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