Origin Of Life

Courtesy Britain’s Royal Society. A friend notes that three Nobel Prize winners were among the speakers: Read More ›

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

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Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

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The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

Read More ›

From: Rabbi Moshe Averick

To: Dr. Jerry Coyne is a distinguished biologist at the University of Chicago and a self labeled “cultural Jew.”

Dear Dr. Coyne,

I’ve been contemplating the three attacks you launched against Rabbi Adam Jacobs and myself within a period of several weeks (3/7, 3/9, 3/27/11). They appeared on your website “Why Evolution is True”, and were, to a large extent, in response to a column that Rabbi Jacobs had written for the HuffPost religion section (3/6/11) called “A reasonable argument for God’s existence.” Rabbi Jacobs had mentioned that some of the material was drawn from my book, Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist. [# 7 in Jewish theology. – ed.] What I found most fascinating is that all these attacks were couched in terms of our Jewishness. Among the flowery gems that flowed from your highly enlightened, educated, and sophisticated pen:

“Evangelical Christians can be as moronic as they want, but when a rabbi says something dumb, well that sets my DNA on edge.”

“Frankly I’m weary of arguments like this one and deeply saddened that they come from Jews.”

And finally, “Jews can be just as willfully misguided about evolution as Christians like William Dembske and Michael Behe.”

Your first comment about setting “my DNA on edge” appears overtly racist. Do you actually believe there is such a thing as “Jewish DNA?” You say that you are “deeply saddened that they come from Jews.” Are Jews actually different than other human beings? Do you expect more from Jews? I guess you feel that we are superior to the gentiles. Has natural selection made us smarter than “moronic” Christians? What about non-Christian gentiles? Is there also such a thing as “Christian and non-Christian gentile DNA?” Gee, the next thing that might pop out of your Darwinian inspired view of reality is that there is also superior “Aryan DNA.” Hmmm, where have I heard that before? I’ll leave the analysis of your arguably racist views to some of the expert social scientists who inhabit your Hyde Park neighborhood. Let’s move on to the gist of the matter.

You stated that “Jews can be…willfully misguided about evolution.” What is so strange about this remark is that neither Rabbi Jacobs nor I ever discussed the theory of Darwinian evolution. The topic under discussion was the origin of life. When asked how life came from non-life, Rabbi Jacobs stated, “How? I have no idea. On the basis of all chemistry I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.” Oh, excuse me. That wasn’t Rabbi Jacobs, that was Read More ›

Moshe Averick,the ID community Reb and author of Nonsense of the Highest Order, writes to say,

In a post on his blog Why Evolution is True, Dr. Jerry Coyne took some potshots at Rabbi Adam Jacobs and myself about an article by Jacobs on the Huffington Post “A reasonable argument for God’s existence”When all was said and done, Dr. Coyne summed up his “slam dunk” case for a naturalistic origin of life: Read More ›

Here.

In all, Rodriguez found that separately removing seven different “gears” from a distant part of the molecule each caused the amino acid to bind more tightly to the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. Perona explained that this provides the first systematic analysis demonstrating long-range communication in an enzyme that depends on RNA for its function.”So what we think is going on is that these enzyme-RNA interactions far from the amino acid binding site evolved together with the needs of the cell to respond to subtle cues from its environment — especially in terms of how much amino acid is available,” said Perona. “It makes sense in terms of evolution.

– Glimpse of How the ‘Code’ of Life May Have Emerged, ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2011)

Well, anything can make sense in terms of evolution, because it is a directionless story, festooned with “may haves”.

Friend Jonathan kindly writes, Read More ›

Here: A fresh look at forgotten vials from Stanley Miller’s primordial-soup-in-a-bottle experiments implies that volcanoes seeping hydrogen sulfide helped form some of life’s earliest ingredients.  Earth’s early atmospheric conditions aren’t known, and the reactions in this experiment could only have happened near a source of sulfur. On a primordial Earth, that would have meant volcanoes. Whereas Miller originally focused on chemical reactions in the atmosphere, the primordial soup may have gathered in a volcanic bowl. Danielle Venton , “Primordial Soup’s Missing Ingredient May Be Sulfur”, Wired Science (March 21, 2011) File this under Mayhaveology: Origin of life

Astrobiology Magazine, (not the source you’d expect), offers MSNBC a word of caution re fossils of early life: However, the interpretation of the structures has always been controversial, and it is still hotly debated among scientists searching for Earth’s earliest evidence for life. Specimens from the site apparently displayed branching structures that some researchers said were inconsistent with life, while others dismissed such branching as artifacts from photo software.Analysis of the structures themselves suggested they were carbon-based, and therefore associated with the organic chemistry of life, but some contended they were a type of carbon known as graphite, while others said they were kerogen, a mixture of organic compounds. Now University of Kansas geospectroscopist Craig Marshall and his colleagues have Read More ›

David L. Chandler asks, Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.- “Are you a Martian? We all could be, scientists say — and new instrument might provide proof” (Physorg March 23, 2011) The article provides a useful summary of the state of the evidence, capped by Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA-Ames Research Center in California who specializes in research related to the possibility of life on Mars, says this work is “very interesting and important.” He says, Read More ›

“Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began” (Scientific American, Feb 28, 2011) :

Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: “In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth.” That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today.

He mentions Dennis Overbye’s New York Times origin-of-life story (A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011)), about which I had asked here, “Is this the kindergarten of science or its dotage?”, observing that Overbye “sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one.”

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye’s article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life’s beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

Horgan ends on a really classy note: He trashes creationists, as if they had anything whatever to do with how this mess originated, grew, deepened, and then sucked a whole lot of people in.

At this point, one wants to pull up a chair, pull out a notepad, and make some notes: Read More ›

Interesting story at Evolution News & Views about an exchange between Craig Venter (of human genome fame) and Richard Dawkins (of neo-atheist fame). Venter denies common descent, Dawkins can’t believe that he would even question it. For the exchange, which also includes Paul Davies, go here (start at the 9 minute mark). Origin-of-life researchers such as Ford Doolittle and Carl Woese have questioned for some time whether there even is a tree of life. Venter is now following in their train. What’s significant is not so much whether Venter is right (I think he is), but what his dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy suggests about the disarray in the study of biological origins. If common descent is up for grabs, what isn’t? Read More ›

In response to someone who wondered whether American scientists might be letting their imaginations run away with them about this spectacular new alien life find, Rob Sheldon offers “absolutely not”. Au contraire, the French were onto it and NASA dropped the ball. On why that happened, he says, NASA’s attitude is an example of

… “pathological science” and was extensively discussed by Irving Langmuir in 1953 and subsequent publications

I can assure you, nothing in Hoover’s [the discovering scientist’s] work comes within a mile or so of being pathological. Hoover has several gigabytes of pictures taken in every single CI meteorite he can get his hands on. The pictures have made him a sensation in the French Academy, the Belgian Academy and the Russian Academy. Experts in microbiology have examined the pictures and not only verified their biological identity, but asked how he obtained such clarity that exceeds what they can accomplish in the laboratory. (Freeze dry for a thousand years…) The only people that continue to shun him are the US and NASA. Ultimately it is ideology that prevent people from taking the pictures seriously, a prior commitment to “life only exists on Earth”. Some of those people are conservative Christians, some are dedicated Darwinists. I really don’t think it is a well-reasoned position, but still, there’ a lot of ideological opposition.

By the way, Fox News is offering updates, comments from relevant scientists, though as of ten minutes ago, I couldn’t yet find them. Keep checking back.

I suppose some Evolution Sunday clergy will now be preaching sermons about how to adjust to the fact that we now “know” how life got started purely by chance (abiogenesis). Our ID community’s rebbe, Moshe Averick, told me,

I don’t think it has any implications at all for abiogenesis. No one really has much of a clue how abiogenesis could have occured on earth, the best that could be said is that not only is life on earth inexplicable, but life elsewhere in the universe is also inexplicable.

Our George Hunter will doubtless comment shortly on his regular blog, but I overheard him say, Read More ›

No, not a joke. From “Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite” by Garrett Tenney (March 05, 2011) here: Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth. Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that Read More ›

From New Scientist, we learn “Meteorite cargo could solve origin-of-life riddle” (01 March 2011) Andy Coghlan because A chemical vital for life on Earth may have arrived ready-made from space. Unexpectedly, a chondritic meteorite has been found to contain large amounts of ammonia, a nitrogen-rich chemical needed to form the basic building blocks of life, including proteins, DNA and RNA. Just how early Earth acquired sufficient ammonia for life processes has been a puzzle because the gas is destroyed by sunlight, and the assumed early environment didn’t favour ammonia production. However, some enterprising researchers exposed chondritic meteorite dust to water at 300 ̊C, and then compressed it beneath 100 megapascals of pressure, to mimic early Earth conditions. The ammonia, they Read More ›

We learned recently that “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life” (ScienceDaily, Feb. 7, 2011): A team of applied physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.The research, published online in the journal Soft Matter, shows that clay vesicles provide an ideal container for the compartmentalization of complex organic molecules. The authors say the discovery opens the possibility that primitive cells might have formed inside inorganic clay microcompartments. They expand, “The conclusion here is that small fatty acid molecules go in and self-assemble into larger structures, and then they can’t come out,” says Read More ›

In “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011), New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one: Two dozen chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered here recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been. Over a long weekend they plastered the screen in their conference room with intricate chemical diagrams through which electrons bounced in a series of interactions like marbles rattling up and down and over bridges through one of those child’s toys, transferring energy, taking care of the business of nascent life. The names of elements and molecules tripped off chemists’ tongues as if they were the eccentric Read More ›