Robert Shapiro, noted Darwinist and professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, says this of the recent Sutherland RNA world experiments:
“‘Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever,’ he says. According to Shapiro, it is hard to imagine RNA forming in a prebiotic world along the lines of Sutherland’s synthesis. ‘The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely,’ argues Shapiro. Instead, he advocates the metabolism-first argument: that early self-sustaining autocatalytic chemosynthetic systems associated with amino acids predated RNA.”
My question is this: Could one not substitute the word “metabolism” for “RNA” in the bolded portion of the quote with no loss of cogency of the argument?
See whole article here:
For “petard” reference see here.