Great article, Percy. But I can see exactly where creationist will pick and choose certain words and sentences to support their "God was needed" philosophy.
If I were to play devils advocate I would choose these:
quote:
Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together?
- This would be of use to WordbeLogos in his incredulous argument about "codes".
quote:
But some of his ingredients, like the nucleotide building blocks of nucleic acids, are quite complex. Prebiotic chemists, who study the prelife chemistry of the primitive Earth, have long been close to despair over how nucleotides could ever have arisen spontaneously.
- An argument for complexity.
quote:
One measure of the difficulties ahead, however, is that so far there is little agreement on the kind of environment in which life originated.
- They don't have enough information to go on to give a proper analisis on the prebiotic conditions.
quote:
Chemists and biologists are thus pretty much on their own in figuring out how life started. For lack of fossil evidence, they have no guide as to when, where or how the first forms of life emerged. So they will figure life out only by reinventing it in the laboratory.
- Even if they do, it will still be speculation as to those conditions being equal to prebiotic conditions.
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It is a great article though, but only convincing, in my opinion, to those who accept science over scripture. Not that that was the intentions of the arcticle, but this is EvC so I figured it was a relevant point.
- Oni
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