Page 27 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences
P. 27
The NAS's Error Regarding the Origin of Life
It can clearly be seen that expecting
Orgel's precondition of these two complex
processes from a molecule such as RNA is a
violation of scientific thinking. Concrete sci-
entific facts reveal that the "RNA World" the-
sis, a new version of the claim that life
emerged by chance, is a scenario which
could never have happened.
In his book The End of Science, John
John Horgan
Horgan describes a conversation with Stanley
Miller, who gave his name to the famous Miller experiment which sub-
sequently proved to be invalid. Miller said that he found the latest theo-
ries put forward regarding the origin of life to be meaningless, and
rather despised them:
In fact, almost 40 years after his original experiment, Miller told me
that solving the riddle of the origin of life had turned out to be more
difficult than he or anyone else had envisioned… Miller seemed
unimpressed with any of the current proposals on the origin of life,
referring to them as "nonsense" or "paper chemistry." He was so
contemptuous of some hypotheses that, when I asked his opinion of
them, he merely shook his head, sighed deeply, and snickered-as if
overcome by the folly of humanity. Stuart Kauffman's theory of au-
tocatalysis fell into this category. "Running equations through a
computer does not constitute an experiment," Miller sniffed. Miller
acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely where and
when life emerged. 10
Even the fiercest proponents of evolution, such as Miller, who
led the effort to discover an evolutionary explanation for the origin of
life, make statements of despair as far as the theory of evolution goes,
and thus clearly reflect the enormous difficulties in which the theory
finds itself.
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