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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