Sunday, October 24, 2010

Quote of the Day: "As likely as a golf ball playing its own way around the course"

Full-Length Hammerhead Ribozyme color-coded so...                                         Image via Wikipedia
...the search for ribozymes invokes the same feeling of achievement and beauty in me that I get when I see a skilled golfer playing a difficult course at well under par.  To imagine that related events could take place on their own appears as likely as the idea that the golf ball could play its own way around the course without the golfer.” -- Dr. Robert Shapiro, self-declared agnostic and opponent of ID theories quoted by Uncommon Descent, here.
It's hard to play a perfect round of golf, it's harder to hit a hole-in-one, and its apparently even harder to produce life in the lab -- although dumb nature did it without even trying! Isn't nature something, can we give her a hand, hey, she gave us hands, so, yes we can!
Here's another bite:
Total synthesis involves the preparation by skilled chemists in laboratories of substances that we isolate from biology..… On the early earth, however, there were neither chemists nor laboratories. No driving force has been demonstrated that would direct complex mixtures of organic chemicals of modest size to assemble themselves into a functional RNA. According to Gerald Joyce and the late Leslie Orgel, such an event would constitute a near miracle… 
The catch-22 for darwinian scientists is that all scientist-directed efforts to produce or simulate life in the lab end up illustrating intelligent design - doh!

And, as God said to the scientist who said "I can make life from dirt", "Get Your Own Dirt!".

The Uncommon Descent article is brief, you might want to read the whole thing.

Even better, for the full, free article from Scientific American by Robert Shapiro, go here.
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"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"