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Dumb Ideas

Magicians through the Looking Glass
November 29, 2007
A leading origin-of-life researcher passed away last month: Leslie Orgel.  Gerald Joyce paid him tribute in Nature.1  Orgel worked closely with other famous origin-of-life people like Stanley Miller, and was a leader in the “RNA world” scenario for the origin of life.  Joyce appreciated his rigid empiricism: Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded […]
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Origin of Life

No Salt, Please: Europa Life Needs It Bland
November 23, 2007
Salt may taste good on human food, but for life trying to emerge in the sea, it is toxic.  Astrobiologists have long wondered if life could exist at Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an ocean is believed to exist miles deep under the icy crust.  They must have been presuming the water is pure, but an […]
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Dumb Ideas

SETI Researcher Writes Children’s Poem
November 22, 2007
For a feature called “SETI Thursday” at Space.com, Dr. Laurence Doyle has written a childish poem about how life brought itself up from nothing to galactic explorers.  It begins, “When the Earth was young, and the Moon nearby, in a cometary sea, prokaryotic thoughts arose, what fun it is to be!”  The idea of evolving […]
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Dumb Ideas

Crystal Power Is Not Evolution
October 30, 2007
What would Max Planck think?  The Institute named after him put out a press release, “Evolution in the Nanoworld,” that claims that synthetic molecules can organize themselves by an evolutionary principle of selection: The automatic molecular assembly and selection steps exhibited by the molecules, which start as random mixtures, demonstrates a fundamental step in the […]
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Origin of Life

Is Adenine Additive?
October 22, 2007
A paper in PNAS argues that adenine can form in plausible prebiotic conditions.1  Does this add to the story of chemical evolution leading to life on Earth?     Some chemists at the University of Georgia explored the chemical steps necessary to form adenine (one of the bases used in DNA).  Adenine has been found […]
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Astronomy

Dust Became Knowledge
October 11, 2007
The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award goes to an Associated Press article reporting on a finding from the Spitzer Space Telescope.  It began in a very matter-of-fact manner, claiming that the one of the biggest questions of philosophy is being answered by dust.   Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to […]
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Origin of Life

Mars Was and Is Dry
September 21, 2007
The cover story of Science this week has bad news for those hoping for Martian lakefront property.  A series of articles by planetary scientists who studied images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter casts strong doubt on the presence of water on Mars, even in the planet’s early days.  The overview article by Richard Kerr in […]
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Dumb Ideas

Dust to Dust, or Dust to Life?
September 17, 2007
National Geographic gave prominent press to last month’s theory of living dust (see 08/10/2007, bullet 1).  Criticisms were mild; scientists were quoted who thought this claim raises interesting questions about the definition of life.  Tsytovich’s ideas were described by Mihaly Horanyi (U of Colorado) as “amazing.”  He said, “This is a very original, very intelligent […]
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Origin of Life

Solar System News
August 28, 2007
A flurry of discoveries about the Sun’s family has some scientists smiling and others furrowing their brows.  Astrobiologists, as usual, are wielding their divining rods, looking for water.  Some of these reports surfaced at the European Planetary Science Congress last week at Potsdam, Germany; see agenda and press releases at Europlanet. Basalt assault:  How did […]
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Dumb Ideas

SETI Camp Promotes Make Believe
August 17, 2007
“Every kid loves to play make believe,” wrote Lisa Grossman for Space.com’s “SETI Thursday” feature.  How did Lisa spend her summer?  Playing make believe with 16 undergraduates at a NSF- and NASA-funded SETI camp.  “For many of us, the experience was nothing short of fantasy fulfillment,” she cheerfully said in her report entitled, “How I […]
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Dumb Ideas

Weird-Science Origin-of-Life Theories
August 10, 2007
Two news articles on the origin of life seem bizarre at best.  One even used the word “bizarrely” in its own self-evaluation. Living dust:  Zap the dust in your living room and it may come alive.  Is that the gist of this story in PhysOrg?  A team of international scientists thinks that cosmic dust in […]
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Marine Biology

Deep Sea Vents Tantalize Evolutionists
August 1, 2007
A team of Chinese and American scientists pulled up fragments of deep-sea vents and analyzed their contents, reported Science Daily.  They said the creatures inhabiting these vents are the “most primitive life forms on Earth,” and so thought that the fragments might provide clues to the origin of life.  Timothy Kusky of Saint Louis University […]
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Origin of Life

Origin of Life: Speculation vs. Evidence
July 27, 2007
The European Astrobiology Magazine reviewed a book1 that tries to give “detailed scrutiny” the problem of “the transition from small, simple molecules to large, complex cells.”  The initial reaction by reviewer Toby Murcott points out glaring problems in origin of life research: uncertainty, lack of consensus, and lack of evidence: What hits you immediately about […]
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Intelligent Design

Origin of Life Made Simple: Stochastic Innovation Answers I.D.
June 8, 2007
A press release from UC San Francisco teases, Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe.  But what preceded these pre-life steps?     A pair of UCSF scientists has developed a model explaining how simple chemical and […]
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Origin of Life

OOL Study Substitutes Computer for Chemistry
May 15, 2007
Upon reading a recent origin-of-life paper in PNAS,1 you might think the authors ran experiments with real chemicals and real deep-sea rocks.  A more careful look, however, reveals that their model only worked in cyberspace.  This raises interesting questions about the ability of simulations to substitute for empirical evidence.     Their claims were dramatic […]
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