Robert Shapiro, Professor of Chemistry at New York University (1)
“Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin for life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or processes leading to life, elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder.”
Robert Shapiro, Professor of Chemistry at New York University (2)
“A good example of disciplinary chauvinism can be seen in Robert Shapiro’s fine book, Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. After presenting a very readable, very devastating critique of scientific studies on the origin of life, Shapiro proclaims his steadfast loyalty-not to the goal of “explaining the physical world,” but to science … Shapiro goes on gamely to say that things don’t look quite so bleak right now, pretty much contradicting everything he had written to that point. He can rest secure in the knowledge that there will never be a time when all experiments have “failed unequivocally,” just as there will never be a time when the existence of the Loch Ness Monster has been absolutely ruled out. And the time when the universe will have been fully explored is comfortably far off.”
Michael Behe (3)
“Any scientific revolution has to accept all sorts of black boxes, for if one had to wait until all black boxes are opened, one would never have any conceptual advances. ”
Ernst Mayr (4)
“Our hypothetical nucleic acid synthesis system is therefore analogous to the scaffolding used in the construction of a building. After the building has been erected the scaffolding is removed, leaving no physical evidence that it was ever there. Most of the statements in this section must therefore be taken as educated guesses. Without having witnessed the event, it seems unlikely that we shall ever be certain of how life arose”
D. Voet & J.G. Voet (5)
“If I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution-which is so well supported by the fossil record-and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer’s dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion.”
John Horgan (6)
“If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atmos, natural forces and radiation, how has it come into being? … I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.”
H. J. Lipson, F.R.S. Professor of Physics, University of Manchester, UK (7)
“Mr. Bird is concerned with origins and the evidence relevant thereto. He is basically correct that evidence, or proof, of origins-of the universe, of life, of all of the major groups of life, of all of the minor groups of life, indeed of all of the species-is weak or nonexistent when measured on an absolute scale, as it always was and will always be.”
Gareth Nelson, Chairman and Curator of the Department of Herpetology and Ichthyology, American Museum of Natural History, New York (8)
“Take some matter, heat while stirring and wait. That is the modern version of Genesis. The ‘fundamental’ forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are presumed to have done the rest… But how much of this neat tale is firmly established, and how much remains hopeful speculation? In truth, the mechanism of almost every major step, from chemical precursors up to the first recognizable cells, is the subject of either controversy or complete bewilderment.”
Andrew Scott (9)
“At a recent meeting in Chicago, a highly distinguished international panel of experts was polled. All considered the experimental production of life in the laboratory imminent, and one maintained that this has already been done-his opinion was not based on a disagreement about the facts but on a definition as to just where, in a continuous sequence, life can be said to begin.”
George Gaylord Simpson, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (10)
“Creationists have looked forward to the day when science may actually create a “living” thing from simple chemicals. They claim, and rightly so, that even if such a man-made life form could be created, this would not prove that natural life forms were developed by a similar chemical evolutionary process. The scientist understands this and plods on testing theories.”
William D. Stansfield, Professor of Biological Sciences, California Polytechnic State University (11)
“…(I)t should be apparent that the errors, overstatements and omissions that we have noted in these biology texts, all tend to enhance the plausibility of hypotheses that are presented. More importantly, the inclusion of outdated material and erroneous discussions is not trivial. The items noted mislead studentsand impede their acquisition of critical thinking skills. If we fail to teach students to examine data critically, looking for points both favoring and opposing hypotheses, we are selling our youth short and mortgaging the future of scientific inquiry itself ”
“Origin of Life Evolution in Biology Textbooks – A Critique” (12)
“To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts.”
Pierre-P. Grasse, former Chair of Evolution, Sorbonne University and ex-president of the French Academie des Sciences (13)
“More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. New lines of thinking and experimentation must be tried.”
“Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in moderncells came into existence.”
“It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate, a stage in which hypothetical arguments often dominate over facts based on experimentation or observation.”
Klaus Dose, Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Gutenberg University, Germany (14)
“We must admit at the outset that we do not know how life on earth originated. However, in the last 30 years or so a multidisciplinary effort of scientists from several specialties has made it possible to construct a scenario in which simple living organisms evolved from nonliving constituents more than 3 billion years BP (before present).”
“In the last three decades, the origin of life has been the subject of dozens of books, scores of essays, thousands of articles, relating an enormous amount of experimental and theoretical work. Periodicals devoted exculsively to the subject have been founded. Textbooks dedicate whole chapters to it…..But I must add a warning. If not considered totally outlandish any more, the field still remains largely confined to speculation. When it comes to events that happened several billion years ago, hard data are scarce and, perforce, are supplemented by reasoning and imagination, if not blind faith.”
C.P. Hickman, L.S. Roberts and F.M. Hickman (15)
Source:
1. Robert Shapiro, Professor of Chemistry at New York University, in his review of “The Mystery of Life’s Origin” (byBradley, Shapiro, and Olsen). Dr. Shapiro is coauthor of Life Beyond Earth.
2. Shapiro R.D., “Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Origin of Life,” Summit: New York NY, 1986, p.130
3. Behe M.J., “Darwin’s Black Box,” 1996, pp.234-235
4. Mayr, Ernst (1991) One Long Argument, p. 146, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
5. Voet D. & Voet J.G., “Biochemistry,” John Wiley and Sons: New York, 1995 p23, in Ashton J.F., ed., “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation,” New Holland: Sydney, Australia, 1999, p.165. (emphasis in the original)
6. Horgan, John (Senior Writer, Scientific American), “The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age,” [1996], Little, Brown & Co: London, 1997, p138
7. H. J. Lipson, F.R.S. professor of physics, University of Manchestor, UK, “A physicist looks at evolution” Physics Bulletin, vol 31, p 138, 1980
8. Nelson, Gareth (Chairman and Curator of the Department of Herpetology and Ichthyology, American Museum of Natural History, New York), “Preface,” in Bird W. R., “The Origin of Species Revisited,” Regency: Nashville TN, 1991, Vol. I, pxii
9. Andrew Scott, “Update on Genesis”, New Scientist, vol. 106, May 2nd, 1985, p. 30
10. Simpson, George Gaylord (Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University), “The World into Which Darwin Led Us,” Science, Vol. 131, No. 3405, 1 April 1960, pp.966- 974, p.969. Please note: this statement was made 40 years ago, such a statement would definitely not be made today, as nothing close to life has ever been produced in the laboratory.
11. Stansfield, William D. (Professor of Biological Sciences, California Polytechnic State University), “The Science of Evolution,” [1977], Macmillan: New York NY, 1983, Eighth Printing, pp10-11
12. “Origin of Life Evolution in Biology Textbooks – A Critique,” Mills, Lancaster, Bradley, The American Biology Teacher, Volume 55, No. 2, February, 1993, p. 83
13. Grasse, Pierre-P., [editor of the 28-volume “Traite de Zoologie”, former Chair of Evolution, Sorbonne University and ex-president of the French Academie des Sciences], “Evolution of Living Organisms Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation”, [1973], Academic Press: New York NY, 1977, p.107
14. Dose, Klaus [Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Gutenberg University, Germany], “The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, p.348, 348
15. Hickman, C.P. (Professor Emeritus of Biology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington), L.S. Roberts (Professor Emeritus of Biology at Texas Tech University), and F.M. Hickman. 1986. Biology of Animals. Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing, St. Louis. p. 698., pg. 110