h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>It starts with DNA. DNA is described as a twisted ladder. Now try making a ladder with as many rungs as the Encyclopaedia Britannica has letters! Furthermore, these letters - or 'bases' - must be in a set order according to what organism they are in. In short, DNA is like a book. A book cannot be made by throwing random letters of the alphabet together. The letters must be carefully selected by an intelligent source - the author. This means DNA needs a writer, and we can certainly suppose that the being who created the universe also 'writes' DNA.

A Very poor argument that a first year biology student can point out the flaws in. There is nothing 'random' in the assembly of DNA for a start. Human DNA & Chimp DNA are 99.4% the same. This infers a common ancestor. If you keep going backwards in time you willcome to the common anscestor of all DNA on Earth (probably something like a bacterium). A bacterium is a complex organism with it's own machinery for copying itself but there are simpler organisms that copy themselves differently. Virus'es are an example. Some of the simplest organisms are not much above being formed from simple chemical reactions.

Complex organic molecules can be formed by mixing simple chemicals that were in existence in the primordial Earth and subjecting them to heat, light and lightening. given a long enough period of time, random (here's where random comes in) mixing od these chemicals may produce a simple molecule like RNA which is capale of copying itself - that's the bootstrap to everything else.

The only other thing I'd say is that if DNA implies an intelligent writer, then where does the intelligent writer come from? Answers like 'god has always and always will exist' are not acceptable!

You don't know how many times we tried to get this through to Josh.

He has actually left the site now I think, which, funnily enough, produces effectively the same level of interaction as if he were here discussing evolution with you. In one ear, out the other.

Ste

Had a quick read of these articles and they are lacking or deliberately ignoring certain facts, the major one I picked up on:

"But organisms only use a specific kind of amino acids known as 'left handed'. Miller's amino acids were of both kinds. There is no natural process that creates only left-handed, life-supporting amino acids."

there is in fact significant amount of knowledge known about this and there has been a lot of work carried out, a key member being Goldanskii, into the chiral selection of amino acids and the origin of life through autocatalytic reactions where the product plays a supporting role for the catalyst. With only the tiniest statistical enatiomeric excess of one isomer over the other, it is possible through autocatalytic reactions to gain and almost entiomerically pure composition, ie all left handed. Therefore, this is not a fault in evolution at all