On this episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson talks with scientist and fellow engineer Rob Stadler about a recent origin-of-life paper and how the authors paint themselves into a corner. The context for the paper is this: Decades of research have undermined the three great hopes for a purely naturalistic origin of life — scenarios starting with some sort of metabolism, scenarios starting with some kind of membrane, and scenarios starting with RNA. All three are necessary for cellular life; none seems able to have come ahead of the others. So now some recent work described in an article in New Scientist suggests it all happened at once in a sort of “chemical big bang.” It’s the return of an old idea long ago dismissed as too improbable. Is this “hopeful monster” plausible after all? As Anderson and Stadler show, there are numerous hidden assumptions and imaginary entities lurking in the proposal, which when surfaced, call its soundness into question.
Is your body engineered? Or did it evolve through impersonal, random processes over millions of years through natural selection? On this ID The Future,...
On this episode of ID the Future, hear part 3 of a lecture given by David Snoke at a conference sponsored by the Christian...
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses the origin of birds on The Universe Next Door with Tom Woodward. A recent...
