Re: Origins of life: Sci-Am review
Chris Cogan (ccogan@sfo.com)
Mon, 22 Nov 1999 20:09:55 -0800> But also, Dawkins himself admits in the fine print that Darwinism cannot
> explain the origin of life:
>
> "Cumulative selection is the key to all our modern explanations of
life....
> Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started, and we cannot
> escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in the origin of
> cumulative selection itself...So, cumulative selection can manufacture
> complexity while single-step selection cannot. But cumulative selection
> cannot work unless there is some minimal machinery of replication and
> replicator power, and the only machinery of replication that we know
> seems too complicated to have come into existence by means of anything
> less than many generations of cumulative selection!
Chris
Dawkins published this in 1986, a few years, I think, before the article in
Scientific American detailing laboratory examples of fairly simple
self-replicating molecules, molecules that replicated with variations, no
less.
Further, Dawkins does not admit that Darwinism cannot explain the origin of
life. All he admitted was this: "the only machinery of replication that we
know of seems too complicated to have come into existence by means of
anything less than many generations of cumulative selection!" Perhaps you
missed the words, "that we know"? I *do* wish you'd learn to read properly.
Or are you *so* eager to misrepresent people's statements that you don't
dare read too closely for fear of finding that they are not saying what you
*want* them to be saying?