Quote for today, June 19th, 2003 [As a note before the actual quote, I just want to stress that not everything I read I actually "believe in." In fact, it may be fair to say that I argue with the things that I read more than I accept them. Hopefully, no one could accuse me of swimming in the shallow end of the pool--exposing myself only to the things that I already agree with. Anyway, this quote is one of those I find really disturbing, not because it's out there at all or that it's ridiculous. It's distasteful because it poses more problems than it solves, but is posited as "the solution to the origins of life on Earth." And tons of really significant people--astronomer Fred Hoyle and discoverer of the DNA structure Francis Crick to name but a few--completely buy into this theory. The obvious problem, of course, is that it only pushes the origin of life into a new cloud of unknowing. The argument goes like this: life is complex--far to complex to have arisen in the 400 million to 1.2 billion years that geologists think Earth was habitable--and therefore we need an informational source for this complexity. If neo-Darwinism promoted life from non-life and that is effectively discredited, then life must have come from life. So someone must have created it. But because we are not willing to leave a naturalist metaphysic--are not willing to admit to a Creator operating through whatever means in a unique way, a non-testable, non-observable way to fashion nature--we have to defer the origin of life to someplace outside of Earth proper. But as a chemist friend reminded me the other day, "At some point, time = 0. There was a big bang." Therefore life had to originate at some time, and we currently don't have enough time or enough information input to account for what we have sitting here in front of this computer monitor. "All my people right here, right now...d'ya know what I mean?"] The quote: "The first point, which deals with the origin of life on Earth, is known as panspermia ? literally, "seeds everywhere." Its earliest recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who influenced Socrates. However, Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation came to be preferred by science for more than two thousand years. Then on April 9, 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur announced his great experiment disproving spontaneous generation as it was then held to occur. In the 1870s, British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur and argued that life could come from space. And in the first decade of the 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth. But in the 1920s, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin and English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, writing independently, revived the doctrine of spontaneous generation in a more sophisticated form. In the new version, the spontaneous generation of life no longer happens on Earth, takes too long to observe in a laboratory, and has left no clues about its occurrence. Supporting this theory, in 1953, American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey showed that some amino acids can be chemically produced from amonia and methane. That experiment is now famous, and the Oparin - Haldane paradigm still prevails today. Starting in the 1970s, British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe rekindled interest in panspermia. By careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of light from distant stars they found new evidence, traces of life, in the intervening dust. They also proposed that comets, which are largely made of water-ice, carry bacterial life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way. One aspect of this research program, that interstellar dust and comets contain organic compounds, has been pursued by others as well. It is now universally accepted that space contains the "ingredients" of life. This development could be the first hint of a huge paradigm shift. But mainstream science has not accepted the hard core of modern panspermia, that whole cells seeded life on Earth." --excerpted from "Introduction: More than Panspermia" by Brig Klyce, http://www.panspermia.org/intro.htm