As a subscriber to fanatically pro-evolution magazines  (Scientific American for the last few years, and more recently to ‘Science News’ and ‘Science’)  I always find it amazing that there still is no plausible explanation on how simple dead chemicals combined and formed the simple one cell bacteria. One explanation in the Sept. 2012 Scientific American in which a guy said if he had 10,000 years to run an experiment he would have computer chips made to monitor hundreds of little wells attached to them, looking at different chemical combinations in each well to see if there is a runaway self-replication going on.  Isn’t that kind of like Charley Brown sitting in the patch, waiting for the ‘Great Pumpkin’?

What’s the problem? It’s  just a dumb little bacteria like the ones residing in our gut.  Is there a problem with that library of instructions residing in its DNA? —  instructions  approaching the same complexity level as on how to build a space shuttle.  It’s a factory that makes another factory,  like itself, in less than 30 minutes. Machines throughout the cell are performing a thousand operations at any one time. Some are extremely complicated, for instance  ATP synthase  which produces the chemical energy packets for other machines in the cell,  has 40,000 parts (atoms), all of which have to be in the right place, for proper operation.

This bustling city with its central  library  of construction and maintenance  information, is supposed to arise  by itself from dead chemicals?  Some high school textbooks like Holt Biology (2004) are telling the kids it does.  Throughout the book are little review sections called “Critical Thinking”;  I would think this means striving to be in conformance with ‘reality.’  Dead chemicals self-combining to form ‘life’ is not reality. So why are some educators pushing it?

Phil Drietz,

 Delhi,  MN