soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and...

Creationists have also changed their name … to intelligent design theorists who study ‘irreducible complexity’ and the ‘abrupt appearance’ of life—yet more jargon for ‘God did it.’ … Notice that they have no interest in...

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the...

Will it be possible to solve these problems? It is certain that nobody has thus far observed the transformation of dead into living matter, and for this reason we cannot form a definite plan for...

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality....

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are...

Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is...

[A] planet, wholly inhabited by spiders, (which is very possible)

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable,...

My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel...

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa’s paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to...

The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear...

The outgroup is rocks.

God is the originator of life.

The sense of alienation that inspires wonder, awe and fear in us is enough of a proof that life does not belong to the planet Earth.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there’s only one way to connect such similarities, and that’s through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic...

The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled....

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.