fact as the map of the Mississippi. But in fact they don’t know anything, or hardly anything. It’s dogma. They just draw these lines between fossils that have nothing to do with one another and call it evolution. There are hardly any links. There isn’t any gradualism, and Darwin’s whole idea of how change comes about was of course by gradual increments, each tiny advantage consolidated by natural selection.”
“Dogma,” I said, shifting in my own chair uncomfortably. The Admissions Committee, which once had but to sift lightly through ministerial candidates from the genteel, mainly Unitarian families of New England, now must yield to the applications of untamed creationists from Nebraska and Tennessee; an unattractive lot they tend to be, with a curious physical propensity for wall eyes and jug ears and, among the females, enormous breasts, which they carry through our halls like a penitential burden slung about their necks, suggesting those unfortunates in Dante’s fourth circle “rolling dead weights with full chest pushing square” (“ voltando pesi per forza di poppa ” [Canto VII, line 27] as translated by Laurence Binyon).
“Yeah,” Dale said. “Right at the beginning, all this easy talk about a ‘primordial soup,’ where you have flashes of lightning brewing up amino acids and then proteins and finally a self-replicating string of DNA inside some kind of bubble thatwas the first cell, or creature—it sounds great but just doesn’t work, it’s on a par with flies and spiders being spontaneously generated out of dung or haystacks or whatever it was the people in the Middle Ages thought happened. For one thing, the theory is based on the primitive Earth’s atmosphere being a reducing one, that is, based on nitrogen and hydrogen and short of free oxygen. But if you look at the earliest rocks, they’re full of rust, so there was oxygen. Also, the amount of information you need to make even the simplest viruslike piece of life is so great that the odds of its being assembled by chance are off the map. One biologist puts them at ten to the three hundred and oneth; another guy assumed there were ten to the twentieth planets in the universe capable of supporting life and he still came up with odds of ten to the four hundred fifteenth to one against its arising anyplace but here. Wickramasinghe, who I mentioned the last time, says the odds are ten to the forty thousandth, which is pages and pages of zeros; but that’s just rubbing it in.”
“We don’t want to do that,” I said, shifting my position again; he was the pea and I was the princess. I told him, “You keep citing these long odds to me as if the atoms and molecules had to fall into these combinations by purely mathematical chance; but suppose at this microscopic level there is some principle of cohesion or organization, comparable, say, to the instinct of self-preservation at the level of the individual organism, or gravity at the cosmic level, that would tend to encourage assembly and complexity. Then these long odds would go way down, without any supernatural intervention.”
“That’s not bad, sir, for a non-scientist; but your asking for another molecular law is asking for a bigger deal than you probably know. Also, there’re all kinds of additional problems the ‘primordial-soup’ boys just plain ignore. The energy problem, for example: for that first little microscopic Adam tosurvive he’d need some energy system to keep him going, and right there you’re in a whole other engineering realm. Enzymes, is another. You can’t make proteins without DNA, but you can’t make DNA without enzymes, and enzymes are proteins. How do you do it? They’ve been mixing up these electrified soups in the laboratory since 1954, and they haven’t come up with anything like life yet. Why not? If they can’t do it with all their controls, how come blind Nature did?”
“Nature,” I pointed out, “had aeons of time, and oceans of
“Dogma,” I said, shifting in my own chair uncomfortably. The Admissions Committee, which once had but to sift lightly through ministerial candidates from the genteel, mainly Unitarian families of New England, now must yield to the applications of untamed creationists from Nebraska and Tennessee; an unattractive lot they tend to be, with a curious physical propensity for wall eyes and jug ears and, among the females, enormous breasts, which they carry through our halls like a penitential burden slung about their necks, suggesting those unfortunates in Dante’s fourth circle “rolling dead weights with full chest pushing square” (“ voltando pesi per forza di poppa ” [Canto VII, line 27] as translated by Laurence Binyon).
“Yeah,” Dale said. “Right at the beginning, all this easy talk about a ‘primordial soup,’ where you have flashes of lightning brewing up amino acids and then proteins and finally a self-replicating string of DNA inside some kind of bubble thatwas the first cell, or creature—it sounds great but just doesn’t work, it’s on a par with flies and spiders being spontaneously generated out of dung or haystacks or whatever it was the people in the Middle Ages thought happened. For one thing, the theory is based on the primitive Earth’s atmosphere being a reducing one, that is, based on nitrogen and hydrogen and short of free oxygen. But if you look at the earliest rocks, they’re full of rust, so there was oxygen. Also, the amount of information you need to make even the simplest viruslike piece of life is so great that the odds of its being assembled by chance are off the map. One biologist puts them at ten to the three hundred and oneth; another guy assumed there were ten to the twentieth planets in the universe capable of supporting life and he still came up with odds of ten to the four hundred fifteenth to one against its arising anyplace but here. Wickramasinghe, who I mentioned the last time, says the odds are ten to the forty thousandth, which is pages and pages of zeros; but that’s just rubbing it in.”
“We don’t want to do that,” I said, shifting my position again; he was the pea and I was the princess. I told him, “You keep citing these long odds to me as if the atoms and molecules had to fall into these combinations by purely mathematical chance; but suppose at this microscopic level there is some principle of cohesion or organization, comparable, say, to the instinct of self-preservation at the level of the individual organism, or gravity at the cosmic level, that would tend to encourage assembly and complexity. Then these long odds would go way down, without any supernatural intervention.”
“That’s not bad, sir, for a non-scientist; but your asking for another molecular law is asking for a bigger deal than you probably know. Also, there’re all kinds of additional problems the ‘primordial-soup’ boys just plain ignore. The energy problem, for example: for that first little microscopic Adam tosurvive he’d need some energy system to keep him going, and right there you’re in a whole other engineering realm. Enzymes, is another. You can’t make proteins without DNA, but you can’t make DNA without enzymes, and enzymes are proteins. How do you do it? They’ve been mixing up these electrified soups in the laboratory since 1954, and they haven’t come up with anything like life yet. Why not? If they can’t do it with all their controls, how come blind Nature did?”
“Nature,” I pointed out, “had aeons of time, and oceans of
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