. . the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. . . . But this should not be taken to imply . . . that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth’s surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era. —FRANCIS CRICK, Life Itself, 1981 IN 1986, AN ARTICLE by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and biochemist Walter Gilbert appeared in the influential “News and Views” section of the journal Nature. Eight years earlier in the same section, Gilbert had hypothesized the existence of sections of genes called introns that were spliced from their RNA carriers during the process of gene translation to proteins, solving a long-standing problem in biology.
What do You think about A Brief History Of Creation?
