Retorts

Return to Replicators

Professor Bernard Howard [Retorts, August] calls my approach to what is and is not possible "anti-scientific", and says it "rules out any enquiry before one could start". It is and does nothing of the sort. The fact is we are a long, long way into the enquiry. We've had who knows how many evolutionary scientists and how many billions of dollars devoted to trying to work out how life got up and running naturalistically, and the whole enterprise has been a colossal and resounding failure, despite Miller, Fox and others.

At the same time as all this effort and money was being spent, information theory was being developed. When this is applied to the genetic information system we see the whole mindless, naturalistic proposal -- both at the origin of life and the subsequent development of life levels -- is utterly puerile. Here is the most complex information and information system, all at the ultimate in miniaturisation. Yet it's supposed by evolutionists to have come about randomly through molecules banging together. All we know about information today rules such a suggestion out of court.

If some people, because of ideology, staunchly carry on using other people's money to bang molecules together in the hope of producing an information system and information randomly, so be it. But I don't see why I should be accused of stifling enquiry because I suggest this by now so obviously futile quest, is just that.

Bernard asks me to justify my idea of a minimum replicator. Sure. Replication is genetically controlled so you need the genetic system with its code and conventions, and the concepts carried on the code -- including the replication concepts -- in place. Then you need all the interpretive and intermediate mechanisms and pathways in place that will act between the genetic information and the yet-to-be-replicated parts.

Among the things replicated, of course, needs to be the genetic information. Along with a precisely controlled energy system to drive the replication, the whole system -- information and mechanisms etc -- needs to be separated from everything else so nothing floats away.

I know evolutionists desperately need simple chemical replicators because today's minimum replicator -- a single cell -- is light years too complex to get in one fell swoop naturalistically. But, in short, if a cell is the minimum replicator then naturalism is dead meat.

I did not deride Bernard's comment that some scientists are "looking hard" for an answer to how life got going naturalistically. I simply said that while at times commendable, looking hard proves nothing. You may be looking hard for something your theory requires but which actually is non-existent because your theory is wrong. If life did not get going naturalistically, then it's not very smart looking hard to find a naturalistic means.

Renton Maclachlan, Porirua