Questions & Objections

Origin-of-life experiments have made remarkable progress. Researchers have produced biologically important molecules, constructed membrane compartments, developed catalytic RNA molecules, demonstrated molecular replication, and built synthetic systems displaying some characteristics associated with living organisms.

If scientists can reproduce these processes experimentally, perhaps the origin of life is no longer a serious explanatory problem.

Intelligent Design discussions sometimes argue that natural selection cannot help explain the origin of life because natural selection requires reproduction and heredity, which themselves had to originate.

But chemical systems can undergo competition, differential persistence, replication, and selection-like processes before anything resembling a modern cell exists.

Descriptions of DNA and RNA often use words such as information, code, transcription, translation, and copying.

Critics may argue that this language encourages an inappropriate comparison between living systems and human communication or computer software. Molecules obey chemistry; they do not read messages or understand symbols.

Some arguments against a natural origin of life calculate the probability of assembling a modern protein, genome, or cell by random combination and obtain extraordinarily small numbers.

Critics object that origin-of-life researchers do not propose that a modern cell appeared in a single random assembly event. Chemistry is constrained by physical laws, reactions are not equally probable, intermediate products can persist, environmental processes can concentrate materials, and selection can act once replicating systems exist.

Origin-of-life science still contains important unanswered questions. Critics argue that inferring design from those unanswered questions simply places God or an intelligent cause into gaps in present scientific knowledge.

History provides many examples in which phenomena once unexplained later received natural explanations. Future research may likewise resolve problems that currently appear difficult.

Origin-of-life research is advancing rapidly. Processes that once seemed difficult may become experimentally understood, and future researchers may discover pathways that are presently unknown.

If scientists eventually construct a convincing sequence from plausible prebiotic chemistry to an autonomous evolvable system, would that remove the basis for an Intelligent Design interpretation?