Customer Reviews

The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories

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For 15 years, this book has been the first that I recommend for colleagues and friends wishing to evaluate the validity of evolution. Its value is that it focuses in ample detail on just one single, critical step in evolution: getting from non-life to life. The book describes work by 4 researchers who attempted to find the mechanism that led to the evolution of the first proto-cell. The authors detail their attempts to find this mechanism that would work against the known processes which the first step in biological evolution would have had to surmount (such as entropy). Each researcher brought a different expertise to the work, so the book is able to bring a number of perspectives to bear on this one relatively narrow issue.

This is not a book for individuals with merely secondary-school maths, biology or chemistry knowledge. The further one has studied in those disciplines (university, post-graduate), the better able he will be to appreciate the research.

I recently finished reading this book and was impressed. The authors were well-informed on the topic and cited more than 100 references. They dealt with the various scientific proposals on how life got started on Earth and very effectively pointed out their strengths and failures. They summarized the results of many scientific experiments and discussed how those experiments compare with what we know about the early Earth and how the experiment reflects the intelligent experimenter's interference. They dealt with the philosophical basis of scientific inquiry and showed how scientist are generally unwilling to face their basic assumptions, thereby failing to accept the implications of the limitation of all current research. At the end the authors confessed that they, too, had been under these assumptions until the evidence forced them to recognize the limitations of those assumptions and accept where the evidence is leading. I recommend this book for all those with scientific interest and especially those who believe that there is a natural explanation for everything. The book will give scientifically valid data and support for alternative views. It is very enlightening and very well researched and written.

This book offers an excellent scientific analysis of important data related to the theory of evolution. I have a degree in Applied Physics from Georgia Tech but portions of this book were over my head. Having said that, a vast majority of the book was intellectually stimulating and raised some very real questions about evolution theory that are often ignored and left unanswered. College professors need to read this book in order to have a balanced view of the different theories regarding the origin of life. This book is NOT a theological book and does not promote religion. It is scientific to the core and extremely compelling. I highly recommend it to the scientific community and other interested persons.

The book doesn't focus on Darwinism. It focuses on the origin of life, something that had to happen before the Darwinian mechanism could even begin to work. Dean Kenyon, author of a leading OOL monograph, Biochemical Predestination, was approached by the three authors and he agreed to write the foreword. He found the book illuminating and challenging.

A seminal work for the theory of intelligent design, this book provides a scientific critique of the prevailing paradigmatic theories of chemical evolution. The authors include Discovery fellows Charles Thaxton and Walter Bradley, and they conclude that the prebiotic soup from which the first cell supposedly arose is a myth. The Miller-Urey experiments employed an unrealistic gas mixture, and there is no geological evidence for its existence in Earth's distant past. The "soup" faces a myriad of other problems, such as inevitable rapid destruction at the hands of radiation.

The authors also take aim at the dominant paradigm for chemical evolution using technical arguments from thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics has been misused by creationists who failed to treat the fact that Earth is an open system. But Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen takes this point into account as they argue that thermodynamics is eminently applicable to assessing whether unguided chemical reactions can organize matter into life. Their conclusion is that natural laws cannot account for the encoded "specified complexity" inherent in biomolecules.

The epilogue looks forward to other possible explanations for the origin of life. The book was published in 1984 when the United States was immersed in debate over Genesis-based creationism. Yet these authors take a different approach that is ahead of its time. They recognize that science requires an observation-based understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. Thus they set aside biblical arguments and focus instead on observations about the natural world and intelligence. After demonstrating that various undirected causes lack the power to produce complex information, they note, "We have observational evidence in the present that intelligent investigators can (and do) build contrivances to channel energy down nonrandom chemical pathways to bring about some complex chemical synthesis, even gene building" (pg. 211). The authors then pose a simple question: "May not the principle of uniformity suggest that DNA had an intelligent cause at the beginning?" (pg. 211)

I will simply say,the most daunting problem with a naturalistic standpoint on the origin of life is the impossibility of self-organization of physical elements into a formal function. I'm tempted to get a lot more technical, but I will leave that to Dr. Abel. One of his goals is to clarify the difference between self-ordering and self-organizing in order to correct the current paradigm.


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The authors are distinguished scientists holding advanced degrees in chemistry, materials science, and geochemistry. This book clearly reflects that, and if you've not studied any of these sciences, a primer is in order. They thoroughly rebut Miller's infamous experiment which supposedly proved life can come from nonliving matter. This book explores the hypothesis of chemical evolution and what conditions would be required, as well as what conditions probably were like on the Earth prior to sentient life developing. Darwin's point about wanting a "warm little pond" in which evolution would take place is delved into in the chapter "The Myth of the Prebiotic Soup." Whether you believe in evolution, creation, or creationism, this book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in science.

This is a response to the review By Tom Sullivan (York, PA):
Using terminology like the following does not encourage open and honest debate. You are using emotion to defend your position. Try arguments that don't contain judgement. Use persuasion, not ridicule...

bafflegab
baloney
ID-iot
Get over it
poorly educated ID-iots, who generally are clueless about real science
Only ignorant suckers are taken in by them

Having read the book, and seeing the reviews, I figured I should put my vote in. This book is excellent.

He writes and I quote, "Only a moron would accept that as "proof," and yet ID-iot Christians are more than happy to accept exactly that kind of "proof" from ID-iotic films like this".

Obviously this man thinks it's a film rather than a book, so much for reading it and a fair critical review.