A University Press Release Is Mostly Honest, But Ends With "Seeds of Life" BS

Scientists have long appealed to the idea that chemical precursors of life were delivered to Earth eons ago by comets.  For example, the scientific paper here states, "Thus, comets may have imported prebiotic elements to early Earth, which, when mixed with liquid water, may have allowed the synthesis of all molecules thought to be necessary for the origin of life." This idea always seemed nutty, because a colliding comet would be vastly more destructive than an exploding atomic bomb, as the Google Gemini infographic below explains (mentioning that a colliding comet would have a force of trillions of megatons). 

The "delicate precursors of life from colliding comets" idea is  discredited by a recent press release from the University of Cambridge. We had this headline:

Comets probably didn’t seed life on Earth after all, new study suggests

We read this:

"The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry many of these molecules. However, a new study challenges this idea. 

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found the cometary delivery of these building blocks would be – at best – a ‘one-off fluke’, and not the steady rain of prebiotic molecules that had been theorised.

Using computer modelling, the researchers determined that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth’s atmosphere for the fragile organic molecules to survive: they would almost certainly vaporise on impact with the surface. However, the researchers also found that another planet in our system – Mars – could be a slightly more promising candidate for cometary delivery of prebiotic molecules, although this is still highly unlikely. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports."

Referring to hydrogen cyanide, the scientific paper tells us that "HCN is the only feedstock molecule observed in Solar System comets in prebiotically relevant concentrations." That seems to discredit ideas that things such as amino acids (molecules needed for the origin of life, and much more complex than hydrogen cyanide) might have arrived from comets.  Referring to the delivery of life or its precursors to Earth from comets, the paper refers to "the crux of long-standing objections to cometary delivery, which relate to both the destruction of comets during atmospheric passage, and the thermal destruction of fragile organic species during hypervelocity impact."  The paper states, "Despite representing a best-case scenario for cometary delivery, our Monte Carlo simulations of Earth’s early cometary bombardment record, on average, zero cometary impacts delivering a prebiotically relevant concentration of HCN (> 10 mM)."

The paper authors state this:

"We have shown via Monte Carlo simulation of Earth’s cometary bombardment that these comets were, on the whole, unable to deliver these fragile organic molecules to Earth’s surface intact. Our results demonstrate that, on both global and local scales, cometary impacts provided an insignificant source of the concentrated feedstock molecules required for prebiotic chemistry, challenging the long-held hypothesis that comets played an important role in the origins of life on Earth."

No one should be surprised by this conclusion. The idea that something biological (or even complex chemistry) could come from a comet and survive the comet crashing into Earth (and without being incinerated as the comet came through the atmosphere) was always hugely unbelievable. There's a reason why meteors light up the sky so dramatically as fireballs entering the atmosphere. It's because some rock has become super-heated.  

The University of Cambridge press release announcing these findings does not manage to inform us intelligently throughout its text. Instead, at its end it shifts into BS-shoveling mode (a mode that very many university press releases shift into at their very beginning).  Near its end, the press release states this:

"So where did the molecular seeds of life on Earth come from? The researchers say there are several possibilities, including the synthesis of these molecules following the impact of asteroids, which hit the Earth far more frequently than comets. Or, the chemical precursors formed from processes that occurred on Earth itself, without any outside interference." 

Alas, we have the utterly unscientific has-no-basis-in-fact idea that there is any such thing as "seeds of life." What is a seed? It is something that will grow into a living plant, as long as you supply sunlight, water and soil. Do we know of any such thing corresponding to the appearance of life from non-life? No, we do not.  There are no chemicals that cause life to appear from a sterile environment without life. There are no such things as "seeds of life." The use of that term is a bad deceptions of scientists and science journalists talking about the origin of life. 

Claiming that there are chemicals that are "seeds of life" causing life to arise from non-life is as deceptive as claiming that are types of nuts or bolts that are seeds of automobiles. The number of well-arranged parts in even the simplest self-reproducing cell is comparable to the number of well-arranged parts in an automobile. A car has about 30,000 well-arranged parts. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of proteins, each of which has an average of hundreds of very well-arranged amino acids. Multiply 200 by 200 and you get 40,000.

As for the idea that you could have got the complex components needed for life from asteroids bombarding Earth, all we should say about that is: crazy as colliding comets. 

I'll end by citing the first quote in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post:

"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 

Many Apparitions Are Group-Seen

On this blog (in posts listed at the end of this post) I have described many reports in which an apparition was seen by more than one. Let us look at some more cases of apparitions seen by more than one witness (a rather appropriate task for this Halloween).

Below is an account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses, claimed to be the apparition of Florence Josephine Lee (I have physically rearranged the text to try to make it easier to read, without the distraction of unrelated articles).  You can read the full account here. 

When I was a boy, I used to deliver the newspaper The Evening Star. An account in that paper in 1960 stated the following:

"Mrs. Arnold W. Barnett, who lives in a pre-

Revolution house near Bryantown. Md.. is convinced that she saw a ghost. And, as supporting witnesses, she calls upon her mother and two of her children-Beverley. 17. and Robert, 12-
who insist that they have seen the same apparition....'Four of us have seen her.' Mrs. Barnett
declares. 'We know we have seen the same
apparition because each of us. independently,
has seen a similar figure. She has appeared about once a month for
the last year, and we think she is friendly because of the regular visits."

Below is another account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses, one you can read here. 

The newspaper account below can be read here.  The strength of the account is that we have two named witnesses (H. H. Martens and Joseph Martens), and we have a first-person account that tells what the witnesses apparently saw only a few days earlier. 

On page 7 of the January 4, 1878 edition of the publication Medium and Daybreak, which you can read here, we have this account:

"A scene of a very exciting character was witnessed on Sunday night, before the house of Mr. Edward Foster, druggist, Friargate, Preston... Shortly after six o’clock a number of persons in the vicinity of Mr. Foster’s residence imagined that they saw a ghost or spirit in one of the upper rooms, and at once communicated the fact to other passers-by. A large crowd speedily collected, and the appearance of the ghost was attributed to a seance that was thought to be going on in the room. The crowd increased and became very noisy. The wildest rumours got afloat, and for the space of about two bours the thoroughfares, despite the endeavours of the police, were entirely blocked. No satisfactory clue was obtained as to the cause of the strange apparition, which hundreds of people positively asserted they saw ; and at length the crowd, having exhausted itself in noise and surmises, gradually dispersed."

A book you can read here summarizes another report of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses:

The following newspaper account appeared in 1923:

Below is the text of the story:

Two Royal Airmen Say
They Saw Ghost Walk

London.—A ghostly form of human
shape, apparently composed of a grayish-white

 vapor and devoid of features or limbs, has disturbed the
slumbers of men stationed in the
Royal Air Force camp here, declares
the Fernborough correspondent of
the London Daily Express.
The vision has been accompanied
by all the portents, such as sudden
gusts of wind on a quiet night, rattling of windows

 and creaking of
bolts, which are usually connected
with psychic phenomena.
Two young airmen sleeping in a
barrack room with ten others declare
that they have clearly seen the ghostly visitor. 

Their commanding officer
ridiculed the idea and told them to
report sick. They were found to be
perfectly fit, but one of them has been
sent on leave.

Both men are convinced, however,
that the smoky form which hovered
at the foot of their beds was not a
mere figment of the imagination.
They were filled with fear, and lay
there enduring the icy sweat of terror until

a window pane smashed and
the mysterious figure vanished.
'The figure took its stand at the
foot of my bed and peered about as
though looking for something,' declared one of the men. 

'A face seemed to appear gradually, and I am almost
sure it was that of my mother. She
died in 1914.' ”

You can read the account here:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83032307/1923-04-26/ed-1/?sp=5&q=%22they+saw+ghost%22&r=0.011,0.097,0.718,0.343,0

Below is another newspaper account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses, an account you can read here. 

Below is another newspaper report of an apparition reported by multiple witnesses:

You can read the account using the link here and here. 

Here is some more of the rest of the account:

Here are some more excerpts from the account. We have some named witnesses (including Guy Willie Jones and William Pope):

The account below was reported in the Detroit Times in 1914, and can be read here.  We have an independent witness (E. H. Sothern) saying he saw something "not long ago" corroborating the report of a family who claimed to see an apparition. 

The visual below depicts an apparition reportedly seen by multiple witnesses. It is from the newspaper article that can be read here and here. 

For other cases of apparitions seen by multiple witnesses, see my 14 posts below:

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases
More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

Yet More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Get Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Are Seen by Multiple Witnesses

Many Said They Saw Nelly Butler's Apparition

Yet More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Get Observed by Not Just One

If the topic of this post interested you, you may want to check out my free 292-page book "Eeriest Events," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. 

Nonsense in an Episode of "How the Universe Works"

The long-running TV series "How the Universe Works" can now be watched on HBO Max. Let us look at an episode where the series showed scientists saying things that were misleading or stupid. 

In Episode 4 of Season 10 we have an episode entitled "Dark History of Earth."  At the 23:56 we have a description of a Japanese experiment. We are told that Japanese scientists simulated the conditions of the early Earth and then tried to reproduce what would happen if you smashed a meteorite into the early Earth. We are told that amino acids were created (without any mention of the amounts). 

A look at the scientific paper ("Impact-induced amino acid formation on Hadean Earth and Noachian Mars") shows that the scientists tried to simulate a meteorite impact using a gun which fired at a speed of 1 kilometer per second. Meteorites hitting the earth hit the ground at a speed of only about 100 or 200 meters per second. The amino acids reportedly detected were claimed to have been detected at only the most negligible trace amounts of about 1 nanomole, roughly 1 part per billion (Figure 2). Because the reported levels were so miniscule, they probably are mere amino acids already present in the sample, before the gun fired. No robust evidence was provided that amino acids are created by meteorite impacts. The authors mention that amino acids supposedly produced by similar experiments may be the result of mere contamination, but fail to specify safeguards they took to prevent such contamination in their experiment. 

Around the 25:00 mark the TV show incorrectly claims, "The experiment proves that meteorite impacts can help build the components for life." No, it did not, because of the negligible amino acids amounts reported, and because of the impossibility of telling whether they arose from any activity simulating a meteorite impact. The narrator then says something more is needed for life to arise. We then hear around the 25:10 mark an astrophysicist compare the origin of life to making a cake from the right ingredients. This is an enormously misleading analogy. Even the simplest life would require a state of organization exponentially greater than the minimal amount of organization to make a cake. A three-layer cake with frosting is not a highly organized structure, but merely a structure with the most minimal organization. 

What would be a realistic analogy for the accidental origin of life from non-life? It would be the analogy of a 100-page technical manual arising from accidental ink splashes. Because even the simplest living thing requires hundreds of types of protein molecules each requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids, the probability of life accidentally arising from non-life is roughly comparable to the probability of accidental ink splashes producing a 100-page well-written useful technical manual. 

Misleading us very badly and teaching absurd nonsense, the narrator says at the 25:30 make, "We thought that the violence of asteroid impacts prevented life from forming. Now, we think they could be an essential ingredient." Senselessly, some woman talks about ideal "Petri dish" conditions for early life, just as we see some visual of a meteorite plunging into a sea of lava. The show has gone crazy, it seems. A Petri dish is a glass container protecting some microbes from harm, which is the exact opposite of the sterilizing conditions visually depicted while the woman refers to a Petri dish. It's like someone claiming that your poodle will have an ideal spot to relax if you put him in your tumble dryer for a 40-minute spinning cycle. 

We then around the 27:00 mark hear the astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell saying, "The sort of chemistry that goes on in these hydrothermal fluids seems to be the right kind of chemistry for creating life." That's baloney, BS. No scientist understands any such thing as a "kind of chemistry for creating life" from lifeless matter. Any scientists claiming to understand any such thing is misleading you very badly. All experiments trying to create life from lifeless matter have been the most dismal failures. The recent article here discusses a recent scientific study "Rethinking the origin of life at seafloor hydrothermal vents" finding that hydrothermal vents "lacked the fundamental conditions needed to spark early life."

The narrator then talks equally bad nonsense, saying around the 27:15 mark, "Once again Earth got lucky. Impacts that could have destroyed everything may have helped spark life into existence." The idea that you can "spark into existence" life from non-life is very bad nonsense. Even the simplest living thing is an information-rich state of very high organization. You can no more "spark into existence" such life than a thunderbolt striking a tree can produce a 100-page book. 

Around  the 30:20 mark the show starts to discuss homochirality, without decently explaining it. Chemicals such as amino acids and sugars can be either left-handed or right handed. A left handed amino acid looks like a mirror image of the right-handed amino acid, and a right-handed sugar looks like the mirror image of a left-handed sugar. Homochirality is the fact that in living things essentially all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA are right-handed. But when such things are synthesized in a laboratory, you see equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids and equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed sugars.

Based on the fact that it is just as easy for left-handed amino acids to form in the laboratory as right-handed amino acids, and just as easy for left-handed sugars to form in the laboratory as right-handed sugars, we would expect for there to be a symmetry in the handedness of amino acids, with an equal amount of left-handed and right-handed amino acids. We would also would expect a symmetry in the handedness of sugars, with equal amounts of left-handed sugars and right-handed sugars. But what we see is a puzzling asymmetry, with living things having only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars in DNA. This puzzling asymmetry is the long-standing unresolved mystery of homochirality. Homochirality is a major reason for suspecting that the origin of life required purposeful design, and could not have occurred by accident. 

At the 30:30 mark the TV show laughably suggests cosmic rays as an explanation for homochirality, saying, "The reason may have been cosmic rays." I won't bother to summarize the speculation that followed, merely telling you that it is one of those "some scientists believe" affairs. You can read my post here for an explanation of why cosmic rays do nothing to remove the mystery of homochirality. 

In the last quarter of the show, we have all kinds of nonsense, such as the claim at 35:43 that an asteroid striking Earth 66 million years ago "gave us a push forward." At the 38:49 some scientist witlessly describes himself as a "furry primate," mentioning an asteroid impact, and claiming he is "here because of it." An event getting rid of dinosaurs does not actually explain the appearance of mammals, nor does it explain the appearance of humans. 

We have a nonsensical attempt to account for the origin of flowering plants.  We hear this:

"Before the asteroid strike, conifers and ferns dominated the tropical forests of South America. But afterwards, falling ash from the impact enriched the soil. And fast growing flowering plants took over. "

Actually, the fossil record shows flowering plants first appearing about 120 to 140 million years ago, long before the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs (believed to have occurred about 66 million years ago). Such plants appear in a sudden burst that is not explained by Darwinian evolution. Here is a relevant quote:

"Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University 

of London.

No one familiar with the Cambrian Explosion should be too shocked to read the quote above. In the Cambrian Explosion, almost all of the animal phyla (the main types of animals) appeared in a relatively short period of time, contrary to what is predicted by Darwinism. The diagram below depicts when animal phyla appeared during the past billion years. 

At the 41:06 mark in the TV show we hear a scientist saying "we need these disasters for evolution to work," thereby suggesting some giant hole in evolutionary explanations, which prior to the year 1980 did not appeal to disasters caused by things such as asteroid collisions. The truth is that with or without asteroid collisions, evolutionary ideas and Darwinist ideas fail to provide any credible explanations for the origin of species or the origin of very complex biological innovations. 

Postscript: There's another deus ex machina abiogenesis believers appeal to: the possibility of comets colliding with the early Earth and providing some of the "building blocks" of life. On the day of this post's publication, there was published the paper here. It states this:

"Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event. Our results therefore challenge the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth."

When Scientists Misrepresent Their Long Lab Labors as "Evolution"

 Let us examine the very big folly and misrepresentation that occurs when scientists engage in the most laborious and purposeful hi-tech fiddling in laboratories filled with gadgetry, and then try to pass off their long lab labors as examples of natural evolution. 

But first, as a springboard towards this discussion, I will mention a scientist who is simply making some provocative claims.  A recent article at www.yahoo.com is entitled "Scientist Says Human DNA Contains Clues of an Intelligent Creator." We read about assertions of Orson Wedgewood, an organic chemist with a PhD in organic medicinal chemistry. The article quotes a Daily Mail article which stated this:

"Dr Orson Wedgwood, a New Zealand-based healthcare researcher, argues that DNA could not have emerged randomly in puddles or undersea vents on early Earth, calling its spontaneous formation so improbable that it is effectively impossible.

Wedgwood believes the genetic system contains abstract instructions that nature has no known mechanism for creating unaided....

The statistical problem, he argued, concerns the extraordinary improbability of amino acids assembling into a functional protein without direction.

His conceptual objection goes further, as modern cells depend on DNA to provide instructions for proteins, while proteins help copy and translate those instructions. 

Wedgwood questioned how that interdependent arrangement could have arisen without intelligence."

The genetic code is the system within DNA by which particular triple combinations of nucleotides represent particular amino acids.  Speaking of that code, Wedgewood says, "Every other code is a result directly of intelligence, and that sort of speaks to the evidence of perhaps an intelligent originator." The visual below shows the Morse code on the left and the genetic code on the right. Both are schemes of representation under which a series of things are symbolically represented by particular combinations of symbolic tokens. During the age when telegraphs were the main technology for long-distance communication, the Morse Code was used to transmit written information over telegraph wires. When messages were transmitted using the Morse Code, an operator would use short presses on a button for one of the dot shapes shown below, and the operator would use longer presses on a button for one of the dash shapes shown below. The complexity of the genetic code used by all organisms is roughly equal to the complexity of the Morse Code. 

The Morse Code and the Genetic Code

The Daily Mail article had tried to offer a bit of "the other side" balance by stating, "A 2024 paper from Gerald Joyce's laboratory, titled RNA-Catalyzed Evolution of Catalytic RNA, showed that an RNA enzyme could copy functional RNA in a way that might enable evolution at the molecular scale." The same paper is referred to in the Yahoo article. That article first says, "RNA World research offers experimental footholds on the very steps Wedgwood calls impossible." Then it says this:

 "Researchers at the Salk Institute are not waiting for the philosophy to settle. In a 2024 paper published in PNAS, Gerald Joyce, Papastavrou, and Horning reported an RNA enzyme capable of copying functional RNA strands while allowing new molecular variants to emerge — evolution happening entirely within an RNA system."

But the claims refer to work that is not experimental in the sense of simulating early Earth conditions. And the work was not any demonstration of what can happen by evolution or by unguided natural chemical events. The work was instead long purposeful lab labors by scientists using all of the conveniences available to today's chemists -- quite the opposite of natural evolution, and quite the opposite of anything occurring by natural chemistry. 

Perhaps we can absolve the writers of the Daily Mail article and the Yahoo article, because they are merely repeating a very bad misrepresentation that glaringly occurred in the paper they are referring to. That paper is the paper "RNA-catalyzed evolution of catalytic RNA." The paper started out in its first line by misrepresenting things badly by claiming, "An RNA enzyme with RNA polymerase activity was used to replicate and evolve an RNA enzyme with RNA-cleavage activity." No natural evolution was occurring. The "evolution" described was a series of changes produced by a long series of purposeful interventions made by scientists fiddling around in a modern hi-tech lab. Calling such long lab labors "evolution" is a grotesque misrepresentation. 

The text below (from the "Methods" section of the paper) shows how the so-called "evolution" required the longest and most intricate series of purposeful lab labors by scientists or their helpers, with state-of-the-art hi-tech equipment being used throughout the process:

"Synthetic oligonucleotides were either purchased from IDT or prepared by solid-phase synthesis using an Expedite 8909 DNA/RNA synthesizer, with reagents and phosphoramidites from either Glen Research or ChemGenes. All other RNAs, including RNA templates and polymerase ribozymes, were prepared by in vitro transcription (SI Appendix, Methods) and purified by denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). Assays of polymerase or hammerhead ribozyme activity used fluorescently labeled RNA primers or substrates, respectively. The reaction products were separated by PAGE, imaged using an Amersham Typhoon RGB laser scanner, quantified using ImageQuant TL software, and plotted using GraphPad Prism. Hot Start Taq, OneTaq, Q5 high-fidelity DNA polymerase, T4 RNA ligase, T4 RNA ligase 2, K227Q T4 RNA ligase 2, and Universal miRNA Cloning Linker were from New England Biolabs. SuperScript IV reverse transcriptase, Turbo DNase, MyOne C1 streptavidin magnetic beads, and Pierce high-capacity streptavidin agarose beads were from Thermo Fisher Scientific. Nucleoside 5′-triphosphates were from Chem-Impex International, pCp-biotin, γ-(2-azidoethyl)-ATP, and sulfo-cyanine5-azide were from Jena Bioscience, and all other chemical reagents were from Sigma-Aldrich....

Beginning with a population of polymerase ribozymes obtained after 52 rounds of directed evolution (17), error-prone PCR was performed (31) and a new 5′-terminal region was added during PCR using primer Fwd1, which contained an AvaII restriction site. In vitro transcription of polymerase-encoding DNA was carried out in the presence of γ-(2-azidoethyl)-ATP, which enabled attachment via click chemistry (SI Appendix, Methods) of a 5′-hexynylated RNA primer (Primer1). Following PAGE purification, 50 nM polymerase-primer conjugates were mixed with 100 nM 3′-biotinylated RNA template (Tem2) and 75 nM cofactor oligodeoxynucleotide (Tem4), which were annealed by heating at 80 °C for 30 s, then cooling to 17 °C. The cofactor oligo, which binds to the new 5′ end of the polymerase, was found to increase polymerase activity and was included in all polymerase-catalyzed reactions.

The annealed materials were added to a reaction mixture containing 4 mM of each NTP, various concentrations of MgCl2, 50 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.3), and 0.05% Tween-20, which were incubated at 25 °C for various times. The reaction was quenched by adding an equal volume of 250 mM EDTA, 500 mM NaCl, 5 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0), and 0.025% Tween-20, then mixed with 5 µg streptavidin magnetic beads per pmol of biotinylated template and incubated with agitation at 23 °C for 1 h. The beads had been pre-blocked by incubating with 1 mg/mL tRNA. The beads were washed twice with urea buffer [8 M urea, 1 mM EDTA, and 10 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0)], and the polymerase-primer conjugates were eluted from the RNA template in NaOH buffer (25 mM NaOH, 1 mM EDTA, and 0.05% Tween-20), then neutralized in 100 mM Tris-HCl (pH 7.5), ethanol precipitated, and the full-length products were purified by PAGE.

The purified products were captured on magnetic beads that had been derivatized with DNA oligo Rev2, which is complementary to the 3′ end of the polymerase (SI Appendix, Methods). The bead-bound polymerase was reverse transcribed in situ. Then in a concerted reaction using both AvaII restriction enzyme and T4 DNA ligase, the 5′ substrate for the class I ligase (S1) was installed at the 3′ end of the polymerase cDNA. The 3′ substrate (S2), which was 3′-biotinylated, was added to the solution and the bead-bound ligase ribozymes were challenged to join the two substrates in the presence of 60 mM MgCl2, 200 mM KCl, 0.6 mM EDTA, and 50 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.3) at 25 °C in 30 min.

The ligated products and corresponding polymerase cDNAs were cleaved off the beads using EcoRV (SI Appendix, Methods). The released molecules were captured on streptavidin magnetic beads, washed three times with NaOH buffer and twice with urea buffer, eluted in formamide buffer [95% formamide, 100 nM EDTA, and 1 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0)] by heating at 95 °C for 5 min, then ethanol precipitated. The cDNAs were reverse transcribed using primer Fwd2, which is specific for substrate S2, then PCR amplified using primers Rev1 and Fwd3, the latter of which is specific for the ligation junction between S1 and S2. Nested PCR with primers Fwd4 and Rev1 provided materials to begin the next round of evolution. New mutations were introduced by error-prone PCR (31) after rounds 53 through 58, 60, 61, 63, and 67 through 70."

Notice the use of the passive voice throughout this passage. The use of the passive voice helps achieve a covering-up the manual purposeful interventions that are occurring everywhere throughout these long lab labors. So, for example, we have a line saying "the beads were washed twice with urea buffer [8 M urea, 1 mM EDTA, and 10 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.0)], and the polymerase-primer conjugates were eluted from the RNA template" instead of a line saying something like this: "Scientist John Smith washed the bead with urea buffer and he then eluted  the polymerase-primer conjugates from the RNA template, because this was part of his design plan to achieve the desired results."

Efforts such as those described in this paper do not do anything at all to rebut the weighty assertions of Orson Wedgwood.  Long lab labors by scientists purposefully trying to achieve some end result by using the finest gizmos and hi-tech gadgets of modern chemists do not do anything to show what unguided natural evolution or unguided chemical combinations might have produced eons ago.  

Wedgwood's insight about the genetic code stands unscathed. Human beings have never witnessed any such thing as the natural and unguided origination of some novel system of representation, something as complex as the Morse Code or the genetic code. It seems  valid to argue that a complex new system of representation can only arise though the work of one or more intelligent agents, never through unguided natural processes.