Re: Dembski and Nelson at MIT and Tufts

Kevin O'Brien (
Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:18:45 -0600

>How else can we recompense those who would have performed the greatest
>experiment ever?

No one ever won a Nobel Prize for "discovering" that enzymes were catalysts
either, yet this concept is so basic and fundamentally important to
biochemistry that if it were ever proven to be false, the whole of modern
biochemistry would collapse and we would have to start from scratch. There
are many such concepts in science for which no one ever won a Nobel Prize,
because the concept was not proven by a single person or group of persons
doing a single critical experiment, but was proven by a great deal of
research done over a span of time. These concepts are accepted by concensus
based on this research, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded for reaching a

The realization that life has been made in the lab is a concensus based on a
large amount of research that stretches back at least four decades. Yet
even as early as 1970 biochemists like Lehninger had recognized that life in
the form of primitive cells that could metabolize and reproduce, even
evolve, had been made in the lab from simpler chemicals. The modern
concensus is that this is still true.

If you want to learn more, then stop being so stubbornly ignorant and read
the scientific literature.

Kevin L. O'Brien