So, according to this AP story scientists are within a couple of years of producing a living cell from the chemical constituents of life:
Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways-in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."
One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step-creating a cell membrane-is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
Szostak is also optimistic about the next step-getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.
His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
This is a very odd statement. Szostak is saying that blind, random chance is more ingenious than human intelligence. He'd have us believe that unguided, unintelligent accident is a better engineer than human minds.
Anyway, they may be successful in manufacturing a functional cell - who knows - but if so, then the only observed case of life having appeared from non-living precursors will be one in which the development was guided by an intelligent agent. We will then have actual experience of life being produced by intelligent designers, but we will still have had no experience of life being formed by purely unintelligent processes. We will, in other words, have empirical reason to believe that biogenesis can be effected by minds but no empirical reason to believe that it can be effected apart from minds.
What, then, will be the most reasonable inference - that life probably appeared through physical processes alone or that it is at least partly the result of intelligent action?What scientific, as opposed to philosophical, grounds will anyone have for insisting upon a purely physicalist explanation for the origin of life?
RLC
