Time's Up

In 2006 biologist Robert Shapiro boldly predicted that we would understand how life originated in five years:

Some dedicated effort will be needed in the laboratory to prove this point. Why have I specified five years for this discovery? The unproductive polymer-based paradigm is far from dead, and continues to consume the efforts of the majority of workers in the field. A few years will be needed to entice some of them to explore the other solution. I estimate that several years more (the time for a PhD thesis) might be required to identify a suitable monomer-energy combination, and perform a convincing demonstration.

Well, this is 2011 and we're no closer, as far as I can tell, to explaining the OOL (origin of life) now than we were when Shapiro made his prediction.

Shapiro goes on to say that both scientists and creationists/intelligent design people will be disappointed by this development. Scientists will be disappointed because they are heavily invested in a theory [The RNA World theory] that Shapiro thinks is unfruitful. Creationists and IDers will be disappointed because:

[They] would feel that another pillar of their belief system was under attack. They have understood the flaws in the RNA World theory, and used them to support their supernatural explanation for life's origin. A successful scientific theory in this area would leave one less task for God to accomplish: the origin of life would be a natural (and perhaps frequent) result of the physical laws that govern this universe.

Well, this is simply not the case. Such a discovery as Shapiro prophesied would cause problems for biblical creationists, to be sure, but it would only confirm the basic thesis of intelligent design that life is the product of an intentional act of an intelligent mind.

If intelligent scientists working with advanced technology manage to purposefully manipulate chemicals under laboratory conditions thus producing some sort of replicating proto-cell how does that refute the idea that an intelligent being was behind the origin of the proto-cell?

Anyway, five years have passed and any viable theory of how life originated still lies over the horizon. Time's up.

To access the article this post was based on go here and scroll down.