Dear Editor,
The letter
”
Do the Mathematics and It’s a Clear Victory for Intelligent
Design
”
demonstrates exactly how crackpot science works: make a false
assumption, wave your hands and utter some mathematical looking
mumbo-jumbo and arrive at the conclusion you like.
Dear Editor,
The letter “Do the Mathematics and It’s a Clear Victory for Intelligent Design” demonstrates exactly how crackpot science works: make a false assumption, wave your hands and utter some mathematical looking mumbo-jumbo and arrive at the conclusion you like. And don’t forget to pretend to be a scientist because that makes you feel just as good as any 5 year old feels by pretending he’s an astronaut.
The false assumption is that early life looked exactly like modern life and that there is a minimum size for life forms. Says who? NASA? Yeah, right. Can we have a properly cited scientific paper on that subject with an exact explanation how one can calculate the minimum size for self-replicating molecules from first principles?
Truth behold, one can’t. The numbers given are estimates without any scientific value. They just play nicely into the statistical argument. Had they be chosen differently, the same argument would have given an almost unity chance for life within a few million years of the existence of a suitable chemical environment. The only fact is that life is here. So the only LOGICAL explanation is that life indeed did not spring out of nowhere being a 400 amino-acid size elephant. It might have been only 25 amino acids or it might have been no amino acids at all but something we don’t know, yet. And neither does the writer. The letter is just an attempt to cover intellectual ignorance with a fig-leaf of pseudo-science.
If someone needs a non-scientific, philosophical or religious explanation for life, why not say so and admit that science does not do it for them? That’s what religions are for and they work perfectly fine to soothe the mind. To admit that one can’t believe in science for religious or philosophical reasons would be an honest statement. But putting out pseudo-scientific nonsense is, at best, a lie to oneself about one’s own intellectual failure to comprehend. Wanting to teach this in public schools is a crime on children’s minds. But maybe the reader is so taken in by this intellectual spiel that truth does not matter? And may I say that I find this plain appalling?
Jozsef Ludvig
