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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Straw-manning Abiogenesis

Creationists so often talk about how the origin of life is "so improbable" that it couldn't happen, and conclude that there must have been a creator. The will cite numbers like 1 chance in 2.04 x 10390 to form the simplest life forms by "random chance". They make several errors in their so called 'refutations' of abiogenesis, some of them probably intentionally. Essentially, they grossly misrepresent Abiogenesis theory, I'll show you a diagram from Talk Origins to explain the difference between the creationist straw-man and actual abiogenesis theory.

This simplified diagram is missing several small steps between the hypercycle and protobiont stages too. A common analogy that creationists use is that "A tornado ripping through a scrap-metal yard couldn't possibly produce a 747". As you can see from this diagram, this is an obscene oversimplification of the theory, and only goes to show that they do not understand anything about science, or that they are too dishonest to find out what science actually teaches.

For more information on this topic read the article on Talk Origins.

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