Natural Science Forum / Biology / Microbiology / November 2004

HI Griffith

Your amazment is a experience I think most biologists have atleast once in
their existence.

Reality, the living world , its origions and mechanisms of creation are
awsome  targets for thought.

HAve you read  Philip Dawkins "The blind watchmaker", I think you would find
it interesting

At the risk of bandwith I  include a couple of quotes from that work ;

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were
asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for
anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it
perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had
found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch
happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had
before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been
there."

"We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully
'designed' to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come
into existence? The answer, Darwin's answer, is by gradual, step- by-step
transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities
sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive
change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to
its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of
cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you
consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original
starting point. The cumulative process is directed by nonrandom survival."

Bets N10