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The notion is a radical one. And yet it has been proposed by serious scientists in recent years— that life on Earth was delivered, some say "seeded," by extraterrestrials in the distant past! Since the dawn of written history the question of life's origin has been the foremost issue debated by the world's philosophers, scientists and theologians. In 1859 when Charles Darwin wrote his book The Origin of Species, he attempted to answer this question when he proposed that life on Earth arose in "some warm little pond" from the random combining of non-living, inorganic chemicals. This notion, called "spontaneous generation," proposes that life arose when simple molecules combined by chance into more complex molecules and those molecules subsequently combined to form the subsystems of living cells. Ultimately these subsystems came together to form self-reproducing single-celled organisms. In turn, according to Darwin's theory, these single-celled organisms evolved by natural selection into all the life forms on Earth. By the early 20th century, spontaneous generation had become the predominant view of the origin of life in scientific circles. During the time of Darwin, the living cell was viewed as a mere blob of amorphous, unorganized protoplasm. Consequently the proposal that "simple cells" arose by chance seemed reasonable to the adherents of Darwinism. However, in the last half of the 20th century, astonishing discoveries regarding the molecular structure and function of living systems have brought the materialistic, random-chance origin of life scenario into serious question. In the field of molecular biology, discovery after discovery has revealed that living systems contain structures which conform in every way to the modern definition of a machine. In fact, the parallel between machines and living systems has now been shown to extend all the way to the 1 14 1 molecular level. In 1986, molecular biologist and evolutionist Michael Denton commented on the remarkable complexity of living cells: "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world."""! In 1996, biochemist Michael Behe described the current predicament of Darwinism to explain the origin of complex of living systems: "It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed. Vision, motion, and other biological functions have proven to be no less sophisticated than television cameras and automobiles. Science has made enormous 76 DARWIN'S BLACK BOX progress in understanding how the chemistry of life works, but the