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elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science's attempt to explain their origins. There has been virtually no attempt to account for the origin of specific, complex biomolecular systems, much less any progress. Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand, or will be sooner or later, but no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature. More importantly, there are compelling reasons—based on the structure of the systems themselves—to think that a Darwinian explanation for the mechanisms of life will forever prove elusive.” The revolution in our understanding of the molecular biology of life began in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. By the 1970s it became clear that Darwin's notion of a "simple cell" was incredibly naive. Indeed, the suggestion that a living cell, "far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world" could arise by chance became, to many, a dubious proposition at best. Ironically, Francis Crick, the man who started the molecular biological revolution by deciphering the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, began another revolution 20 years later with a simple paper in the scientific journal Icarus.'* The unparalleled complexity of living systems coupled with our knowledge of the conditions on the early Earth, had relegated the notion of spontaneous generation to the realm of the miraculous. By 1982 Crick admitted as much when he stated: "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." However, Crick was a scientific materialist, committed to the non-miraculous origin of life. If confronted with the personal realization that the spontaneous (non-miraculous) origin of life was impossible, most of us would resort to the theory of intelligent design— that life was the purposeful contrivance of an incredibly intelligent, technologically advanced designer. This is exactly what Crick did, but with an unexpected twist. Life on Earth, Crick argued, had been delivered, or "seeded," by highly advanced extraterrestrial beings billions of years ago! In effect, proponents of this theory believe we are somebody's biology experiment. In the 1970s, another prominent scientist, astronomer Sir Fredrick Hoyle, was also doing research on the probability of spontaneous generation. Using a super computer and the assistance of graduate students, Hoyle determined that the spontaneous generation of just the simplest bacterium was mathematically impossible, not to mention the generation of an entire human being. After completing his research, Hoyle stated that the probability of the spontaneous generation of a single bacteria "is about the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard could assemble a 747 from the contents therein."'* 77