Letters to the Editors

based headquarters of Young-Earth Creationists, has made another attack on science, this time prompted by articles that appeared in Elements. In an essay entitled " Irrational Naturalism, " ICR founder Henry Morris attempts to discredit five authors who contributed to Elements #3, a special issue on the geochemical origins of life (Morris 2005). Employing an often-used Creationist approach, Morris revels in the admission by each author that scientists don't yet know all the details of life's origin. George Cody says, " At present there is no complete theory for the origin of life " (Cody 2005). Joseph V. Smith concurs: " The chemical steps that led to life on Earth remain a matter of speculation " (Smith 2005). Graham Cairns-Smith notes that " It is humbling to think about [the chemical complexity of] bacteria " (Cairns-Smith 2005), while James Ferris notes the interdependence of DNA and proteins and wonders, " Which came first? " (Ferris 2005). And I provided Morris with what is probably the juiciest sound bite of all: " Scientists are still far from understanding the ancient, intricate processes that led to the origin of life " (Hazen 2005a). Morris's illogical, but oft-repeated, conclusion is that science has failed and that naturalistic explanations of life's origin are therefore bankrupt, both intellectually and spiritually. He calls our efforts " irrational " and " shameful. " Citing select Biblical quotations, Morris concludes that " Only the living God can create life! " For anyone familiar with the ICR critique of science, this is unsurprising rhetoric, but it still comes as a shock when the attack falls so close to home. By selectively excerpting rondo-like admissions that we scientists don't know it all, Morris tells a truth, but not the whole truth. Even a casual reading of the articles in Elements, or better yet a more conscientious study of the hundreds of research papers that underlie those brief reviews, reveals that origins research is a vibrant, youthful field. We have a clear outline of life's origin as a sequence of emergent events—the successive emergence of biomolecules, of macromole-cules, of self-replicating systems of molecules, and ultimately of molecular natural selection. We now understand how each of these steps adds a degree of complexity to the prebiologi-cal system. We have numerous specific examples of these chemical processes, and more details are filled in every week (Hazen 2005b). Thus, at root, Morris has resorted …