The ID Report

Michael Ruse - Victim of Self Deception
by Kevin Wirth

As an observer of the debate on origins, one of the most disconcerting things I see are statements that are poorly made by those who are educated and informed, and who should know better. In this report, I'd like to take Michael Ruse to task for being overly effusive to the point of overkill on matters he should know better about. Not everything Michael says is overdone, but in this case, one of his arguments simply ignores the obvious.

In his book, 'Taking Darwin Seriously' (1998), here is what Michael says at one point:

"To the working scientist, and not just the biologist, it is simply ludicrous to think that there is any question about the natural origin of organisms from forms very different than those they now bear - ultimately from inorganic materials. This is as much a fact of nature as that the earth goes around the sun or that water is composed of oxygen or hydrogen. But it is certainly not a fact to many non-scientists, especially not to those influenced by North American evangelical Christianity."

Ruse, Michael in "Darwin's New Critics on Trial" in Taking Darwin Seriously. Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY (1998), p.280.

This 'fact of nature' that Ruse alludes to refers to the concept that life arose from inorganic materials. Oh – and note that many ‘non-scientists’, especially those ‘influenced by North American evangelical Christianity’ are especially beguiled and deceived.

Well, since ‘Taking Darwin Seriously’ was first published almost 10 years ago now, I hope I’m not too late to use Mr. Ruse’s commentary as a talking point, especially since those who share his viewpoint continue to harp on about how ill-informed most Darwin skeptics are concerning the ‘fact’ about the ‘natural origin of organisms’ from ‘inorganic materials’.

Maybe it would help Mr. Ruse and his cohorts if they took a closer look at how many in the scientific community and elsewhere have gone on record on this topic with cautionary remarks. To assist Ruse and others, I have provided a number of quotes that they can take issue with, should they choose to.

"The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers ... [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn't happen by chance."

Yockey, Hubert P. in Information Theory and Molecular Biology. Cambridge University Press, (1992), p.257.

"The 'warm little pond' scenario was invented ad hoc to serve as a materialistic reductionist explanation of the origin of life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will remain ad hoc until such evidence is found... One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written."

Yockey, Hubert P.. A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory in Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1977, 377-398, p. 396.

"A natural and fundamental question to ask on learning of these incredibly interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: 'How did they ever get started in the first place?' It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the devleopment of new computer languages - but a bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond one's power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. They all run aground on this most central of all central questions: 'How did the Genetic Code, along with all the mechanisms for its translation (ribosomes and RNA molecules), originate?' For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer."

Hofstadter, Douglas R. in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Goldern Braid. Vintage, New York, NY (1980), p.548.

"it appears unlikely that a self-replicating ribozyme [an RNA molecule having some enzyme activity] could arise, but without some form of self-replication there is no way to conduct an evolutionary search for the first, primitive self-replicating ribozyme"

Joyce, G.F. in Prospects for Understanding the Origin of the RNA World, Gesteland and Atkins, ed. Cold Spring Harbor Press, New York, NY (1993), p.19.

"The origin of the [genetic] code is perhaps the most perplexing problem in evolutionary biology. The existing translational machinery is at the same time so complex, so universal) and so essential that it is hard to see how it could have come into existences or how life could have existed without it. The discovery of ribozymes has made it easier to imagine an answer to the second of these questions, but the transformation of an 'RNA world' into one in which catalysis is performed by proteins, and nucleic acids specialize in the transmission of information, remains a formidable problem"

Smith, John Maynard and Szathmary, Eors in The Major Transitions in Evolution. W.H. Freeman and Co., Oxford, (1995), p.81.

"The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life, emerged may not be revealed in the near future"

Orgel, Leslie. 1994. The Origin of Life on the Earth in Scientific American, 271(0):, 77-83, October.

"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier even than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve.... Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation"

Haskins, Caryl P.. 1971. Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970 in American Scientist, 59(0):, May.

"When speaking here of Darwinism, I shall speak always of today's theory that is Darwin's own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes in a gene pool, and by the decoded genetic code. This is an immensely impressive and powerful theory. The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established."

Popper, Karl. 1978. Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind in Dialectica, 32(3):, 339-355, .

"In fact, the probability of the formation of a protein and a nucleic acid (DNA-RNA) is a probability way beyond estimate. Furthermore, the chance of the emergence of a certain protein chain is so slight as to be called astronomic"

Demirsoy, Ali and Kalitim ve Evrim in Inheritance and Evolution. Meteksan Publishing Co., (1984), p.39.

"What gambler would be crazy enough to play roulette with random evolution? The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Durer's 'Melancholia' is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it."

Grasse, Pierre in "Chapter IV: Evolution and Chance" in Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation. Academic Press, New York, NY (1977), 2nd edition, p.104.

"Any living being possesses an enormous amount of "intelligence," very much more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this "intelligence" is called "information," but it is still the same thing. It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of any other organelle in each cell. This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it."

Grasse, Pierre in "An Introduction to the Study of Evolution" in Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation. Academic Press, New York, NY (1977), 2nd edition, p.2.

"The origin of life on the surface of the Earth is a unique historical event whose character cannot be established by experiments in contemporary laboratories ... Many scientists have taken this position on the origin of life. Jacques Monod, the distinguished French molecular biologist, said as much in 1970 in his elegant book Chance and Necessity. There is no way, he argued, that an event as improbable as the emergence of life on Earth could be analyzed by science, which is able to deal only `with events that form a class. ... A decade later, Francis H.C. Crick, co-originator of the structure of DNA, put the argument more specifically: the chances that the long polymer molecules that vitally sustain all living things, both proteins and DNA, could have been assembled by random processes from the chemical units of which they are made are so small as to be negligible, prompting the question whether the surface of the Earth was fertilized from elsewhere, perhaps from interstellar space. `Panspermia' is the name for that"

Maddox, J. in What Remains to be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race. Touchstone, New York, NY (1999), Reprint, p.131.

"The late biologist Gerald Soffen, who oversaw the life-seeking experiments carried out by NASA's Viking probes to Mars, once outlined the early milestones in the evolution of living processes: development of organic compounds, self-replication of those compounds, appearance of cells isolating the compounds from their environment, photosynthesis enabling cells to use the sun's energy, and the assembly of DNA. ‘It's hard to imagine how these things could have happened," Soffen told me before his death in 2000. "Once you reach the point of a single-cell organism with genes, evolution takes command. But the early leaps — they're very mysterious.’ "

Easterbrook, Greg. The New Convergence in Wired Magazine, December 2002.

"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier even than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve... The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery... Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation."

Haskins, Caryl P.. Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970 in American Scientist, May 1971, 298-307, p. 305.

"The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going"

Horgan, John. In the Beginning in Scientific American, February 1991, -, p. 125.

"It was already clear that the genetic code is not merely an abstraction but the embodiment of life's mechanisms; the consecutive triplets of nucleotides in DNA (called codons) are inherited, but they also guide the construction of proteins... so it is disappointing that the origin of the genetic code is still as obscure as the origin of life itself."

"It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means."

Orgel, Leslie E.. The Origin of Life on the Earth in Scientific American, October 1994, 77-83

"Now we know that the cell itself is far more complex than we had imagined. It includes thousands of functioning enzymes, each one of them a complex machine itself. Furthermore, each enzyme comes into being in response to a gene, a strand of DNA. The information content of the gene (its complexity) must be as great as that of the enzymes it controls."

Salisbury, Frank B.. Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution in American Biology Teacher, September 1971

"Take some matter, heat while stirring and wait. That is the modern version of Genesis. The 'fundamental' forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are presumed to have done the rest... But how much of this neat tale is firmly established, and how much remains hopeful speculaion? In truth, the mechanism of almost every major step, from chemical precursors up to the first recognizable cells, is the subject of either controversy or complete bewilderment."

Scott, A.. Update on Genesis in New Scientist, 1985, 30-33, p. 30.

"And then what of the ' primitive soup' required for Chemical Evolution? If such an environment ever existed on Planet Earth for any appreciable time, it would require relatively large quantities of nitrogen-containing organic compounds (amino-acids, nucleic acid bases and so on). It is likely that such nitrogen-rich soups would have given significant quantities of ' nitrogenous cokes', trapped in various PreCambrian sediments. (The formation of such 'cokes' is the normal result obtained by heating organic matter rich in nitrogenous substances.) No such nitrogen-rich materials have yet been found in early PreCambrian rocks on this planet. In fact the opposite seems to be true: the nitrogen content of early PreCambrian organic matter is relatively low (less than 0.15%). From this we can be reasonably certain that: * there never was any substantial amount of 'primitive soup' on Earthwhen ancient PreCambrian sediments were formed; * if such a 'soup' ever existed it was only for a brief period of time. Subtract from the basic concept of the Chemical Evolution Theory the ideas of substantial amounts of 'primitive soup' and a long period of time, and there is very little left"

Brooks, J. in Origins of life. Hertfordshire, (1985), p.118.

"It is true that some of the simpler amino acids have been found in complex mixtures generated under conditions simulating those that might have been present on the primitive Earth. Even nucleotide letters have been found in mixtures that are said to be plausible simulations of probiotic products. But all such 'molecules of life' are always minority products and usually no more than trace products. Their detection often owes more to the skill of the experimenter than to any powerful tendency for the 'molecules of life' to form"

Cairns-Smith, A.G. in Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1993), Reprint, p.44.

"Sugars are particularly trying. While it is true that they form from formaldehyde solutions, these solutions have to be far more concentrated than would have been likely in primordial oceans. And the reaction is quite spoilt in practice by just about every possible sugar being made at the same time - and much else besides. Furthermore the conditions that form sugars also go on to destroy them. Sugars quickly make their own special kind of tar - caramel - and they make still more complicated mixtures if amino acids are around."

Cairns-Smith, A.G. in Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1993), Reprint, p.44.

"Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There are two reasons for their unease. First they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalism...Second, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding"

Davies, Paul C.W. in The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. (0), p..

"Some scientists say, just throw energy at it and it will happen spontaneously. That is a little bit like saying: put a stick of dynamite under the pile of bricks, and bang, you've got a house! Of course you won't have a house, you'll just have a mess. The difficulty in trying to explain the origin of life is in accounting for how the elaborate organisational structure of these complex molecules came into existence spontaneously from a random input of energy. How did these very specific complex molecules assemble themselves"

Davies, Paul C.W. and Adams, Philip in More Big Questions. ABC Books, Sydney, (1998), p.53-54, 47-48.

"The great diversity of these opinions reflects their largely subjective nature. Individual viewpoints often reveal idealogical, philosophical, or religious biases more than they express objective appraisals, for the simple reason that not enough elements are available for objective analysis"

De Duve, Christian. in Blueprint for a Cell: The Nature and Origin of Life. Neil Patterson Publishers, (1991), p.212.

"In fact, the probability of the formation of a protein and a nucleic acid (DNA-RNA) is a probability way beyond estimate. Furthermore, the chance of the emergence of a certain protein chain is so slight as to be called astronomic"

Demirsoy, Ali and Kalitim ve Evrim in Inheritance and Evolution. Meteksan Publishing Co., (1984), p.39.

"To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts"

Grasse, Pierre in Evolution of Living Organisms Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation. Academic Press, New York, NY (1977), 2nd edition.

"If I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution-which is so well supported by the fossil record-and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer's dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion"

Horgan, John in The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scien. Little Brown & Co, London, (1997), p.138.

"Essentially, the same amino acid chain being found also in other animals and even in plants, we have a case in histone-4 where more than 200 base pairs are conserved across the whole of biology. The problem for the neo-Darwinian theory is to explain how the one particular arrangement of base pairs came to be discovered in the first place. Evidently not by random processes, for with a chance 1/4 of choosing each of the correct base pairs at random, the probability of discovering a segment of 200 specific base pairs is 4-200, which is equal to 10-120. Even if one were given a random choice for every atom in every galaxy in the whole visible universe the probability of discovering histone-4 would still only be a minuscule ~10-40"

Hoyle, Fred in Mathematics of Evolution. Acorn Enterprises, Memphis, TN (1999), p.102-103.

"Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the power of 40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court"

Hoyle, Fred and Chandra Wickramasinghe in Evolution from Space. A Theory Of Cosmic Creationism. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY (1984), 2nd edition

"Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate. ... It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect in a valid way the higher intelligences to our left, even to the extreme idealized limit of God."

Hoyle, Fred and Chandra Wickramasinghe in "Chapter Nine: Convergence to God" in Evolution from Space: A Theory Of Cosmic Creationism. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY (1984), 2nd edition, p.141, 144.

"Geological and geophysical evidence is insufficient to allow us to state with any precision what conditions were like on the surface of the primitive earth. Arguments concerning the composition of the primitive atmosphere are particularly controversial. It is important, therefore, to state our own prejudice clearly. We believe that there must have been a period when the earth's atmosphere was reducing, because the synthesis of compounds of biological interest takes place only under reducing conditions"

Miller, Stanley L. in The Origins of Life on the Earth. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (1974), p.33.

"However, it is now held to be highly unlikely that the conditions used in these experiments [i.e., the modeling of strongly reducing atmospheres] could represent those in the Archean atmosphere. Even so, scientific articles still occasionally appear that report experiments modeled on these conditions and explicitly or tacitly claim the presence of resulting products in reactive concentrations "on the primordial Earth" or in a "prebiotic soup". The idea of such a "soup" containing all desired organic molecules in concentrated form in the ocean has been a misleading concept against which objections were raised early (see, e.g., Sillen 1965). Nonetheless, it still appears in popular presentations perhaps partly because of its gustatory associations"

Mojzsis, Krishnamurthy, Arrhenius in "Chapter 1 of the RNA World" in Before RNA and After: Geophysical and Geochemical Constraints on Molecular Evolution. Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, (1999), 2nd edition, p.6.

"Oparin believed that the organic molecules from which life originated collected as a “soup” in surface waters...However, a basic problem is that a high concentration of complex organic molecules would be required. This violates the second law of thermodynamics, which basically tells us (in this context) that it would be more energetically favorable for such a mixture of organic compounds to disintegrate into simple parts than to collect into a multitude of complex, organized molecules"

Murck, B.W. and Skinner B.J. in Geology Today: Understanding our Planet. John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY (1999), p.442.

"The origin of the [genetic] code is perhaps the most perplexing problem in evolutionary biology. The existing translational machinery is at the same time so complex, so universal) and so essential that it is hard to see how it could have come into existences or how life could have existed without it. The discovery of ribozymes has made it easier to imagine an answer to the second of these questions, but the transformation of an 'RNA world' into one in which catalysis is performed by proteins, and nucleic acids specialize in the transmission of information, remains a formidable problem"

Smith, John Maynard and Szathmary, Eors in The Major Transitions in Evolution. W.H. Freeman and Co., Oxford, (1995), p.81.

"The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models; hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts. The complex genetic apparatus in present-day organisms is so universal that one has few clues as to what the apparatus may have looked like in its most primitive form."

Dickerson, Richard E.. Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life in Scientific American, September 1978, p. 77.

"Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in modern cells came into existence"

Dose, Klaus. The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 1988, p. 348.

"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier even than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve... The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery... Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation."

Haskins, Caryl P.. Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970 in American Scientist, May 1971, 298-307, p. 305.

"A spaceship approaches the Earth, but not close enough for its imaginary inhabitants to distinguish individual terrestrial animals. They see growing crops, roads, bridges, and a debate ensues. Are these chance formations or are they the products of an intelligence?' It is not at all difficult to formulate examples of events with exceedingly low probabilities. A roulette wheel operates in a casino. A bystander notes the sequence of numbers thrown by the wheel over the course of a whole year. What is the chance that this particular sequence should have turned up ? Well, not as small as 1 in 10^40000, but extremely small nonetheless. So there is nothing especially remarkable in a tiny probability. Yet it surely would be exceedingly remarkable if the sequence thrown by the roulette wheel in the course of a year should have an explicit mathematical significance, as for instance if the numbers turned out to form the digits of pi to an enormous number of decimal places. This is just the situation with a living cell which is not any old random jumble of chemicals"

Hoyle, Fred. The Universe: Past and Present Reflections in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1982, 1-35, p. 15.

"If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces and radiation, how has it come into being? ... I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it"

Lipson, H.. A Physicist Looks at Evolution" in Physics Bulletin, 1980, -, p. 138.

"Unfortunately, catalytic reactions of the required type in aqueous solution are virtually unknown; there is no reason to believe, for example, that any intermediate of the citric acid cycle would specifically catalyze any reaction of the citric acid cycle. The explanation of this is simple: noncovalent interactions between small molecules in aqueous solution are generally too weak to permit large and regiospecific catalytic accelerations [of the type required by living systems]. To postulate one fortuitously catalyzed reaction, perhaps catalyzed by a metal ion, might be reasonable, but to postulate a suite of them is to appeal to magic."

Orgel, Leslie E.. Self-organizing biochemical cycles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2000, 12503-12507

Finally, I would throw in this reminder.

"Expectancy leads to self-deception, and self-deception leads to the propensity to be deceived by others...Indeed, professional magicians claim that scientists, because of their confidence in their own objectivity, are easier to deceive than other people."

Broad, William and Nicholas Wade in Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. Touchstone, New York, NY (1982), p.108 ff.

And so… this brings me to an issue that Ruse himself and others are well aware of: the point about self-deception.

First, the reader will note that many of the quotes I've presented are spread across recent decades, and many are not current within the past few years. I rest confidently in the knowledge that nothing has changed in the realm of scientific discovery in the area of origin of life scenarios that would significantly modify the comments presented here. And if anyone would care to challenge this, I welcome it. The point is, there are a plethora of obstacles that must be overcome before Ruse or anyone else can honestly make the claim that we understand how life arose, or that it is an established fact that inorganic materials spontaneously gave rise to organic ones when we currently have no clue how that would be possible.

Second, many critics of IDers and Darwin skeptics lament what they describe as the laborious and often inaccurate use of quotations to support their contentions regarding the errors of Darwinism or Origin of Life arguments. I hope that the sheer weight of quotations offered here from qualified skeptics (which is just scratching the surface) will put any such allegations to rest. The point is, Ruse is wrong when he arrogantly claims that ….

“the natural origin of organisms from forms very different than those they now bear - ultimately from inorganic materials… is as much a fact of nature as that the earth goes around the sun…”

In fact, the idea of the natural origin of organisms remains one of the mostly hotly debated topics within science today. The notion that life spontaneously arose from inorganic beginnings by chance is not only an unproven speculation, but runs contrary to everything science tells us. And, Ruse’s baseless allegations to the contrary are at best merely a posturing of insistence that one would expect of a true-blue Darwinian.

What all the foregoing comments inexorably lead us to is the conclusion that we are still totally in the dark with respect to even imagining how life could have begun (without an Intelligent Designer). I hope Ruse takes his own advice, noted here, to heart:

Descartes hypothesized a demon who deceives us, even about that which we think self-obvious. Could not our theistic belief in a Creator fall prey here? What right have we to think that our belief in a good god who would not let us be deceived about his existence is not caused by an evil spirit who is misleading us?...

Recognizing that our senses can mislead or deceive us about the world, we must distinguish between the real world as we can in some sense discover (common sense reality) and the world in some absolute sense (metaphysical reality)…

Consider this. It is certainly the case that organisms are sometimes deceived about the world of appearances and that this includes humans being deceived. Sometimes we are systematically deceived, as instructors in elementary psychology classes delight in demonstrating. Moreover, evolution can often give good reasons why we are deceived.

Ruse, Michael in "Darwin's New Critics on Trial" in Taking Darwin Seriously. Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY (1998), p.295-296.

Indeed - IDers and Darwin skeptics are not the only ones capable of being deceived. The first step, for anyone with an unfounded addiction to an idea, is to admit the possibility that they might have it all wrong.