Do some people *actually* take this superstitious crap seriously?

Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea
By Carl Zimmer
Copyright 2001
(Part of the "Evolution Project", a coproduction of WGBH/NOVA Science
Unit and Clear Sky Productions.)

Pages 104 and 105
"In Search of Life's Origins"

Do some people *actually* take this superstitious crap seriously?

Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea
By Carl Zimmer
Copyright 2001
(Part of the "Evolution Project", a coproduction of WGBH/NOVA Science
Unit and Clear Sky Productions.)

Pages 104 and 105
"In Search of Life's Origins"

Even if the tree shown on page 102 doesn't reach back to life's
beginnings, it can help scientists who are trying to reconstruct that
first great biological transformation: from nonlife to life. Along
with the geological record, it can offer clues and constraints. Any
explanation of how life began has to account for the evidence that has
been left behind.

Although scientists are a long way from knowing the precise history of
life's early evolution, they can study it in the same way they study
later transitions. As we'll see in chapter 6, new groups of animals
didn't emerge in one giant leap; rather, pieces of their new body plan
were added on step by step until the forms we see in living animals
took shape. Scientists have found compelling evidence that life could
have into a DNA-based microbe in a series of steps as well.

The first step in the rise of life was to gather its raw materials
together. Many of them *could have* come from space. Astronomers have
discovered a number of basic ingredients of life on meteorites, comets
and interplanetary dust. As these objects fell to the early Earth,
they *could have* seeded the planet with components for crucial parts
of the cell, such as the phosphate backbone of DNA, its
information-bearing bases, and amino acids for making proteins.

As these compounds reacted with one another, they *may have* produced
more lifelike forms. Chemical reactions work best when the molecules
involved are crowded together so they bump into one another more often;
on the early Earth, the precursors to biological matter *might have*
been concentrated in raindrops or the spray of ocean waves. Some
scientists *suspect* that life began at the midocean ridges where hot
magma emerges from the mantle. The branches nearest the base of the
tree of life, they point out, belong to bacteria and archaea that live
in extreme conditions such as boiling waters or acids. They *may be*
relics of the earliest ecosystems on the planet.

Scientists *suspect* that prebiological molecules became organized into
cycles of chemical reactions that could sustain themselves
independently. A group of molecules would fashion more copies of
itself by grabbing other molecules that surrounded it. There *may
have* been many separate chemical cycles at work on early Earth. *If
they* used the same building blocks to complete their cycles, they
would have competed with one another. The most efficient cycle would
have outstripped the less efficient ones. Before biological evolution,
in other words, there was chemical evolution.

Ultimately, these molecules gave rise to DNA, RNA and proteins.
Scientists have debated for decades which of the three emerged first....