Creating Life From Scratch?

From AP's Seth Borenstein, Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years.

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch
and they're getting closer.

Actually "creating" from what is already existing.

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

Would it really? It would seem to highlight the need for a creator.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

Why not let random processes create life without intelligent interaction?

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

Is blind, mindless darwinism better at design? I want to let it design a car for me. It should be easier since it is not a living organism.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

Yet, under darwinian evolution, this is what supposedly happened. It brought a wide variety of life that was able to reproduce and eventually take over the planet and produce reading material such as this one.