[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Or I could hold a debate about the truth of Islam with the Ayatollah Khamenei, the winner to be decided by an impartial jury of Iranian clerics.

Er, I suggest you look at the judging link. They are using the 70% rule, tiered and the list of judges is quite impressive.

[Right Wing Professor]

They have an impressive list of judges, true; but they do not guarantee the selection of judges will be random, and there are enough anti-evolutionists on there to make sure you can always block an award, particularly when you go through 5 separate screenings, with 4 judges at any stage being enough to block the award.

The prize is obviously a scam. Their very 'discussion' is not a balanced survey of the literature, but rather a account of Yockey's very conbtroversial ideas. As I've written already, Yockey's contention that the Shannon entropy of a sequence has nothing to do with thermodynamic entropy is simply wrong; it's a portion of the thermodynamic entropy.

Creationists have cleverly adopted the scam of setting up a debate or prize with supposedly fair ground rules, challenging evolutionists; it's when you get into the details you discover the scam. I myself accepted a challenge, right here on FR, to debate some creationist sports-medicine type, with the only proviso that the debate be for $1 rather than the $10,000 he wanted. He refused. What am I to conclude from that?

Abiogenesis research is at a very early, exploratory stage. Most of the research at the moment focusses on exploring possibilities for the most primitive biological processes. Expecting a well-developed theory for the evolution of RNA at the moment is premature.