The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets. (emphasis mine)
Seems to me they've already concluded how life began.
Whatever this endeaver is, it certainly isn't science.
That's Harvard science for you. I hope the school has other areas of study in which they are competent. The school has a good name.
What would you rather them say? That they are researching how God Lego'd the Earth together in a couple days and plopped a couple humans down on it?
I picked this out of the article as well. If this is an accurate quotation of what those proposing this project have said, it is not science.
But, ten years from now ( when some of the funding seekers figure memories have gotten dim ), they will point to the experiments as validation of the premise.
And, if if this topic is considered as 'central to the debate over the theory of evolution' by scientists launching this project, then it puts the lie to the claim by evolution folks that evolution does not address the origins of life.
This is one of the few threads I probably will read, if only to shake my head at the gyrations gone through by the stone chuckers that are drawn like flies to crevo threads, despite that origins of life and origins of species ( as even claimed on this forum ) are supposedly separate issues.