This is my first post here, though I've been regularly reading freerepublic.com for a while now. I'm pretty liberal in general, and I recognize that this is meant to be a conservative forum, so I won't post often, but I wanted very badly to say something about this.
The Theory of Evolution, as I understand it (as a scientist) does not claim any understanding of the origin of life. This is something that I think gets conflated a lot. Theories on the origin of life are, for the most part, not scientifically interesting, because they make no predictions, and so are not testable. They are the realm of philosophy, religion, whatever, but not science.
Evolution, on the other hand, deals only with the process of mutation and subsequent natural selection. Purely speaking, the mutations don't even have to be genetic, though genetics is pretty solid so we usually assume that this is in fact the source of the mutations. What makes Evolution a valid scientific theory is that it makes predictions, and those predictions have in fact been verified in the fossil record. Hence it is taught in science classes, as it should be.
Origin of life theories, however, should never see the inside of a science classroom, because without predictive capability, they're not science. I haven't read the Behe paper referenced in the article regarding an argument that there is a complexity that genetic mutation cannot overcome. I am interested to read it. If that turns out to be true, it will disprove several origin of life theories (primordial soup excited by an electric charge is a common one), but it will not affect the theory of Evolution at all.
That's all I wanted to say, and I will try not to invade the posts here with my liberal opinions, nor hide them, but post when I feel something should be said that is independent of the liberal/conservative divide. I hope that this is an acceptable position.
-joe
Joe,
Welcome to FreeRepublic!
"I hope that this is an acceptable position."
Welcome aboard, welcome to FR.
I think you make a very good point about evolution/origin of life. It will no doubt be lost in the donnybrook here, but, such is life!
Hang around, great people here, don't judge it all by this contentious thread!