I found part of this quote (the first clause, above) at the Quote Mine Project. It appears that, as you took this out of context, you were blatantly trying to make Dr. Wald appear to be saying something he really wasn't saying:
I am starting at the top of the center column on page 45.
One answer to the problem of how life originated is that it was created. This is an understandable confusion of nature with terminology. Men are used to making things; it is a ready thought that those things not made by men were made by a superhuman being. Most of the cultures we know contain mythical accounts of a supernatural creation of life. Our own tradition provides such an account in the opening chapters of Genesis. There we are told that beginning on the third day of the Creation, God brought forth living creatures- first plants, then fishes and birds, then land animals and finally man.
Spontaneous Generation
The more rational elements of society, however, tended to take a more naturalistic view of the matter. One had only to accept the evidence of one 's senses to know that life arises regularly from the nonliving: worms from mud, maggots from decaying meat, mice from refuse of various kinds. This is the view that came to be called spontaneous generation. Few scientists doubted it. Aristotle, Newton, William Harvey, Descartes, van Helmont all accepted spontaneous generation without serious inquiry. Indeed, even the theologians- witness the English priest John Turberville Needham- could subscribe to this view, for Genesis tells us, not that God created plants and most animals directly, but that he bade the earth and waters to bring them forth; since this directive was never rescinded, there is nothing heretical in believing that the process has continued.
But step by step, in a great controversy that spread over two centuries, this belief was whittled away until nothing remained of it. First the Italian Francisco Redi shoed in the 17th century that meat placed under a screen, so that flies cannot lay their eggs on it, never develops maggots. Then in the following century the Italian Abbe Lazzaro Spallanzani showed that a nutritive broth, sealed off from the air while boiling, never develops microorganisms, and hence never rots. Spallanzani could defend his broth; when he broke the seal of his flasks, allowing new air to rush in, the broth promptly began to rot. He could find no way, however, to show that the air inside the flask had not been vitiated. This problem was finally solved by Louis Pasteur in 1860, with a simple modification of Spallanzani's experiment. Pasteur too used a flask containing boiling broth, but instead of sealing off the neck he drew it out in a long, S-shaped curve with its end open to the air. While molecules of air could pass back and forth freely, the heavier particles of dust, bacteria, and molds in the atmosphere were trapped on the walls of the curved neck and only rarely reached the broth. In such a flask, the broth seldom was contaminated; usually it remained clear and sterile indefinitely.
This was only one of Pasteur's experiments. It is no easy matter to deal with so deeply ingrained and common-sense a belief as that in spontaneous generation. One can ask for nothing better in such a pass than a noisy and stubborn opponent, and this Pasteur had in the naturalist Felix Pouchet, whose arguments before the French Academy of Sciences drove Pasteur to more and more rigorous experiments.
We tell this story to beginning students in biology as though it represented a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity". It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a hypothesis of spontaneous generation. What the controversy reviewed above showed to be untenable is only the belief that living organisms arise spontaneously under present conditions. We have now to face a somewhat different problem: how organisms may have arisen spontaneously under different conditions in some former period, granted that they do so no longer.
Wald spends quite some time dealing with the issue of the probability of life arising spontaneously. I again quote Dr. Wald (p47):
With every event one can associate a probability - the chance that it will occur. This is always a fraction, the proportion of times an event occurs in a large number of trials. Sometimes the probability is apparent even without trial. A coin has two faces; the probability of tossing a head is therefore 1/2. A die has six faces; the probability of throwing a deuce is 1/6. When one has no means of estimating the probability beforehand, it must be determined by counting the fraction of successes in a large number of trials.
Our everyday concept of what is impossible, possible, or certain derives from our experience; the number of trials that may be encompassed within the space of a human lifetime, or at most within recorded human history. In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous generation of life to be "impossible". It is impossible as we judge events in the scale of human experience.
We shall see that this is not a very meaningful concession. For one thing, the time with which our problem is concerned is geological time, and the whole extent of human history is trivial in the balance. We shall have more to say of this later.
Wald then describes the difference between truly impossible and just very unlikely. His example is a table rising into the air. Any physicist would concede that it is possible, if all the molecules that make up the table act appropriately at the same time. ".but try telling one [a physicist] that you have seen it happen."
Finally, Wald cautions us to remember that our topic falls into a very special category. Spontaneous generation might well be unique in that it only had to happen once. This is the section to which I was referring in my previous post:
The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at lest once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two [sic] billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles.
As I composed this, it came to me that here was a real authority on the spontaneous generation of life: Wald is a Nobel Laureate, his work on photopigments is classic. This is the perfect rebuttal to the Hoyle nonsense about tornadoes.
Finally, I would repeat that any errors herein are mine, except one. Dr. Wald estimated the age of the planet at two billion years. Since 1954 we have more than doubled that figure, based on new information. I can't help but think he is tickled pink at that kind of mistake.
- C. Thompson
It would help immensely if creationists would actually search for the actual source of their quotes instead of lifting them verbatim from some creationist website. The first "Christian" who edited these quotes to fit his agenda was as dishonest as the day is long. The folks who repeat the lies without double checking them are ignorant dupes at best or blatantly dishonest themselves at worst. Either option does not reflect well upon them.
Yes. I saw Gould quoted earlier and thought the same thing.
"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled 'Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax' states: 'The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge...are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible.'" -- Stephen Jay Gould
Good work debunking the bogus George Wald quote.