SCIENTISTS HAIL the creation of artifical life, drawing attention to intelligence and creativity. This development is missing the spontaneity of Darwinian processes.

Mary writes:

My intuition says that this “breakthrough” is going to be like embryonic stem cell research: Make fantastic promises to get funding, only to have every experiment mutate. Make the promises even louder and bury the data. There’s at least one outrageous hope in this article already: creating cells to absorb CO2. Literally, reinventing the chloroplast.

Laura writes:

“I think they’re going to potentially create a new industrial revolution,”  [Venter] said.

“If we can really get cells to do the production that we want, they could help wean us off oil and reverse some of the damage to the environment by capturing carbon dioxide.”

Wow. Who would deny him funding?

Lawrence Auster writes:

Although real science continues to be done, the public statements of today’s scientists and science journalists about the latest “revolutionary discovery” which “has changed everything we know” (every week there’s a new revolutionary discovery which changes everything we know) cannot be trusted, because the statements are driven by liberal ideology, careerism, and the search for funding. The outrageous orchestrated hype exactly one year ago over “Ida,” the 47 million year old primate fossil, which its Norwegian discoverer and legions of cooperative journalists touted as the “missing link” (the missing link between what and what?) that “proved” the Darwinian evolution of man (see this and this), was an extreme example, yet typical of what’s going on all the time.

Shannon writes:

“If we can really get cells to do the production that we want, they could help wean us off oil and reverse some of the damage to the environment by capturing carbon dioxide.”

Don’t plants and trees already do that? Maybe when he’s done he can come up with some way for water to come from the sky so we don’t have to use garden hoses to water those miraculous plants anymore.

Lawrence writes: 

When I originally read Venter’s quote about artificially created bacteria that will capture carbon dioxide and thus help combat the greenhouse effect, I missed the absurdity of the remark. Thanks to Shannon for catching it.

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