Prufrock's Lair

2011-12-22T14:08:00.001-05:00

Random Thoughts

2011-12-21T17:08:00.001-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

Those who believe that extending civil rights protections on the basis of sexual behavior contrary to the designs of nature constitutes liberty are thoughtless slogan eaters. Civil rights protections are collectivistic in nature and are exerted against liberty's preeminent concerns of private property and free association. The sanctity of human life and the family of nature—the first principles of private property—are the only legitimate basis on which the government may exert civil rights protections beyond those associated with the franchise.

Legislation that supports parental authority in commerce is not the stuff of a nanny state. Both natural and constitutional law underscore the reality that a society in which minors wield the political rights of adults cannot be free. Minors are not free to buy and sell as they please. This is not merely for their protection. Ultimately, it goes to the concerns of private property and free association associated with parental authority against the usurpations of strangers.

To understand the Founders is to understand the classical liberalism of the Anglo-American tradition predicated on the Lockean political theory of natural law as summarized, for example, in the Declaration of Independence. Every freedom loving person should be steeped in the Two Treatises of Government by John Locke. In today's political parlance, think a synthesis of "Tea Party" conservatism and libertarianism, sans the latter's tendency to recklessly disregard the first principles of private property, i.e., the sanctity of human life and the official approbation of the biological family of nature. This model was extrapolated from the socio-political ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's ethical system of thought. It is the nearest thing to perfect liberty and justice attainable in this world.

The natural law of the Anglo-American tradition presupposes the God of nature. The God of nature, not the State, is the Source and Guarantor of fundamental human rights. Further, it asserts that the sanctity of human life and the security of private property, backed by an armed citizenry, comprise the foundation of all subsequent political rights.

The Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism does not recognize any equivalency between the prospect of the State compelling one to support the life and welfare of another to whom one bears no direct responsibility and the prospect of preserving the life of nature's unborn children. The impositions of the former are outrageous. The impositions of the latter are obligatory. Beyond those rights inherent to the self-evidentiary demands of self-preservation, necessity and virtue, there is no inherent right of abortion for the sake of convenience.

The leftist imagines boogiemen lurking behind every tree, under every rock and around every corner where none exist; he is determined to enslave us all in his futile effort to exorcise them.

Of course, Lefty is a statist bootlick, but the reason he deplores the liberty of free association is because he is terrified of it. He knows that his collectivist claptrap cannot compete in a truly free and open society, so he cheats and steals and lies his way along, using the judiciary, for example, as a means of maintaining a monopolistic stranglehold on the public education system in direct violation of natural and constitutional law. In other words, he's a coward at heart and a fascist by default.

Teachers are not underpaid by taxpayers; taxpayers are underserved by teachers.

7 Reasons Why Liberals Are Incapable of Understanding The World

2011-08-26T14:21:00.000-04:00

by John Hawkins

08/23/2011

Townhall.com

Even liberals who've accomplished a lot in their lives and have high IQs often say things on a regular basis that are stunningly, profoundly stupid and at odds with the way the world works. Modern liberalism has become so bereft of common sense and instinctually suicidal that America can only survive over the long haul by thwarting the liberal agenda. In fact, liberalism has become such a toxic and poisonous philosophy that most liberals wouldn't behave differently if their goal were to deliberately destroy the country. So, how does liberalism cause well-meaning, intelligent liberals to get this way?

Read More

One President Left Behind: McConnell Schools Obama on Debt

2011-07-14T13:16:00.000-04:00

07/13/2011
By Ann Coulter
Townhall.com

Democrats don't want to cut any government spending programs, not now, not ever. The country is on a high-speed bullet train to bankruptcy (the only kind of bullets liberals approve of), and the Democrats' motto is: Spend! Spend! Spend!

Democrats are at an advantage in the "should the U.S. go bankrupt or not?" debate because, based on their economic policies so far, they obviously favor bankruptcy.

This allows them to sit back and demand that Republicans propose all the spending cuts and then turn around and scream that Republicans have declared war on the poor and disadvantaged.

It's a nice trick, especially considering Republicans control only the House.

Meanwhile, the Democrats control all other branches of our government: the Senate, the White House, and The New York Times op/ed page. What's their plan?

The Rest of the Article

Great Poems

2011-04-14T17:31:00.006-04:00

The Waste Land by T. S. Elliott

The Tiger by William Blake

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Terence, This is Stupid Stuff by A. E. Housman

Home Burial by Robert Frost

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Bluemoon's Picks: Great Film Performances

2011-04-12T17:29:00.155-04:00

By Michael David Rawlings

These are the performances that I believe to be among the greatest. Though my viewing experience is learned and more extensive than most, though my taste is well-developed, this is by no means an exhaustive conpendium. The choices are listed as they came to mind, in no particular order.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (2005)

Hoffman doesn't simply capture his character's mannerisms with a casual subtlety, but utterly dis-appears into Capote, leav-ing us the unabashedly self-absorbed and manipula-tive, yet always fascinating and complex man of letters. Hoffman's Capote is a flesh-and-blood human being who occasionally deplores his foibles, but never long enough to stare them down. Too unnerving. This is not a caricature, which would be so easy to fall into when playing a figure like Capote. There's no hint of a lisp here, just the childlike voice of the childlike man—full of petulance and envy, yet oddly sweet and naïve, well, in a Twilight-Zone sort of way.

Joseph Cotton
as Uncle Charlie Oakley (1943)

Cotton delivers a brilliantly controlled performance of a murderous sociopath whose suave and charming demeanor gradually unravels under the relentless scrutiny of a courageous young woman.

Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (2004)

Perfection. Spot on. And Foxx does his own singing, too, no overdubbing here.

Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane (1941)

While he and Herman Mankiewicz picked up an Oscar for best original screenplay, Welles' towering performance in the greatest movie ever made was eclipsed, as was the film, by political controversy and Gary Cooper's Sergeant York, a good perfor-mance of an iconic character, but not the stuff of unforgettable brilliance.

James Cagney as George M Cohan (1942)

So the guy who established his career by playing some of film history's most iconic mobster characters, wins the Oscar for a tour-de-force performance in a musical! That's Hollywood.

Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines (1995)

A brilliant stream of rapid-fire zaniness erupts on the screen. Brad, We didn't know you had it in ya.

Pitt garnered a nomination for his performance, but lost the Oscar to Kevin Spacey, who gave another of the screen's great performances in The Usual Suspects. But Suspects gave us yet another great performance in the supporting category that was not nominated. (See below.) In total then, Hollywood gave us 3 big performances in 1994 . . . from the two best films of the year, neither of which were nominated for best picture.

Peter O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence (1962)

O'Toole has been nominated eight times. In 2003 the Academy awarded him an honorary Oscar for his career in film. It had it's opportunity to give him a competitive Oscar for this performance, which many believe to be the greatest screen performance of all-time.

Elizabeth Taylor as Martha (1965)

Taylor was nominated 5 times, winning twice. But her turn in this film was stunning!

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone (1974)

Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik (1975)

Pacino actually won the Oscar for best actor in a leading role for his fine performance in Scent of a Woman. However, his performances in Godfather: Part II and Dog Day Afternoon are every bit as good or better. But he apparently split the vote in 1975 for the 1974 year in film with Dustin Hoffman (Lenny) and Jack Nicholson (Chinatown), two other great performances, which allowed the sentimental favorite Art Carney to win for his performance in Harry and Tonto. The following year, Pacino had the bad luck of going up against Jack Nicholson again, who was nominated for his performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, another of the great performances in the history of film.

Al Pacino as Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (1992)

And finally he wins the Oscar after eight nominations, including a double nomination in 1992 (best actor in Scent of a Woman and best supporting actor in Glengarry Glen Ross) and four consecutive nominations in 1972 to 1975. He was also nominated in 1980 and 1991. See nominations.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett (1939)

Preferring the stage over the screen, Leigh made only 18 films (13 American productions) in her short career. She was only 54 when she died of tuberculosis. Everyone of her performances are riveting. Even her small part in Ship of Fools (1965) steals the show. It's quite amazing that she wasn't nominated more often despite the relatively small number of films she made, but that goes to the Hollywood politics of award nominations, and Leigh spent most of her time in her native Great Britain collecting the accolades of the London Stage like postage stamps. But when she was nominated, there was no doubt who would win the prize. Despite her comparatively small contribution to the history of film, pound-for-pound, Leigh is the best screen actress in history.

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois (1951)

She was twice nominated and twice rewarded by the Academy—500! But the Golden Globe association, which did nominate her performance in Streetcar, did not give her the award, the only organization that didn't. What were its members thingking?

Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday (1993)

Kilmer is a fine actor, but is notoriously difficult and demanding. Hence, A-list producers and directors have refused to work with him for years. His once promising career, which included several years of good films and roles, has fallen off the radar. He appears in straight-to-DVD B-movies now playing at your local kiosk. In my opinion, his inspired performance in Tombstone is the very finest Doc Holliday ever put up on the big screen and the second best supporting performance of 1993, bested only by another of the screen's great performances, which was nominated (Gary Sinise as Lt. Dan Taylor in Forest Gump), but did not win the prize either.

Javier
Bardem
as Anton Chigurh
(2007)

Chilling!

Joan Crawford Beragon as Mildred Pierce (1945)

Perfectly cast, perfectly played by the three-time nominee.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown (1989)

A brilliant and joyous performance!

Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (2002)

While Day-Lewis' performance was nominated by the Academy, the Oscar went to Adrien Brody for his performance in The Pianist. Huh? Was Brody's effort good? Yes, yes, of course. But like Day-Lewis', was it the stuff of history? Not even close.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview (2007)

"I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!"

The four-time nominee Day-Lewis is hands-down the greatest dramatic screen actor of all-time, and this is the greatest screen performance of all-time! All of Day-Lewis' performances are masterful. While he already has two Oscars on his shelf, more nominations and Oscars will come his way for sure. See his other celebrated performances.

Sigourney
Weaver
as Ripley
(1986)

In one of the best science fiction movies ever made, this is the commanding, iconic performance that solidified Weaver's star.

Broderick
Crawford
as Willie
Stark
(1949)

After nearly 15 years of being relegated to bit parts in B-movies, Crawford landed the role of a lifetime and made it count as the one-time populist turned corrupt demagogue Willie Stark, a politician reminiscent of Huey Long, cynical and vaguely mystified by his own betrayals.

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove (1964)

The unforgettable Peter Sellers' performance times three!

Bette Davis as Julie (1938)

This one's a toss up between Davis' perfor-mance in Jezebel and that as Mildred Rogers in On Human Bondage (1934), the first performance for which she was nominated. Both are quite amazing, but she's best known for the former.

Bette Davis as Margo Channing (1950)

This is Davis' finest performance, backed by the marvelous perfor-mances of the film's supporting cast, most notebly those of Anne Baxter and George Sanders.

Bette Davis as Baby Jane Hudson (1962)

It's broady. It's camp. It's great.

Cary Grant as David Huxley and Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance (1938)

Two wonderfully wacky performances in one—incomparable comedic timing moving at the speed of light!

Susan Vance: Anyway, David, when they find out who we are, they'll let us out.

David Huxley: When they find out who you are, they'll pad the cell.

Cary Grant as Johnnie (1941)

Though he was nominated for others, in my opinion this is his best dramatic performance.

Cary Grant
as Mortimer Brewster
(1944)

Grant gave his very best dramatic performances in Penny Serenade (1941), Suspicion (1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (1944). His efforts in Serenade and Lonely Heart garnered him his only nominations. Regardless, in my opinion, he gave us his best stuff in the screwball comedies. Aside from the genius of those who concentrated solely on comedy—Lloyd, Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers and others—Grant is the greatest comedic actor of all-time, even better than Jim Carrey and Robin Williams.

Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord, Cary Grant as C. K. Dexter Haven and James Stewart as Macaulay Connor (1940)

We get three great comedic performances in this film, with the five-time nominee James Stewart taking home the Oscar. Hepburn was also nominated.

Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone (1962)

Hepburn picked up a nomination for this performance, but lost to Anne Bancroft for her performance in The Miracle Worker. However, in my opinion, Hepburn's was by far the best performance of 1962 and one of the greatest ever.

Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine
(1968)

This is Hepburn's greatest dramatic performance.

Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Martin-Dallas (1937)

Stanwyck, another of the greats of the silver screen, was one of the finest comedic actresses of her time, but she is best remembered for her dramatic performances. This one was her very best. She was nominated 4 times by the Academy, but never won a competitive Oscar. Of course she should have won for Stella Dallas and Double Indemnity, but ended up with an honorary Oscar for her career contribution to film, awarded in 1982.
See the other celebrated performances.

Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson (1944)

This is film history's quintessential femme fetale—seductive, dangerous and surprisingly vulnerable. Did Barbara Stanwyck ever give a bad performance? Not on your life, Walter Neff.

Kevin Spacey as Roger "Verbal" Kint (a.k.a., Keyser Soze) and Benicio Del Toro as Fred Fenster (1995)

Spacey won his first of two Oscars for this perfor-mance. He won the Oscar for best actor in a leading role for his performance in American Beauty in 1999. Del Toro was not nominated for his performance in this film, but then Spacey's role was central. Regardless, the best performances of 1995 were those of Pitt, Spacey and Del Toro, all unforgettably great. All three of these actors have been nominated by the Academy twice. Del Toro won best actor in a supporting role for his performance in Traffic (2000). Pitt is still waiting for a win.

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump and Gary Sinise as Lt. Dan Taylor (1994)

Momma always said: life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're going to get.

Superb movie, superb performance.

Tom Hanks as Captain John H. Miller (1998)

Hanks received his fourth Oscar nomination for this performance, but the Oscar went to Roberto Benigni for his performance, another great one (see below), in Life is Beautiful.

See Hanks' other celebrated performances.

Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond (1950)

Hollywood's Golden Era, which began for Swanson in the Silent Era, comes roaring back and collides with film nior—madness, betrayal and murder. Swanson garnered her third Oscar nomination for this huge comeback performance, but once again failed to bring home the prize. While her performance is arguably the best remembered and most celebrated of 1950, she had the bad luck of going up against Judy Holliday's performance in Born Yesterday, another great one which won (See below.), and Bette Davis' performance in All About Eve (See above.).

William Hurt as Luis Molina (1985)

The four-time-nominated Hurt won the Oscar for his portrayal of Luis Molina, a homosexual prisoner obsessed with the high camp of classic Hollywood film. While Kiss of the Spider Woman is a bit uneven and slow, it mostly works because of the exceptionally good performances of its leading actors, Hurt's performance in particular.

Buster Keaton as Johnny Gray (1926)

An imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan comedic acting in what is arguably the greatest comedy of all-time—above and beyond the call of hilarity.

Clark Gable as Peter Warne and Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews (1934)

Two great comedic performances in one of history's greatest films. A rare achievement for a comedy, It Happened One Night swept all the top honors—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist (1944)

Academy-award-winning perfection!

Paul Newman as "Fast" Eddie Felson The Hustler (1961)

Of Newman's impressive ten Oscar nominations, this is the one performance for which he should have won. Ironically, the competitive Oscar he did win was for his performance in The Color of Money (1986) in which he reprised his role from The Hustler. This was a spectacles-wearing "Fast" Eddie Felson twenty-five years later mentoring a brash Tom Cruise. Newman was awarded an Oscar for his career the year before, when it looked like he might not ever win a competitive Oscar. But of course he did pick one up for Money and was nominated two more times in 1995 and 2003 before he passed away.

See Newman's other celebrated performances.

Judy Garland as Esther Blodgett, a.k.a., Vicki Lester (1954)

Though nominated and thought to be the frontrunner for the Oscar, Garland did not win. Instead, the Oscar went to Grace Kelly, who costarred with Bing Crosby in The Country Girl. Crosby's performance was nominated as well. Kelly's win was a big surprise to her and virtually everyone else. Today it is clear that the Academy goofed, for Garland's huge comeback performance is clearly the better and more enduring, one of the great ones of film history.

John Wayne as Ethan Edwards (1956)

Wayne was nominated three times in his long and illustrious career, hands-down the most prolific of Hollywood's legendary elite. Two of his nominations were for acting: best actor in a leading role, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and True Grit (1969). He won the Oscar for his performance in the latter. He also earned a best picture nomination for The Alamo (1960), a dismal picture, really, and a box-office flop, as the film's producer. He directed and starred in The Alamo as well. Yet Wayne's best performances are clearly the ones for which he was not nominated: Thomas Dunson in Red River and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, with the latter being by far the best of 1956 and one of the greatest ever. Indeed, everything about The Seachers, a box-office disappointment, went virtually unnoticed by both the public and the Hollywood elite. Today, it is rightly regarded as one of America's finest films ever.

Dustin Hoffman as Ratso (1969)

Midnight Cowboy is the only X-rated movie in history to be nominated for best picture . . . and it won the prize! The film's director John Schlesinger also picked up an Oscar for his work. Both of the film's co-leads, Hoffman and Voight, were nominated for their performances, with Hoffman's being by far the very best of the year and one of the very greatest ever, that is to say, rivaling those of Day-Lewis in There Will be Blood or O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Instead the Oscar went to the sentimental favorite John Wayne for his performance in True Grit.

Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce (1974)

A timeless and extraordinary performance!

See Hoffman's other celebrated performances.

Cate Blanchett as young Queen Elizabeth (1998)

In my opinion, Blanchett is the best screen actress around today and one of the very best ever, ranking at the very top of the heap among the likes of Vivian Leigh, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn or Ingrid Bergman. She can do it all, and this performance is really quite stunning. But even more stunning is the fact that the Academy awarded Gwyneth Paltrow's performance in Shakespeare in Love and not Blanchett's. But then the Academy awarded the Oscar for best picture to Shakespeare as well that year, when it should have gone to Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes the Academy does things that just don't make any sense at all.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn (2004)

Though nominated for his brilliant portrayal of Howard Hughes, DiCaprio had the bad luck of going up against Jamie Foxx's portrayal of Ray Charles. The three-time-Oscar nominee DiCaprio is one of the best actors around today, and his performance along with Blanchett's spot-on, Oscar-winning portrayal of Katharine Hepburn makes this film a very special affair. See DiCarprio's other celebrated performances.

Cate Blanchette as Jude Quinn, a.k.a., Bob Dylan (2007)

The four-time-Oscar nominee Blanchett garnered two nominations in 2007: for her supporting role in this film and for her leading role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, her second time at bat playing the great queen. Though the Oscar went to the right person for best actress, Blanchett's brilliant portrayal of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' ruminative biopic was passed over in favor of Tilda Swinton's very fine performance in Michael Clayton. Blanchett should have won.

See Blanchett's other celebrated performances.

Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth (1993)

In this stunning, Oscar-nominated performance, Fiennes was the person-ification of evil's typical sloven banality. His was by far the best supporting performance of 1993, but it was passed over in favor of Tommy Lee Jones' enter-taining but formulaic performance in The Fugitive.

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski (1951)

Brutish, infantile madness at its poetic best.

Stella! Stella!

Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy (1954)

"I could have been a contender." And many believe that he is, i.e., that eight-time-Oscar nominee Marlon Brando is a contender for the greatest screen actor of all-time.

Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone (1972)

Perhaps the greatest comeback performance of all-time.

See Brando's other celebrated performances.

Christopher Walken as Nick (1978)

While he is a gifted and always reliable character actor, the caliber of this stunning, Oscar-winning performance has never been even closely realized by Walken in his many performances since.

Kate Winslet as Clementine Kruczynski (2004)

One of the very best screen actresses around today and a six-time-Oscar nominee, Winslet won the Oscar for her performance in The Reader in 2009; however, for my money, this is her very best so far and one of the greatest performances ever.

Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee (1936)

Though he would still have to slough through more than a dozen bit parts before finally attaining A-list-star status with his performance in High Sierra (1941), this is the role that finally put him on the map as someone to be reckoned with. While his perfor-mance as gangster Duke Mantee is now mostly forgotten, it is electrifying, easily surpassing the performances of the film's stars, Bette Davis and Leslie Howard no less. The studio heads took notice. It just took them another five years before they figured out how to properly use and market Bogie, who is arguably the most important screen actor of all-time.

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade (1941)

As the iconic and aloof Sam Spade, Bogie seals the bargain after High Sierra's success and solidifies his newfound, megastar status.

Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine (1942)

Immortal! Bogie garners his first Oscar nomination.

Humphrey Bogart as Dobbs (1948)

This is Bogie's finest performance, but it goes un-nominated.

Humphrey Bogart as Charlie Allnut (1951)

Bogie wins the Oscar!

Humphrey Bogart as Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg (1954)
Another fine performance to cap an incredible career. It's too bad he had to compete with Marlon Brando's Oscar-winning perfor-mance in On the Waterfront. Otherwise. . . .

Meryl Streep as Sophie (1982)

Simply stunning!

See the other celebrated performances of this 16-time-nominated, two-time-Oscar-winning actress.

George C. Scott as General George Patton (1970)

A masterful, Oscar-winning performance, one of the very greatest of the great! Scott was also nominated four times.

Peter Finch as Howard Beale (1976)

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Jodie Foster as Sarah Tobias (1988)

A tour-de-force performance out of nowhere. Jodie Foster establishes herself as one of the true heavyweights of the silver screen—four Oscar nominations, two wins; six Golden Globe nominations, two wins.

James Stewart as Jefferson Smith (1939)

This is the very best performance of this beloved, five-time-Oscar-nominated legend of the screen. But he didn't win for this one . . . one of the Academy's biggest goofs. Instead, the Academy awarded him the Oscar the very next year for his performance in The Philadelphia Story, a fine comedic performance, but not the stuff of Jefferson Smith. He was also awarded an honorary Oscar for his career in 1985.

James Stewart as George Bailey (1946)

Despair turns to joy! A moving performance hitting on all the emotions from A to Z.

James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd (1950)

This charming performance was Stewart's favorite role.

James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson (1958)

Though Stewart was not nominated for this performance, it is hands-down the best of 1958 and one of the most enduring of the silver screen. Some of his other fine performances include those in Rope (1948), The Far Country (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), for which he was also nominated, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Shenandoah (1965), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). . . .

Joan Fontaine as Jennifer De Winter (1940)

Vulnerable, lovely, endearing, sweet, courageous, triumphant!

Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand (1999)

Masterful!

Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter (1991)

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."

Among the very best performances ever, delivered with bone-chilling precision.

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker (1967)

Bonnie Parker: You're good!

Clyde Barrow: I ain't good. I'm the best!

Bonnie Parker: And modest!

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray and Jack Nicholson as J. J. Gittes (1974)

Of the two great performances in this film, Dunaway's is the better. She's sheer perfection as the doomed Evelyn. Dunaway is one of the best actresses to ever grace the silver screen, but she acquired the reputation of being chronically late for shoots and unprepared. She is also known to be a bit of a prima donna—demanding, uncooperative, churlish. In short, she became too difficult and costly to work with. The good scripts and roles stopped coming her way.

Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle (1976)

Electrifying!

Travis Bickle: Are you talking to me?

Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta (1980)

A tour-de-force perfor-mance, among the very greatest ever!

Robert De Niro as Max Cady (1991)

This is the second greatest performance of a villain-ous character in film history, second only to Hopkins' Hannibal Lector, which by the way was delivered the same year. Both performances were nominated, but of course the Oscar went to Hopkins.

See De Niro's other celebrated performances.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly (1961)

A touching performance of iconic elegance. Though nominated, Hepburn's performance was passed over. The Oscar went to Sophia Loren for her performance in Two Women. Hepburn's other great performance was delivered in Roman Holiday (1953), her very first starring role for which she won an Oscar. See Hepburn's other celebrated performances.

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet (1948)

This is perhaps the greatest Shakespearean production ever presented on the silver screen. Olivier not only played the title role, but also produced and directed it. While he didn't win the Oscar for direction, he did pick up two Oscars for his performance and best picture.

Laurence Olivier as Richard III (1955)

This was another threefer for Olivier—star, producer, director. But the film only picked up a nomination for best actor, and what a performance it was. While the Oscar went to another, many believe Olivier's Richard was even better than his Hamlet. In any event, these are hands-down the best Shakespear-ean performances ever rendered on the big screen and among the very greatest performances ever.

See the other celebrated performances of this eleven-time-Oscar-nominated silver screen legend.

Jane Fonda as Brea Daniels (1971)

Amazing performance!

With seven Oscar nomi-nations and two Oscar-winning performances in less than twenty years, Fonda is one of the silver screen's greatest actresses of all-time. But radical politics derailed her career.

Jack Nicholson as Buddusky (1973)

Raw, gritty perfection.

The twelve-time-Oscar-nominated, three-time-Oscar-winning brilliance of Jack Nicholson at its very best.

Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched (1975)

Two devastatingly brilliant dramatic performances in one. We knew Nicholson was a rare and wonderful talent, but Fletcher's performance was a revelation: an unremitting stream of calm malevolence.

Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands (1990)

The three-time-Oscar nominee Depp is one of the most versatile actors around today. This startling performance was his first major role on the big screen. It should have been nominated, but the Academy didn't quite know what to make of it.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow (2003)

Though Depp's creative performance was nomi-nated, the Oscar went to the always annoying and overrated Sean Penn.

Heath Ledger as The Jocker (2008)

Whoa! Among the greatest of the great. A resounding triumph. There was never any doubt that Ledger's performance would be nominated by the Academy. There was never any doubt he would win the Oscar.

Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp (1921)

Chaplin and Coogan are magic together.

Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp (1931)

Sheer genius!

In addition to these, the great comedic director-actor's best films include The Pilgrim (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952).

Ben Kingsley as Don Logan (2001)

Frightening intensity! A far cry from Gandhi.

See this fine character actor's other celebrated performances.

Spencer Tracy as The Old Man (1958)

Out of all the wonderful performances delivered by Tracy, this is his most personal, and for us, his greatest. But few others would agree with me on this one. See the other cele-brated performances of this nine-time-Oscar-nomi-nated, two-time-Oscar-winning legend.

Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (1960)

This is the other great performance delivered by Tracy that most would choose as his best. This is one of the screen's greatest perfor-mances to be sure, but not a great film, unless you go for the histor-ical distortions of leftist propaganda.

Patty Duke as Helen Keller (1962)

A great Oscar-winning performance and easily the best ever delivered by a child actor. This was Duke's first big-screen role, and she was only sixteen years old. Truly amazing.

Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVitto (1990)

Can you say, "Wow!"

Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo (1947)

Talk about sadistic sociopaths, check out this chilling, Oscar-nominated performance out of the Twilight Zone by Widmark.

"You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over. You're worse than him, tellin' me he's comin' back? Ya lyin' old hag!"

Judy Holliday as Emma "Billie" Dawn (1950)

One of the most brilliant comedic performances ever, Holliday's Oscar-winning role of a lifetime.

Billy Bob Thornton as Karl Childers (1996)

A refreshingly bold and original story with a magnificent performance. Thornton wrote, directed and starred in this little gem, and garnered two nominations: best original screenplay and best actor in a leading role. He did win the Oscar for his screenplay and should have won for his performance, but instead the Oscar for the latter went to Geoffrey Rush for his performance in Shine. It's hard to fault the Academy's decision on that score, but it's failure to nominate Thornton's film for best picture and best director in a year when it elected to award the Oscar for best picture to the pretentious and boring English Patient rather than to Fargo is the stuff of inexplicable stupidity. In other words, the bright and shining stars of 1996 were glaringly obvious: Fargo and Swing Blade. Not even Shine is of their caliber. And why was Jerry Maguire nominated for best picture?

Denzel Washington as Malcolm X (1992)

Masterful!

See Washington's other celebrated performances.

Alec Guinness as Col. Nicholson (1957)

Brilliant!

See Guinness' other celebrated performances.

Edward Norton as Aaron/Roy (1996)

Electrifying!

Roberto Benigni as Guido Orefice (1997)

A lovely miracle.

Ed Harris as Blair Sullivan (1995)

Buckle up for this one.

Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson (1996)

"And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper."

Ray Milland as Don Birnam (1945)

The role and the Oscar-award-winning performance of a lifetime.

Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (1979)

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning!"

For my money this is easily the six-time-Oscar-nominee Duvall's best performance and, of course, one of the very greatest of all-time. Unforgettable. Duvall is perhaps the most versatile and accomplished character actor of the silver screen.

Jack Lemmon as Harry Stoner (1973)

The most amazing perfor-mance of this eight-time-Oscar-nominated master.

Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson (1940)

"Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way."

Gene Hackman as Harry Caul (1974)

Though the five-time-Oscar-nominated Hackman picked up Oscars for his performances in The French Connection and Unforgiven, this is by far his very best, and it wasn't even nominated.

Burt Lancaster as J. J. Hunsucker (1957)

Lancaster was nominated four times by the Academy and won the Oscar for his performance in Elmer Gantry (1960), but it is this performance of the established matinee idol against type that stands out as his best and one of the greatest ever.

Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert (1931)

Perfection. Among the very greatest of the great.

Edward G Robinson as Dr. Paul Ehrlich (1940)

Amazingly, Robinson was never nominated by the Academy, not even for this incredible perfor-mance. However, he was awarded an honorary Oscar, posthu-mously, for his career in 1973 within months of his death. The Oscar was accepted by his wife, Jane Bodenheimer.

F Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri and Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1984)

Two of the screen's greatest performances in one! Both of these performances were nominated—best actor in a leading role—but of course only one of them could win. The Oscar went to Abraham.

Morgan Freeman as Fast Black (1987)

A role that could have easily devolved into cliché is in the hands of this master a tour de force exhibition of barely restrained menace, always lurking just beneath the surface—real, believable. Unlike his character's weak hook shot, nothing but net.

Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin (2006)

A film of first-rate entertainment lead by this towering performance.

Checkmate

2011-03-18T15:14:00.346-04:00

By Michael David Rawlings

Continued from Je ne sais quoi . . .
See the entirety of Immune to Indoctrination's argument: Part I, Part II.

P-K4
I did not change the meaning of your statement. I merely inserted a phrase by way of clarification in order to wake you up to what you were saying. Fine. We'll go with precisely how it is written.

Talking about the science and nothing else but the science, I write:

Creation and ID scientists have justifiably concluded that the results of nearly sixty years of prebiotic-chemistry research resoundingly falsify abiogenesis. —Michael David Rawlings

Directly under this, you write:

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable, complete with beings who reside in separate realms to avoid detection and are openly contrary to logic and reason. —Immune to Indoctrination

It's not me who keeps confusing things! The only one who confounded meaning is you. But your confusion doesn't end there. Why in the world would you be talking about the falsification of supernatural things even if I had been talking theology? The potentialities of human consciousness that reside beyond the boundaries of empirically demonstrable idealizations are not subject to scientific falsification or verification; rather, they are subject to refutation or affirmation in accordance with the rules of logic and the imperatives of pertinent facts. And two pertinent facts that have been established beyond all dispute are (1) biogenesis is subject to falsification and (2) the claim that it has been falsified or is ''obviously false'' is bogus!

KB-QB4
There's a big difference between the way that young-Earth Creationists and an old-Earth Creationists approach science. The former's approach entails a battery of certain hermeneutical apriorities, which, in my opinion, are presumptuous, erroneous and ill-defined. The latter simply employ a methodological naturalism; hence, their theological biases are irrelevant. They are not doing anything different than what scientists have always done, once again, before Darwin came along. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Pasteur—all of these guys were Creationists. Bacon and Newton were Christian theologians as well. So what? None of these guys confused the difference between that which can be inferred in accordance with the rules of science and that which can be rationally asserted by Judeo-Christianity. Obviously, they did not impose their religious views on the scientific method or on their interpretations of the empirical data insofar as science is concerned. This approach rejects both the young-earth Creationist's a priori imposition of a semi-theological naturalism and the materialist's and/or the Darwinist's a priori imposition of a philosophical naturalism.

I've established the scientific facts of prebiotic chemistry and what the conceptually legitimate construct for science is. Neither I nor anyone else is beholden to the gratuitous extrapolations of a philosophical naturalism with which the materialist thinks to displace the standard rules of scientific inquiry and evidentiary substance as if no one would notice. These are the very things you keep trying to assert against an unremitting torrent of unassailable imperatives. Once again and for the last time: ontological/philosophical naturalism is no more subject to scientific falsification than any other philosophical or theological construct.

What was that you said again, you know, when by mistake you essentially changed my scientific observation about abiogenesis into a theological argument?

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable. . . . —Immune to Indoctrination

And so you go on about an authentically scientific solution, as if you had one: something about mindless chemicals eventually achieving self-awareness all by themselves. Whoop dee doo. That's not science. That's story time, just another scenario among many that derive from the potentialities of human consciousness, the stuff of philosophy. And that's all Darwinism is or ever was—from chemical evolution to a common ancestry. Creationists who abide by the standards of classical empiricism are not reactionaries. That's the narrative of your worldview. They are the realists of a methodological naturalism and see Darwinism for what it is. Yank Darwinism's ontological presupposition out from under it, and it comes crashing down—a broken pile of junk comprised of ancient prejudices and pretentious.

Q-KB3
You're quibbling with me over semantics? Assumption or faith? Have it your way then, assumption. I don't care which of these two essentially synonymous terms you use. You're still not talking about science, but the underlying metaphysics and rational formulations on which science is contingently based, as you insinuate an obvious non sequitur, i.e., that faith necessarily precludes logic or reason or evidence. Error. Your defining blind faith, not faith. You forgot the modifier. And Judeo-Christianity, for example, emphatically denounces the former, not merely because it is foolish, but because it is wantonly sinful, habitually indifferent, for example, to the meaning of words and the truth. Further, Judeo-Christianity holds to the epistemological construct of a balanced rational-empirical realism against the irrationalism of pagan and materialist systems of thought. Your's is a distinction that makes no difference, just one of the many silly pretensions of atheism.

Q-KB7, Checkmate

Now that's the debate I was looking for. Please lets shift our focus to how you reached that conclusion. —Immune to Indoctrination

So your intent was to discuss the validity of philosophical or theological accounts of origins all along? Yet you have incessantly imposed the intellectually stifling constraints of an ontological naturalism on the counterargument as if materialism were an objectively verifiable fact.

Okay. Fine. But now we would be weighing arguments that are strictly rational in nature. They are not bound by the limitations of scientific inquiry. Theology, for example, encompasses not only the constituents of any given religious system of thought, but those of any given philosophical system of thought and the asseverations of science. That's why it's King, by the way.

So, yes, beyond the science, all things considered, I am ultimately asserting creation ex essentia. So what? We have moved beyond science now and into the realm of the potentialities of human consciousness. And my article is properly structured. The introduction defines the dispute as being one that is both scientific and philosophical/theological. The body of the article deals strictly with the science. The conclusion summarizes the state of the science and reveals the actual nature of the materialist's assertion and its weaknesses in the face of the stronger argument that God must be.

Your entire argument rests on the asseveration of materialism, a philosophical construct, nothing else and nothing other.

Your argument:

Major Premise: The only substance that exists is matter.
Minor Premise: Life exists.
Conclusion: Life arose out of non-living matter.

Other than the ~~faith-based~~ assumption that the limits of sensory perception necessarily constitute the limits of existence, despite the universal and objectively self-sustaining idealization of transcendent origins, what is the substance of your major premise?

*Crickets Chirping*

On the other hand, we have my argument:

Major Premise: All biological life is from life.
Minor Premise: Biological life did not always exist.
Conclusion: God created biological life.

And what sort of things do I rally in support of my major premise? Well, looky here: they're scientific. You know, like the indisputable facts that spontaneous generation has been falsified and the conjecture of chemical evolution defies explanation. Biogenesis stands.

Sorry, but repeating this irredeemingly disfigured rash of madness gets you nowhere fast:

If you don't buy the Big Bang at all then I'd point out that no creator I've ever heard of qualifies as life, so biogenesis, exactly as stated, is still false. —Immune to Indoctrination

What does the Big Bang have to do with anything? The God of Judeo-Christianity, for example, is not biological life? So what? Your observation is pointless. Biogenesis does not attempt to address origins. It merely refutes the erroneous notion of spontaneous generation and pronounces the extant state of biological systems, nothing more. With regard to origins, its limitations as an explanation is due to the limitations of scientific inquiry only. These things have no force beyond science. None! Pasteur could not have pushed the evaluation of the experimental data beyond "all life is from life" without exceeding the limits of science. Where has life ever been scientifically observed to arise from anything but life? Pasteur's axiom is not false.

Arguably, science can legitimately ask the question how did life begin? But it doesn't appear that it can answer it even on its own terms, and only philosophy or theology can answer it in any ultimate sense. What's wrong with you?

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead. . . . Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened (Rom 1:20-21).

And again . . .

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. —Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1627), Of Atheism

Please let[']s shift our focus to how you reached that conclusion[, i.e., that God must be]. —Immune to Indoctrination

But I've already addressed that, here in this debate and in the article "Abiogenesis: The Holy Grail of Atheism". I don't have the time to write everything all over again. It would be much easier if you were to just reread the article and review the defeat of your arguments in this debate.

As for the Big Bang theory, click link.

As for Summa Theologica . . . good luck with that. It's a tome. Actually, let me recommend instead that you read The Gospel of John first. Ultimately, my words are nothing, just those of another imperfect, half-blind creature scratching at the surface with hand and the pimples on his arse with the other. It's not that any of things I've told you aren't true. It's just that they're less than a fraction of the things that really matter.

Righting the Confusion of Citizenship and Nationality: The Facts, The Myths and Other Riddles

2011-03-14T18:17:00.009-04:00

By Michael David Rawlings

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Citizenship and Nationality: Historical Foundation and Framework
The Natural-Born Citizen Clause of the Constitution
A Compendium of the History of Jus Sanguinis
The Straight Dope on U.S. Territories
Was Senator John McCain a U.S. Citizen at Birth?
A Critique of the Chin Argument
Wong Kim Ark meet Rogers
The Obama Controversy and the Soiler Factor
Citizenship and Nationality: List of Links

Related Works
Who are the Real Conspirators?
A House of Cards: The Case Against the Birther Movement

Righting the Confusion of Citizenship and Nationality: The Facts, The Myths and Other Riddles is a series of related articles or chapters. It is strongly recommend that these articles be read in the order listed, as each builds upon the next.

Je ne sais quoi: the debate with Immune to Indoctrination continues. . . .

2011-03-14T08:11:00.059-04:00

By Michael David Rawlings

Continued from "Spiritual Particles of Empirical Substance?!"
See the entirety of Immune to Indoctrination's argument.

First things first. . . .

I shared:

The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself—in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does. —Dr. Wilder-Smith

Your response:

Maybe I'm just nit-picking his wording (but what['] s a quote without it's wording?) but he's obviously wrong. When water gets cold its molecules will organize themselves into a rigid, crystalline structure that many would consider aesthetically pleasing. Many other examples exist. It's very simple and mostly unrelated to the abiogenesis argument, but it is, undeniably, matter organizing itself. —Immune to Indoctrination

Right you are. But the error is not Dr. Smith's, it's mine. I carelessly ripped that quote from its context without properly prefacing it, which, by the way, begins with the observation that the cosmos entails a foundational universal of material organization. He then goes on to say that "[t]he Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. . . ." Hence, his observation goes to the organization of biological systems, the aggregation and polymerization of infrastructural and informational complexity beyond nature's fundamental and unspecified structures.

* * * * *

I never said spiritual entities do not exist. . . . I just explained why science is justified in ignoring them ["spiritual or supernatural things"] completely. —Immune to Indoctrination

Well, things get a little confusing when you insist that science cannot regard transcendent things, but then heedlessly go on about things that do not exist like scientific definitions of God and spiritual particles of empirical substance. That's why after reading your second installment, which appears to go on in the same vein while simultaneously correcting my alleged misapprehension, I asked for clarification:

Science cannot ascertain or assert anything whatsoever about that which is not empirical. Yes or no? If no, please explain. —Michael David Rawlings

Your response:

Yes I agree. I'll rephrase to avoid any confusion: Science can only make assertions about things for which objective evidence or data can be collected. This data must be potentially reliable enough to test the subject directly or indirectly by experiment. If the data can't be collected science can't form a theory for or against. Of course I view this as science's biggest strength not a weakness. It basically means 'no faith allowed' and it's why we've progressed so much. —Immune to Indoctrination

Great! I agree, mostly, for whether you are aware of it or not, science does entail an apriority of faith as a matter of practicality: the assumption that the rational forms and logical categories of the human mind are reliably synchronized with the apparent substances and mechanics of empirical phenomena. Beyond that, the above is precisely what traditional methodological naturalism holds . . . unlike ontological naturalism, which is gratuitously mired in a metaphysical caveat that leads it's proponents to habitually invoke sarcastic theological arguments when challenged by standard scientific practice as we shall plainly see.

I wrote:

Spiritual concerns are not incompatible with science. They are transcendental. That's all. Science simply cannot address them in any case whatsoever. And that's why science is the weakest of the three major branches of human inquiry. Theology is king. Philosophy is queen. And as the rational precedes the sensorial, science is contingently based on the former and cleans up the leftovers as directed. —Michael David Rawlings

Your response:

Wow. I've NEVER heard a claim like that before. First of all, your attempt to link rationality with theology and philosophy before science is simply ridiculous. —Immune to Indoctrination

Uh . . . Immune, the only reason you haven't heard that before is because you're not well read in the history of ideas. But more to the point, your incoherent statement, sans any detectable argument, appears to suggest that science embodies the ontological and epistemological presuppositions on which it contingently rests. This demonstrates that you do not apprehend the realities of the matter at all, and it appears that you are unaware of the nature and perhaps even of the existence of your own a priori biases. Further, in addition to its procedural technicalities, the scientific method is an overlapping, cognitive orchestration of observations, interrogatives, suppositions, evaluations and inferences. What's ridiculous is the idea that science and its methodology precede metaphysics and rational formulation—as if the former established and outlined themselves, as if the empirical data of experimentation interpret themselves.

Ontological naturalism, which is your bag, and traditional methodological naturalism, which is mine, are not science, Immune. They're the underlying philosophical constructs which inform our respective views of what science is and our interpretations of empirical data. And here's a news flash for you: your obsessive insinuation of transcendent concerns in a discussion about the science of prebiotic chemistry is annoying, for in the world of methodological naturalism after the tradition of a Baconian or Lockean empiricism, there is no place set for them at the table at all. No plates, no glasses, no silverware . . . no chairs! Or as Locke would put it: je ne sais quoi, i.e., I do not know.

But it would appear that the "science" of ontological naturalism knows a lot about transcendent entities, namely, that they don't exist. And what precisely is the scientific or empirically demonstrable evidence for this knowledge? There is none, of course. The substance of this is nothing other than the reiteration of the materialist's faith-based, metaphysical presupposition.

I wrote:

Creation and ID scientists have justifiably concluded that the results of nearly sixty years of prebiotic-chemistry research resoundingly falsify abiogenesis. —Michael David Rawlings

Your response:

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable. . . . Biogenesis is obviously false. —Immune to Indoctrination

No. See, you're mistaken about this, my friend. The spontaneous generation of life out of non-living organic matter is obviously false. It was falsified by Pasteur's body of research, and it's indisputable that insofar as science can presently ascertain or assert, in accordance with its structural rules and limitations, life does not and cannot arise from inanimateness. Pasteur's axiom stands, and it most certainly is of a nature that is subject to falsification, a circumstance that nearly sixty years of prebiotic research necessarily concedes. Indeed, proponents of abiogenesis had in the beginning quite casually expected to falsify it, only to reinforce its validity with their research instead.

If all life came from life where did the first life come from? —Immune to Indoctrination

Ah! Here we have a legitimate scientific question, only to be followed by a theological argument of sorts against a standing scientific axiom—mere sophistry, a denial, laced with insult and one non sequitur after another.

Of course some supernatural creator being would not be considered life in scientific terms, and even if it was, it itself would break the "law". Clearly life came from non-life it's just a matter of how and when. Biogenesis is even more contrary to creationism than abiogenesis. Abiogenesis explains how and when but not why. It can still be claimed God guided it. Biogenesis destroys the concept of God all together and paints a universe where life has always existed. I'm su[r]prised you haven't come to that conclusion yourself. I can only assume your thinking is impaired by the layer of dishonesty that[']s required for you to sustain your beliefs. —Immune to Indoctrination

Of course, those who have minds that still work perceive the unhinged logic of this screed and that it ultimately derives from the materialist's gratuitous apriority. And science? Why, it's nowhere in sight. In the meantime, the Creation scientist—standing on the only legitimate foundation for science, a traditional methodological naturalism—responds to the question: "currently, all we can say scientifically is that life comes from life; beyond that, je ne sais quoi." There's no appeal to the transcendent or denial of the same. No philosophizing here. Science cannot ascertain or assert anything whatsoever about that which is not empirical or not in evidence.

I don't understand how you can concede that science can't address the immaterial whatsoever and then call materialism pseudoscience. That[']s totally contradictory. You've lost that assumed credibility I gave you earlier. —Immune to Indoctrination

. . . he blurted, as if methodology and materialism were synonymous, underscoring my credibility and the utter lack of his own.

In any event, I actually referred to “the pseudoscientists of materialism”. By definition materialism holds that matter is the only substance that exists.

In the meantime, back in the world of real science: je ne sais quoi.

While the experimental data indisputably falsify spontaneous generation and chemical evolution, the pseudoscientists of materialism argue that abiogenesis must be true, not based on any demonstrable empirical evidence, but based on the unscientific apriority that nothing exists but matter—as if from some elevated vantage point outside the space-time continuum they were authoritatively describing something more than the limitations of sensory perception, as if the universal potentialities of human consciousness were merely the stuff of subjective impressions, as if all of cosmological history were necessarily an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect.

In the meantime, back in the world of real science: je ne sais quoi.

You and your materialist cohorts show your hand every time you're compelled to defend your unscientific conjectures—gratuitous extrapolations—with philosophical gibberish.

In the meantime, back in the world of real science: je ne sais quoi.

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable, complete with beings who reside in separate realms to avoid detection and are openly contrary to logic and reason. You guys are just hiding behind your impenetrable wall of poorly defined phrases ('transcendental', 'spiritual', 'God' etc.) and taking cheap shots at people who have truly inquisitive minds and won't accept your overly simple, illogical, paper-thin, faith-based answers to the universe's toughest questions. —Immune to Indoctrination

Still more of this, eh? Like I said at the top, you don't understand what classical empiricism is about at all. You've been brainwashed by the likes of Dawkins et al., atheist savants who incessantly demonstrate their ignorance about the history of ideas that reside beyond their reductionist world of stunted cognition. I told you in my last post that "Creation scientists abide by the conventions of a traditional methodological naturalism and faithfully distinguish the essential difference between the inferences they make about the constituents of empirical phenomena and the assertions they make about the potentialities of the transcendent. . . . They are doing nothing different today than what most of the great scientists had been doing since Copernicus . . . before Darwin came along." But you paid it no heed. The only one who keeps reverting to theological or philosophical arguments, i.e., to "overly simple, illogical, paper-thin, faith-based" blather against established scientific theory is you!

"Abiogenesis explains how and when but not why", you write. LOL! My friend, you child, abiogenesis can't even begin to account for the mind-boggling complexities involved in the aggregation and polymerization of the pertinent precursors, much less the realization of biological systems. It's not even close. Your claim is the bluster of one who does not grasp the realities of prebiotic chemistry at all.

And finally, we have this bit of superfluous nonsense:

Secondly we must have wildly different ideas of what 'theism' is (in practice). To me its the study of ancient writings and the attempt to reconcile them with what we see in nature and what we've discovered scientifically. That[']s by FAR the most generous definition I can come up with. —Immune to Indoctrination

That's exactly right: I know what revealed religion and theology are, and you don't. But then again, what does any of this have to do with the substance and the limits of scientific inquiry? What does any of this have to do with abiogenesis? I thought for once I had run across an atheist who actually knew the science and was prepared to discuss it. Instead, you're just another Bill Maher knockoff, veering off into one irrelevant metaphysical vignette after another.

Look. I've heard all of the atheist's trite and conceptually illiterate appraisals of theological matters before. It's all pretty stock. What are there, two, maybe three routine litanies consisting of maybe a half-dozen clichés strung together in a semblance of thought?

But since you keep bringing the matter up out of context, i.e., are so masochistically insistent on getting a theological beat down as well: the idea of the transcendent, the idea of God objectively exist in and of themselves, as they indisputably impose themselves on human consciousness without the latter willing that they do so. These things are not akin to mere cultural idealizations like unicorns or leprechauns as atheists foolishly argue. They entail the force of universal and ultimate origination. And the atheist, whether he be ultimately right by accident or not, acknowledges the truth of this every time he opens his mouth to deny their existence. And by accident, I mean that he might be right, objectively speaking, not because it's rational to flatly deny that which is indisputably possible, but merely because he stumbled into it as a matter of blind faith. In other words, concluding that God must be, is not a matter of faith at all. Faith goes to in whom or what one places it. I conclude that God must be by reason; I place my soul in the hands of Jesus Christ by faith, as opposed to tossing it over to the likes of Allah or Vishnu or, in your case, Mindless Rocks.

You see, If I want theology, I can go to Augustine or Aquinas or Henry. Beyond Christ crucified and resurrected on your behalf and mine, what could possibly be the point of discussing such matters with you at this stage? Suggested reading: Summa Theologica, Aquinas. And after that monument of exquisitely precise, systematic logic of unassailable, self-evident truths, masterfully extrapolated from the Bible, rolls over you and your prattle about an "impenetrable wall of poorly defined phrases", you can crawl back to me for yet another drubbing, my friend.

Come on, Immune, just talk to me like a real person. Forget about all the rubbish that typically passes between believers and non-believers. "I can only assume your thinking is impaired by the layer of dishonesty that[']s required for you to sustain your beliefs", you write. Oh, really? That's truly what you believe? And you, you're truly as stupid as your stubborn disregard for certain indispensable rules of science would imply, rules without which science would quickly veer off into la-la land? I don't believe that.

Stanley Miller himself in the spirit of real science acknowledged after decades of prebiotic research that insofar as science was concerned, we do not know at this point and may never know how life began. Presently, in terms of natural cause, there's no way to explain away or to overcome nature's prebiotic, monomeric dead ends. All we can do at this point is move on with the materials and biotechnology derived from extant life. And you would see that if you were to take the blinders off.

The debate concludes in "Checkmate".

Spiritual Particles of Empirical Substance?! I debate Immune to Indoctrination

2011-03-11T21:55:00.021-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

(For the entirety of Immune to Indoctrination's argument, see comments below "Abiogenesis: The Holy Grail of Atheism".)

I admit I don't have the biology knowledge to refute the details of your argument. I have seen many creationists who grossly misused and skewed scientific fact to mislead those with less knowledge. Usually I can spot this easily but in your case I'm going to have to give you the benefit of the doubt. —Immune to Indoctrination

Hmm. That's odd. I know the science very well and while I have run across many blunders made by Creationists, the vast majority of these were the errors of laymen with little or no real scientific training—a matter of ignorance, not dishonesty. Laying aside the assertions made by young-earth Creationists, with whom I disagree, I don't think I've ever encountered any serious or calculatedly dishonest errors made by progressive Creationists trained in the sciences. The only kind of routine "errors" made by the latter of which I am aware are those attributed to them by evolutionists who merely reassert their presupposition and its dogma as if these things did not constitute the very essence of the dispute! For an example of this sort or thing, see my refutation of Labsci's assertion.

"Intelligence" isn't the issue here. "Supernatural" and/or "spiritual" is. Of course it's obvious that the concept of the supernatural is completely incompatible with science in most cases. —Immune to Indoctrination

Spiritual concerns are not incompatible with science. They are transcendental. That's all. Science simply cannot address them in any case whatsoever. And that's why science is the weakest of the three major branches of human inquiry. Theology is king. Philosophy is queen. And as the rational precedes the sensorial, science is contingently based on the former and cleans up the leftovers as directed. Your materialistic apriority is open. You might want to zip that up.

. . . imagine if scientists did deny abiogenesis. —Immune to Indoctrination

Real scientists don't deny things, they falsify them. Creation and ID scientists have justifiably concluded that the results of nearly sixty years of prebiotic-chemistry research resoundingly falsify abiogenesis. The Pasteurian axiom that omne vivum ex vivo, i.e., all life is from life stands. Nature's prebiotic, organic materials are monomeric dead ends. As for the pseudoscientists of materialism, they are welcome to go on with their fantasies.

After that you get all tangled up with some very odd notions. Scientific definitions of God? Spiritual particles of empirical substance? Once again, science is not equipped to deal with spiritual or theological matters. Arguing that because spiritual entities are not empirical—a truism—spiritual entities do not exist is neither rational nor scientific. Your premise is AWOL, your conclusion is absurd. State your premise and then prove it empirically.

Got reductio ad absurdum?

The idea that science must necessarily assume an abiogenic origin of life is hogwash. That's merely the stuff of a Darwinian naturalism run amok. Has it not ever occurred to you to question the rather awkward, scientifically unconventional practice of arbitrarily displacing an established law of biology with a body of research premised on a mere supposition. When did the rather shaky hypothesis of abiogenesis falsify Pasteur's theoy of biogenesis? According to your account of things, I must have somehow missed that in my reading.

Contrary to the claims of evolutionists, Creation scientists do not impose any theological construct as such on science, nor are they obliged to do any such stupid thing. They simply reject evolutionists' self-serving imposition of an ontological naturalism on science, whereby the latter then proceed to politicize the matter. (And in their typically fascistic fashion, evolutionists have been quite successful in convincing stupid and corrupt judges and politicians to overthrow natural and constitutional law in our public education system.)

Creation scientists abide by the conventions of a traditional methodological naturalism and faithfully distinguish the essential difference between the inferences they make about the constituents of empirical phenomena and the assertions they make about the potentialities of the transcendent. Their axioms (Pasteurian biogenesis and irreducible complexity) are rock solid. They are doing nothing different today than what most of the great scientists had been doing since Copernicus . . . until Darwin came along.

Science deals with the empirical. Theology deals with the transcendent. Creationists do not confound the distinction. We leave that sort of foolishness to materialists.

The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself—in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does. —Dr. Wilder-Smith

And again. . . .

Ultimately, the essence of this perversion is a Darwinian naturalism run amok: mere theory elevated to an inviolable absolute of cosmological proportions, which displaces not only the traditional conventions of methodological naturalism, but is superimposed on the discipline of science itself. Never has so much been owed to so little. —Michael David Rawlings

See Je ne sais quoi: the debate with Immune to Indoctrination continues. . . .

Abiogenesis: The Holy Grail of Atheism

2011-03-06T07:37:00.000-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

Years of experience have shown me that most atheists are more obtuse than a pile of bricks. They are either breezily unaware of their metaphysical biases or are unwilling to objectively separate themselves from them long enough to engage in a reasonably calm and courteous discussion about the tenets of their religion: namely, abiogenesis and evolution. While science's historical presupposition is not a metaphysical naturalism (or an ontological naturalism), most of today's practicing scientists insist that the composition of empirical phenomena must be inferred without any consideration given to the possibility of intelligent causation. The limits of scientific inquiry are thereby reconfigured as if they constituted the limits of reality itself, the more expansive potentialities of human consciousness be damned. In other words, if something cannot be readily quantified by science, it doesn't exist, regardless of the conclusions that any rational evaluation of the empirical data might recommend. Hence, should one reject what is nothing more than the guesswork of an arbitrarily imposed apriority, one is said to reject science itself, as if the fanatics of scientism owned the means of science.

Ultimately, the essence of this perversion is a Darwinian naturalism run amok: mere theory elevated to an inviolable absolute of cosmological proportions, which displaces not only the traditional conventions of methodological naturalism (or mechanistic naturalism), but is superimposed on the discipline of science itself. Never has so much been owed to so little.

I'm well acquainted with the hypotheses, the research and the findings in the field of abiogenesis. Also, I understand evolutionary theory, inside and out. I know the science, and I'm current. Indeed, I'm light years ahead of the vast majority of atheists who routinely sneer at theists as the former unwittingly expose their ignorance about the science and the tremendously complex problems that routinely defy their dogma. These are the sheeple blindly following an ideologically driven community of scientists, which, since Darwin, is determined to overthrow the unassailable. God stands and stays: science can neither prove nor disprove His existence; it's not equipped to venture beyond the temporal realm. But this does not mean that the empirical data do not testify to His existence. Science is merely the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it. And science in the hands of materialists is the stuff of fairytales.

I recently proposed a question on Yahoo! Answers and prefaced it with a brief summary of the results derived from the Miller-Urey experiments of 1952 in the light of current science. Of course, the underlying hypothesis on which the experiments were originally based has been falsified, but we learned plenty. While I discussed a number of the problems associated with it, I neglected to emphatically state what that hypothesis was . . . just to see what sort of fish I might catch.

The following is the full version of the necessarily condensed one that appeared on Yahoo! Answers. . . .

A Yahoo! Answers resident, Lord Fluffy Tail, recently offered up the following quote in answer to a question about origins:

In 1951, the American Miller succeeded to form organic matter out of a mixture of ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water (H2O) by exposing this mixture to an electric current. During the experiments different organic mixtures were formed, among them amino acids and nucleic acids. These acids are essential for the building of proteins and chromosomes. —ORACLE ThinkQuest

Miller-Urey has been falsified for years; that is to say, the experiments' parameters and conditions were shown to be incongruent and the results, negative. The reasons for this are legion and very complex, yet textbooks continue to relate these experiments with the same sort of blurb in the above as if they were still something more than an historical footnote. An avalanche of innumerable Internet sites—most of them put up by atheistic, know-nothing layman—continue to tout them as being something that still matters along with theory that is years, even decades, behind current science.

For example, it doesn't appear that the author of Lord Fluffy Tail's source knows that the atmosphere of the primeval world was more oxygen-rich even earlier than he supposes and was generally more oxidizing than reducing—necessary for life, but not friendly to the formation of amino acids. In other words, the actual conditions were considerably more hostile to the prospects of abiogenesis than those of the Miller-Urey experiments. The primordial soup keeps getting driven deeper and deeper into the ocean where, once again, another battery of problematic conditions confound the imbecilic notions of chemical evolutionists.

Also, the author of this source writes that the "origin of life out of lifeless matter is called biogenesis." Uh . . . no. But that's probably just a typo. Biogenesis pertains to the Pasteurian theory that omne vivum ex vivo, i.e., all life is from life. The idea that life may arise from non-living matter goes by the name of spontaneous generation or, in accordance with contemporary theory, abiogenesis.

But the most startling bit of information divulged by this author—which is not a typo, but a UFO—consists of the claim that the Miller-Urey experiments produced nucleic acids.

What? Stop the presses! News flash!

Trust me. They did not produce nucleic acids or anything else like them.¹

What the published Miller-Urey experiments did produce were small concentrations of at least 5 amino acids and the molecular constituents of others. The dominant material produced by the experiments was an insoluble carcinogenic mixture of tar—large compounds of toxic mellanoids, a common end product in organic reactions. However, it was recently discovered that the published experiments actually produced 14 amino acids (6 of the 20 fundamentals of life) and 5 amines in various concentrations. In 1952, the technology needed to detect the even smaller trace amounts of prebiotic material was not available. But the unpublished Miller-Urey experiments conducted in that same year show that a modified version of Miller's original apparatus, which increased air flow with a tapering glass aspirator, produced 22 amino acids (still only 6 of the fundamentals) and the same 5 amines.²

The significance of the recently uncovered results produced by the altered apparatus does not go to the synthesis of proteins as a result of the inherent chemical properties of their molecular precursors within atmospheric conditions that entail a more vaporous, volcanic-gas-like mixture of steam. It goes to the more impressive results that are derived under these simulated conditions coupled with the potentialities of the RNA-world hypothesis and its obligatory molecular precursors. Hence, Senior Correspondent Stephen K Ritter misses the target when he assumes that the team of researchers who analyzed the results of the unpublished experiments "speculate that amino acids formed in volcanic island systems could have been polymerized by carbonyl sulfide—volcanic gas—to form peptides leading to proteins" (Stephen K. Ritter; Oct. 16, 2008; "Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited"; Chemical and Engineering News-Prebiotic Chemistry).

They could not have sensibly speculated any such thing, as it is well known that amino acids do not form lasting peptide bonds (much less proteins) under any natural conditions outside living organisms. And this is true under laboratory conditions as well, whether their mixtures be racemic, as is always the case in nature on Earth, or even if they be artificially homochiral.

The original apparatus of the published experiments simulated a strictly reducing atmosphere consisting of hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water, but as Ritter in the same article observes "[s]cientists who have analyzed Miller's experiments doubt that the highly reducing reaction conditions he used existed on early Earth"; however, the apparatus equipped with the aspirating mechanism simulated the more "intense conditions of a lightning-laced volcanic eruption." Hence, the researchers aver that "[t]he volcanic apparatus experiment suggests that, even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective". Precisely! But what the researchers mean by the word "effective" goes to the formation of amino acids only, and only within the domains of semi-reducing, carbonyl-sulfide-producing atmospheres of "volcanic island systems", as the more generally oxidizing atmosphere beyond would prevent their formation.

The problem with this scenario is that under natural conditions the newly created precursors could not have stayed inside these atmospheric enclaves for long, for unlike the artificial conditions calculatedly arranged within the apparatuses of laboratories, which artificially remove biotic materials from the synthesizing medium once they are formed, nature would have continued to bombard them and thusly would have destroyed them with the very same source of energy it used to create them. Worse, the vastly more copious abiotic materials that would have also been produced would have continued to react with the racemic mixtures of the biotic materials within the synthesizing medium and would have readily incorporated the latter into compounds that would have been utterly useless for life.

Miller's experiment did produce . . . amino acids, but only by continuously circulating the reaction mixture and isolating products as they were formed. The quantities were still tiny and not in the same proportions as found in nature.

One of the causes of the low yield has been identified by [Edward] Peltzer who worked with Miller. As the amino acids were formed they reacted with reducing sugars . . . forming a brown tar around Miller's apparatus. Ultimately, Miller was producing large compounds called mellanoids, with amino acids as an intermediate product. —J. H. John Peet (Oct. 2005), "The Miller-Urey Experiment", Truth in Science

But the real problem for the synthesis of amino acids in a reducing atmosphere is that in spite of the latter's abundance of free electrons, it would not have provided an ozone layer to protect the amino acids it produced. If the electrical energy that induced their synthesis in one instant did not reduce them to their basic elements or induce harmful reactions in the next, the entire range of UV light's wavelengths would have slapped them silly. And biologically useful organic compounds do not form in oxidizing atmospheres.

Perplexing.

That is why the out-gassing calculations based on chondritic models of planetary formation, which support a reducing atmosphere for the primordial world, do not solve the initial problem of an abiogenic account of life's origins.³ Indeed, chondritic models, in spite of their apparent credibility and that of their inherent calculations, do not explain away the equally compelling and essentially incontrovertible geological evidence that supports an early oxidizing atmosphere.

Perplexing.

It would appear that the problem of resolving the nature of the primordial world's atmosphere requires some sort of synthesis of the two possibilities. But even if the constituents of abiogenesis were profitably given over to the thralls of a semi-reducing atmosphere all those many years ago, we see no evidence of that today. The geological record should contain an overflowing abundance of nitrogen-rich mineral deposits. It doesn't.

Still, despite the paltry concentrations of organic materials produced relative to the energy expended, the best bet for abiogenesis would have been a semi-reducing atmosphere akin to the model simulated by the altered apparatus in the unpublished experiments. At least the organic materials produced in those were slightly more voluminous and diverse. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that the dynamics of the altered atmospheric model would have moved the materials away from the lingering dangers inside the synthesizing medium, past the threats beyond, and into the primordial soup of the oceans below more rapidly.

It's all pie-in-the-sky nonsense, of course, but as long as we're already suspending disbelief far above any reasonable altitude, we might as well go along with the tale forever: never mind the threats beyond the synthesizing medium, never mind the ubiquitous cross-reaction contaminants, never mind that water pushes peptidyl bonding backward, not forward, would disperse the constituents of proteins and condemn most of them to the whims of a churning and lonely isolation, and never mind most of all that the total amount of organic compounds on Earth today is less than a fraction of the lofty concentrations that would be reasonably favorable for the inscrutable processes of abiogenesis. After all, the other precursors of life, which improbably braved and overcame the same obstacles, have need of their prebiotic cousins. The long and arduous journey toward self-awareness must go on by way of an even more implausible series of elaborately complex and fortuitous accidents.

The Miller-Urey experiments showed that under the right conditions nature might be able to build some of life's amino acids; later discoveries in space and here on Earth confirmed that. But that in and of itself was not the rhyme or the reason of the experiments' underlying hypothesis, and beyond that, what have these experiments shown us? Well, not much about that which was expected, but plenty more about that which is obvious.

The natural occurrence of amino acids is light years away from life, and there exists no coherent or demonstrable explanation for how they aggregated and combined by mere chance in the exact sequences we find in life. And even if such a thing were possible, we'd still not be there.

How did the many hundreds of thousands of mindless proteins and other molecular components, which can only function within a very narrow range of conditions, aggregate and combine in the exact sequences required to build the thousands of intricately complex and interdependent pieces of machinery minimally required by a viable, functioning cell? The process could not have been accumulative, but had to have been instantaneously synchronous for obvious reasons. All these things evince a certain set of preconditions and necessities which stupid materialist layman will never understand and agenda-driven scientists will never acknowledge.

(As for those still operating under the sleight-of-hand illusion that the refutation of Behe's flagellum argument overthrows the classic construct of irreducible complexity, see "Another Debate" and "The Debate Continues. . . .".)

If one allows that an intelligent agent was required to create the simplest form of life, one opens the door to a world where the regnant theory for the development of life might unravel. If an intelligent agent did it once, what would prevent him from creating other and even more complex forms of life again and again?

We now know that life arose much earlier than was ever thought possible, and the ramifications of this are devastating for abiogenesis, which just keeps running into wall after wall after wall. And the more apparent the complexity of the genome and the infrastructural machinery and processes of the cell becomes, the denser the walls become.

We really don't have a clue about how to explain any of this without considering the necessity of a preexistent intelligence, which is precisely why more and more evolutionists are hesitantly going where they don't want to go. . . . While it still would not resolve the matter of origins, at the very least the evidence points to intelligent extraterrestrials. And that is precisely the point ID scientists have been making for years.

Atheism is poisoning science. Intellectual fascists are arbitrarily asserting a metaphysical naturalism against the evidence.

* * * * *

With the matter thusly framed, I asked the following question: "Given what we know today from biochemistry and microbiology, why to people continue to go for abiogenesis?" My query, together with my observations regarding the contents of Lord Fluffy Tail's source, elicited two responses, the chief characteristic of them being a stunning obtuseness of metaphysical contortions.

For example, Vincent G, a top contributor at Yahoo! Answers, writes:

Earth was running its own experiment over an area that is 500 million square kilometer[s], had access to far many more chemicals . . . with sources of energy that also included asteroid impact[s] and volcanic eruptions, and that experiment ran for million[s] of years. . . .

. . . Who cares if the gas in the jar was not exactly what is now believed to be the right composition? Has anyone tried to redo the experiment using the one that is now thought to be the right mix? Can anyone prove that nowhere on the planet . . . [there] did not exist a pocket of gas that matched what Miller and Urey used?

The fact is that we are detecting amino acid[s] in gas clouds in friggin['] space. It seems those chemicals can even form there!

But I suppose for weaker minds, calling on the intervention of a breaded guy on a cloud somewhere makes more sense.

To which I am now obliged to respond as follows. . . .

So what? That has nothing to do with the exchange rate of proteins in the intergalactic market.

Prior to the DNA and microbiological revolutions of the latter half of the 20th Century, it was believed by materialists that the first cell owed its existence to the inherent chemical properties of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. That is to say, it was believed that from these elements, amino acids (the building blocks of life) and, in their turn, proteins (the machinery of life) were assembled first; the formation of other cellular structures and functions by combinations and transformations of proteins followed: all these things occurring over millions of years within the primordial soup.

But the results of Miller-Urey, which indeed have been repeated hundreds of times in labs across the world, clearly demonstrate that brute forces alone under the atmospheric conditions postulated cannot create anything close to a viable mixture of life's amino acids. Hundreds of other atmospheric models have been tested in labs as well with the same results. In nature, all mixtures of amino acids on Earth occur in the wrong proportions and are invariably racemic, i.e., have equal numbers of left-handed (levorotatory or levo-) and right-handed (dextrorotatory or dextro-) amino acids.

Biology's amino acids are left-handed.

While Earth's atmosphere was more oxygen-rich much earlier than was previously thought possible, it's early primordial atmosphere was a mixture of mostly carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, vaporized water and sulfur dioxide; hence, it was enveloped by a generally oxidizing atmosphere in which the production of prebiotic materials would have been virtually impossible. But that assumes that the geologists have got it right. . . .

Contrary to your reckless disregard for the differences between atmospheric models (as if the painstaking efforts of scientists to nail them down were a mere pastime between potty breaks), the differences between the results derived from the Miller-Urey experiments based on a reducing or semi-reducing atmospheric model and those derived from experiments simulating the conditions of the most probable model are profound. The latter produce compounds that inhibit the formation of protein. These compounds are cyanide and formaldehyde. The rest of the substances produced by these experiments are water and other abiotic compounds. Cyanide is a building block for dextro-amino acids.  Formaldehyde destroys proteins and nucleic acids and is heavier than water. . . . It would have reached the oceans' depths and wreaked havoc on the supposed, organic creations of the primordial soup. (It should be noted that some formaldehyde is not necessarily a problem for abiogenesis, just the sort of concentrations that an oxidizing atmosphere would produce.)

All uncontrolled conditions and all forms of undirected energy readily denature the peptide bonds of proteins. This is especially true of the sort of conditions that are known to prevail as a result of "asteroid impact[s] and volcanic eruptions", and the energy derived from such events is redundantly catastrophic. The various conditions and forms of energy that can create amino acids are the very same as those that gleefully destroy proteins.

As for UV energy. . . .

The destructive intensity of its long wavelengths exceeds the constructive facility of its short ones; consequently, the quantum efficiency of the inhibitions it exerts against the polymerization of organic compounds is approximately five orders of magnitude higher than its threshold for the facilitation of their formation. In order to produce even non-functional amino acids, for example, biochemists must not only control for a certain range of conditions—including temperature—but must also select for the compound-producing wavelengths of light energy as they screen out the compound-destroying ones. Yet both types of light are unremittingly shed by stars, under which life's amino acids, except for glycine, readily break down. In other words, while ultraviolet energy can indirectly induce the chemical reactions of the organic elements that produce amino acids, it can also quickly destroy them.

Hence, I alluded to the various, alternative hypotheses for abiogenesis which have driven the primordial soup deeper and deeper into the ocean, actually, all the way down to the ocean floor. Here, beyond the reach of natural light's destructive wavelengths, it is imagined that life's various precursors formed on the backs of crystals or clay formations and then, in accordance with their self-ordering properties, assembled themselves inside discrete hydrothermal vents. However, in hindsight, it turns out that the problems of polymerization in the ocean are even more daunting due to the problem of dispersion and the higher probability of the toxic cross-reactions of dissymmetric molecules.

And the denaturing temperatures associated with geothermal or hydrothermal energy?

*Crickets chirping*

Accordingly, today's Darwinists believe that UV energy played only an indirect role in the polymerization of organic compounds. Variously, nature's abiogenic laboratories are the planet's interior cauldrons, the oceans and outer space. In the latter, the organic molecules in gaseous mixtures are partially converted by polarized light inside cooling asteroids. And the most interesting of these organic-bearing space debris are the "water-altered" variety with carbon-rich deposits, as their meteoric fragments contain many mixtures of amino acids that are predominately left-handed.⁴Much has been made of this by the zealots of scientism—the stuff of pigheaded presupposition and sensationalistic journalism (for example, "More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth"!). But since the leftward-leaning mixtures of the amino acids that are found in meteorites are abiotic, cooler heads recognize that their significance has been wildly exaggerated.⁵

Additionally, amateurish proponents of abiogenesis routinely misunderstand the nature of the controversy associated with the problem of contamination. For even if it were conclusively demonstrated that all mixtures of amino acids in space debris, including those that are pertinent to extant biochemistry, have an intrinsic excess of left-handed forms (a ubiquitous byproduct of interplanetary synthesis), the chemical reactions of the primeval terrestrial environment, in the absence of any amplifying mechanism to generate homochirality, would have readily neutralized their efficacity.⁶

In any event, the controversy does not pertain to the levo-enantiomeric excesses that are routinely found in space debris' mixtures of α-dialkyl amino acids.⁷ No one of any repute disputes that. Yet the Internet is awash with the silly and erroneous claim that the proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design attribute these excesses to contamination. Hogwash! Instead, the controversy pertains to the minority reports of levo-enantiomeric excesses of both α-dialkyl and biology's α-hydrogen amino acids being found inside the Murchison Meteorite.⁸ But the results of all the many other tests that have been conducted on Murchison and other chondrites, before and since, dispute the findings of Engel and Nagy (1982) and those of Engel and Macko (1997).⁹ That is to say, the results of all the other tests do indeed consistently show that the mixtures of α-dialkyl amino acids are predominately left-handed, but they also consistently show that the mixtures of biology's α-hydrogen amino acids are racemic. Hence, the overwhelming consensus is that the results of Engel et al., respectively, are due to contamination.¹⁰

Accordingly, it is believed that the chemical properties of α-dialkyl amino acids are uniquely susceptible to the manipulations of the interplanetary medium's two-step mechanism of polarized light and aqueous alteration. The overall quantity of X is reduced as some portion of its dextro-enantiomers are optically reoriented and aqueously altered, and another portion of the same are decomposed and thereby divorced from their enanteiomeric counterparts. The result is a smaller, altered mixture of X with an excess number of levo-enantiomers. While the finer details of the process are unknown, the outcome is manifest.¹¹

What is not manifest are the mechanisms by which these space travelers avoided being racemized on Earth, achieved homochirality and transferred it to the α-hydrogen amino acids of extant biochemistry. Was all of this accomplished before or after life began? If before, how in the absence of organic information? If after, why in the presence of a putatively self-replicating abundance of a well-established motif? Given the inevitability of racemization in heterogeneous environments (that is to say, given the vain pretensions of chemically acquired homochirality) and given the magical nature of transferring a mulishly intrinsic property from one type of amino acid to another . . . oh, never mind. These are inscrutable riddles.

While the unfathomable reaches of intergalactic space are slightly partial to left-handed amino acids (albeit, to the wrong type with respect to known terrestrial life), the vagaries of molecular chemistry on Earth are irreverently indifferent to them. In other words, there is no apparent, intrinsic reason that the basic biophysics of terrestrial life could not be conversely arranged on the basis of right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars instead. Yet terrestrial life is decisively biased about both the type and the optical form of its amino acids. While the process would be no less mysterious, insofar as it were left to the mindless devices of nature, why would the self-ordering properties of biochemistry take such a circuitous route and not simply amplify the chirality of α-hydrogen amino acids?

Once again, all of this comes down to the sort of predictions that evolutionary theory actually makes, bound as it is to a mechanism of random variables: stories about life's development (history) told in hindsight and based on nothing more substantial than the truism that what survives, survives . . . or in this case more at what is, is, and what was, was. Aside from all the hullabaloo over abiotic levo-enantiomers being nothing more than an unfalsifiable collection of vague and impenetrable conjectures, what is more annoying to the abiogenist—the unanswerable questions raised by his convictions or the questionable sanity of his convictions?

As for comets, it is now known that some amines and the amino acid glycine are produced inside irradiated compositions of frozen interplanetary dust. As life's amino acids go, glycine (being the simplest and, therefore, the sturdiest with only two hydrogen atoms on its side chain) can withstand the challenges of the interplanetary medium. (This may also be true of glutamic acid and alanine.) But this has long been suspected as glycine consistently constitutes the largest concentrations of the biotic compounds that are found in meteorites or produced in laboratory experiments. The other fundaments of life would be destroyed by galactic cosmic rays, solar-wind particles or UV radiation outside a comet's nucleus.¹²But this does not mean that comets could not have brought life's other, more complex amino acids to Earth or, according to computational chemistry, contributed to their creation on Earth—the result of shock-compression synthesis induced by glancing-impact events.¹³

*Yawn*

Wake me when abiogenists contrive a computer simulation that coherently explains how the first living cell was created by the primordial soup's orgy of happy coincidence and random variation.

Meanwhile back in the real world. . . .

The friggin' amino acids that have been detected "in gas clouds in friggin['] space", as well as those that have been produced in friggin' experiments or found in friggin' meteorites here on friggin' Earth have all been of the same friggin' quality with respect to that which is friggin' relevant to extant terrestrial life:  a friggin' racemic mixture of the wrong friggin' type in the wrong friggin' proportions without the benefit of having a friggin' adequate number of those friggin' required by life, all within in a friggin' "soup" of cross-reaction contaminants. Never mind that the friggin' chemical properties of life's friggin' amino acids are clearly not up to the friggin' challenge of actualizing the vast array of meticulously complex components that are friggin' required by even the conceivably simplest form of friggin' life.

Are the lights on yet? Did you find the switch?

Since Miller-Urey, the discoveries of biochemistry and microbiology have revealed precisely why the synthesis of life out of amino acids from the ground up is a dead end. Mere chemistry does not produce life; only complex structures produce life. Amino acids simply do not link up in nature to form proteins, not even when they are let loose in a pristine brew consisting of only left-handed ingredients. Without high-energy compounds and enzymes, amino acids do not form the many peptides and, therefore, the many proteins needed for life. But the most significant prerequisite of all is information, and that information resides above the chemical properties of amino acids.

The original, underlying hypothesis of the Miller-Urey experiments has been falsified for decades.

Hence, no matter how many experiments were conducted by planet Earth and no matter how many more particulate chemicals She might have had at Her disposal, there is no friggin' way that amino acids fabricated the hundreds of thousands of proteins that are found in living organisms. It takes more than a random collection of amino acids to make life. They must be assembled in a very precise and elaborate fashion in order to perform useful or desirable functions. Without the necessary information contained in preexisting nucleic acids, the result would be a collection of gobbledygook, and nucleic acids cannot evolve without the infrastructural and catalytic properties of preexisting proteins.

In other words, DNA synthesis relies on the presence of infrastructural and enzymatic proteins, and protein synthesis relies on the encoded genetic information in DNA and on the coded translations of that information in RNA. What we have here, at least with respect to the origins of DNA, is an interdependent circle of irreducible complexity.

(By the way, Vincent G, you're not by any chance related to that schmuck who goes by the moniker Dr. George Johnson are you? Yeah. Right. He thinks the essence of the chicken-or-the-egg problem is simply a matter of dilution and only applies to the origin of proteins. The problem is irreducibly catalytic, infrastructural and informational! All nucleic structures require proteins for their fabrication and structural integrity in living cells, and outside living cells, the spontaneously formed chains of nucleotides in vitro from preexisting material are meaningless collections of goop relative to the fabrication of biologically useful polypeptide chains. Further, the topic is abiogenesis! The problem of dilution has nothing to do with cellular environments; it has to do with the replication and polymerization of prebiotic compounds in acellular environments. And of course, neither nature nor experiments simulating realistic prebiotic conditions form nucleotides or proteins, least of all the Miller-Urey experiments. More pseudoscientific claptrap from a materialist know-nothing.)

I never said that "Miller-Urey . . . discredit[ed] abiogenesis".  I only hinted at the fact that the original, underlying hypothesis of Miller-Urey—once again, that life was built from the ground up by amino acids—had been falsified and suggested that the earlier-than-expected appearance of life on Earth was devastating to the subsequent models of abiogenesis: models that have arisen precisely because we now know for sure that the supposed primordial soup could not have fabricated the proteins necessary for life in the absence of organic information.

Every friggin' bit of your blather is moot! And that includes this bit of nonsense: "But I suppose for weaker minds, calling on the intervention of a breaded guy on a cloud somewhere makes more sense." Well, next time you pop off at a theist, you might want to bring something more substantial than your rather dull blade to what might be a gun fight. That is to say, you might want to open up your mind a bit and consider the possibility that you could be improved by a theist.

Science has moved on; you're decades behind it. Clearly, it is your pseudoscientific claptrap that does not belong on the "Science-Biology Forum" of Yahoo! Answers, and clearly your misreading of my piece is due to the arrogance of your "weak mind" and its lack of knowledge.

Now that I've brought you up to speed, awakened you, pulled you out of your make-believe world of pre-information proteins, let us move on to the make-believe world of the subsequent models of abiogenesis based on smaller compounds containing catalytic properties and information. . . .

* * * * *

The other response my query elicited was proffered by Bob. Though more scientifically current, it was in its own perverse way even more obtuse:

The RNA world has already shown easily how the early cells arose. The only element that still seems puzzling is the appearance of life in such a short period. . . .

. . . All essential molecules are present and can be produced under varieties of conditions.

First things first.

Bob, snap out of your zombie-like trance, put the crack pipe down and step away from the instrument.

You do understand that we're talking about abiogenesis, right? Hence, we're not talking about the organic compounds that are available today, i.e., the organic molecules (monomers) that are harvested from extant living cells and are used to synthesis organic macromolecules (polymers) in vitro. Nor, strictly speaking, are we talking about the various organic molecules that "can be produced under a variet[y] of conditions" in laboratories today. In other words, we're not talking about the present, Bob; we're talking about the past. We're talking about that which was realistically available to Mother Nature approximately 4.2 billion years ago.

Focus, Bob.

In the years since Stanley Miller's landmark experiments, scientists have synthesized 17 of the 20 fundamental amino acids in experiments simulating variously tweaked reducing atmospheres inside variants of Miller's original apparatus. But all of these procedures involved high concentrations of methane and ammonia. With respect to the actual conditions of the primordial world, the geological evidence does not support the presence of these kinds of concentrations. It's not even close. But even if it did, as discussed in the above, there would have been no ozone layer to shield the organic compounds produced, and, once again, in oxidizing atmospheres no biologically useful compounds are produced. Zilch. However, in a semi-reducing atmosphere, some of the simpler and more durable amino acids might have had a fighting chance, and we know for sure that the Murchison Meteorite contains 6 of the fundamentals—exactly the number that might have been produced in a semi-reducing atmosphere here on Earth!

Hence, I'll give you 6 amino acids, Bob, in racemic mixtures, and that's being generous. Due to the barely measurable presence and woeful instability of the other 11, no one of any repute would have the temerity to argue that they could have existed in any significant concentrations in the primordial world beyond the environment of a living cell . The 6 are glycine, alanine, glutamic acid, aspartic acid, valine and proline. In this category, that leaves you 14 shy of the 20 "essential molecules" you boasted about.

But the news gets better.

In 1961 Joan Oró synthesized the purine nucleobase adenine from the polymerization of hydrogen cyanide in an aqueous-ammonia solution (aqueous ammonium cyanide¹⁴) under a simulated reducing atmosphere.¹⁵

In March of 1999, Levy et al. showed that the purine nucleobase guanine could be synthesized in the same reaction, though at significantly lower yields, with the greatest volume of product produced at freezing temperatures.¹⁶

Inspired by previous experiments that produced the pyrimidines, howbeit, in low yields at general temperatures,¹⁷ a team of scientists recently synthesized adenine, cytosine and uracil from various reactive mixtures of urea (i.e., urea combined with cyanate, cyanoacetylene or the latter's hydrolyzed form cyanoacetaldehyde) in a cyclically frozen-and-thawed solution of eutectic ice under a simulated reducing atmospheric mixture of methane and nitrogen.¹⁸

Taken together, along with the lessons learned from Robertson and Miller (June 1995), these experiments show that freezing temperatures are generally best for the formation of the purines adenine and guanine, while boiling temperatures are best for the formation of the pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. And the best reactive mixture for the synthesis of cytosine, "from which uracil can be formed by hydrolysis", is urea and cyanoacetaldehyde.¹⁹

Semi-reducing environments won't cut it for the production of these compounds; it's an all-or-nothing affair. But it's not at all unreasonable to imagine that guanine was produced in UV-shielded pockets of frozen reductive mixtures in the arctic regions of the primeval world (Levy et at.), and uracil is a relatively durable compound which, in addition to being readily derived from the degradation of cytosine, appears to be produced under the reductive conditions of outer space inside asteroids, meteorites and comets. Both uracil and xanthine,²⁰ for example, were found in the Murchison Meteorite.²¹ But since cytosine readily degrades to uracil and guanine to xanthine, more tests must be conducted before terrestrial contamination can be satisfactorily ruled out.

Finally, the methylation of uracil, a simple reaction, produces thymine.

("Pretty impressive, eh?", the materialist smugly thought to himself. But then the mundane imperatives of the real world beyond the laboratory crept into his evanescent land of dreams . . . and the cheese slid off his cracker.)

Let's start with cytosine.

Regardless what the chemical composition of the synthesizing solution is, cytosine does not form within oxidizing mediums or in spark-discharge experiments within simulated reducing atmospheres. But even if it did form within the latter, cytosine converts to its photodimers under ultraviolet light and bypasses the reductive reaction that yields uracil.

The thermally energized synthesis of cytosine based on cyanoacetylene's reaction with cyanate requires extravagantly implausible concentrations of both, as well as unrealistic concentrations of methane and nitrogen. While cyanoacetylene is "an abundant interstellar molecule" (Robertson and Miller), only paltry concentrations of it are produced within the idyllic medium of methane and nitrogen once water or ammonia are added to the mix—a devastating blow to the expectation that cyanoacetylene played a significant role in the fabrication of organic compounds in the primordial soup.²² On top of that, in nature, cyanoacetylene finds other chemicals more alluring than the ugly duckling cyanate. But it is not likely that it was discomforted by the sight of cyanate very often given the fact that in nature the latter is derived from the hydrolysis of cyanogen, which has an estimated half-life of less than 30 seconds on Earth beyond laboratory conditions.²³

But wait, there's more!

Despite Robertson and Miller's glowing recommendations, it turns out that in the real world the synthesis of cytosine based on cyanoacetaldehyde and urea is futile.

First, cyanoacetaldehyde reacts with an even wider variety of chemicals than cyanoacetylene. When even relatively small concentrations of the other chemicals that would have been commonly found in the prebiotic environment are added to the mix, no detectable cytosine is produced; hence, in nature, cyanoacetaldehyde does not achieve the uninhibited concentrations required for the reaction to occur.²⁴ But more to the point, in nature it is exclusively acquired from the hydrolysis of cyanoacetylene, so its greater stability—such as it is, with a half-life of only 31 years—is moot.

Second, even if sufficient concentrations of cyanoacetaldehyde had been present in the prebiotic world, the end product of its reaction with urea is not cytosine, but uracil. The entire enterprise is actually an accelerated polymerization-deamination reaction, wherein less and less of the dissipating cytosine is produced as its precursor is used up (Robertson and Miller). In other words, the presence of urea induces the synthesis of cytosine only to cannibalize it for the production of uracil.

An obvious difficulty with this reaction is that the formation of cytosine and the subsequent deamination of the product to uracil . . . occur at about the same rate. . . . It is clear that the yield of cytosine would fall to 0% if the reaction were extended for a number of half-lives. This provides no difficulty in the laboratory, where one can start with a urea concentration of one's choice and monitor the time carefully. On early Earth, the following circumstances would be needed: An isolated lagoon or other body of sea water would have to undergo extreme concentration, to perhaps 10⁻⁵ of its initial volume. This reduction in volume would be needed to bring urea . . . to [the concentration] necessary for the reaction. It would further be necessary that the residual liquid be held in an impermeable vessel. . . . The concentration process would have to be interrupted for some decades . . . with the urea concentration near saturation, to allow the reaction to occur. At this point, the reaction would require quenching . . . to prevent loss by deamination. At the end, one would have a batch of urea in solid form, containing some cytosine (and uracil). This sequence cannot be excluded as a rare event on early Earth, but it cannot be termed plausible. —Robert Shapiro²⁵

The bottom line: the data of the empirical record and the fundamentals of chemistry do not support the proposition that there was a significant presence of cytosine's abiotic precursors in the primordial world, and scientists are not going to find cytosine in meteorites or anywhere else in the universe beyond the controlled and directed environments of laboratories and biological systems. Except perhaps in the sort of implausible, calcified state proposed in the above, cytosine spontaneously deaminates beyond the protective membranes of cells. Even when monitored by life's structural and regulatory systems, this unstable compound is highly susceptible to acidic protonation²⁶ and has an estimated half-life of about 340 years at moderate temperatures, albeit, in a theoretically sterile environment only.²⁷ There is no way that cytosine served as a replication component in the formative stages of any RNA-world (or "exposed-gene") scenario.²⁸

In this category, scratch cytosine off the list of the those "essential molecules", Bob.

I'll give you uracil, as well as thymine by default, although it does not seem likely that uracil could have been obtained from any other place but outer space, and space debris deliver their organic payloads in calcified mixtures replete with abiotic, cross-reaction contaminates. It's not at all clear how the goods might have extracted themselves from their conveyances in any significant concentrations, regardless of how many tons of the latter might have rained down on the primordial world during the solar system's formative years. Indeed, its hard to imagine how the process of chemical evolution was not repeatedly interrupted and made to start all over again from scratch—sent to jail without passing "Go"—by that rain of fire and brimstone. Also, you can have guanine, though how it's concentrations linked up with that of its peers or were not repeatedly destroyed by the same interplanetary weather pattern is merely a slightly different version of the same fuzzy-wuzzy.

But you can't have adenine. Its synthesis requires implausible concentrations of hydrogen cyanide. Also, it's a highly reactive compound and susceptible to hydrolysis with a half-life of only 80 years under moderate temperatures.²⁹ The only semi-stabilizing interaction by which it can maintain its composition at the molecular level outside a living cell and in the absence of ribose is the consequently "weak and nonspecific" bond it forms with uracil (or thymine), which would never hold up, much less "function in any specific recognition scheme under the chaotic conditions of a prebiotic soup."³⁰ Hence, assuming it existed at all before life began, there's just no way adenine could have amassed significant concentrations in an aqueous environment. And that's the worst of all possible news for the RNA-world hypothesis, as adenine is the one indispensable nucleobase in replication.

(By the way, Bob, you're not by any chance related to that schmuck Fraser Cain who claims that all five nucleobases were found in the Murchison Meteorite are you?)

The problem with stepping down to a simpler replicating polymer³¹with a less impressive arsenal of informational and catalytic properties is that it would become even harder for the abiogenic process to step back up to the level of a replicating polymer that would be competent enough to fabricate a cellular organism. But in the absence of any conceivable means of synthesizing biologically useful concentrations of ribose outside the membranous insulation of living cells, none of this amounts to a hill of beans, for there is no replication to be had by any system beyond the acellular stage without it.

While biological amino acids and nucleic compounds are left-handed, biological sugars are right-handed. Hence, the production of the latter also require sophisticated regulatory systems: no regulatory systems, including powerful enzymes, no biologically useful concentrations of ribose. Regardless, all sugars are highly unstable. They readily decompose or react with other chemicals.³² In order for it to retain the integrity of its composition, ribose requires the sequestered environments of living cells provided by cellular membranes, which are composed of proteins. Nucleotides require ribose: no ribose, no nucleotides. And if there's no nucleotides, there's no proteins. Yep. It's another one of those interdependent circles of irreducible complexity.

The idea of the RNA-world model is that primitive compounds consisting of nucleic material built increasingly greater extensions of themselves and thereby increased the volume of their information. At some point they attained the capacity to replicate themselves via recombinant mutations and then synthesized independent peptide chains (proteins). The new peptides were the means by which they boosted their catalytic firepower and range, and the material out of which they constructed primitive cellular membranes. After that, the more complex compounds (including nucleotides?) were constructed. Complex structures and reproductive systems were built. Life. DNA formed. Even more complex structures and reproductive systems were built. Life more abundantly. That's the synopsis, and there are variations of the yarn, which include suppositions of transitory, membranous structures that are composed of inorganic materials.

But wait a minute. What sugar was used to afford the formation of the nucleic-compound chains in the first place?

Well, it wasn't ribose, and no less than two of the known biological nucleobases, including the most vital of them all, were missing. As for amino acids, the nucleic compounds had only six in racemic mixtures to work with initially. And since there were no regulatory systems around at that stage to separate the left-handed wheat from the right-handed chaff, or vice versa with respect to ribose. . . .

Abiogenists have demonstrated that a small and incomplete regiment of ingredients were plausibly available—maybe, perhaps, what if. They have a knowledge about the basic types of compounds and structures that are minimally required. They have some vague notions about alternate routes of chemical interaction and structural substitutions. What they don't have in mind or at their command with any specificity in terms of real-world eventualities and established empirical data is the substance of the indispensable, gap-filling accessories that would make the fruition of their dreams possible.

For example, in answer to the question posed in the above, there simply is no coherent explanation about how mere nucleobases bypassed the intermediate form of nucleic compounds (nucleoside) in the absence of ribose and grew into self-replicating chains of nucleic material as if they were nucleotides. All the hype about the various sugars that are synthesized in laboratories or found in space debris is baby talk. When its molecular precursors are thermally energized in the presence of enzymes, only trace amounts of utterly worthless, racemic mixtures of ribose are produced.³³ The major products are other sugars, also composed of racemic mixtures, which combine with nucleic acids only to form compounds that prevent the polymerization of RNA.³⁴ Only in living cells do we find the structures that segregate metabolic sugars from nucleic sugars, and the regulatory mechanisms that prevent the production of racemic mixtures.

In other words, the self-ordering chemical properties of nature are monomeric dead ends. Nature can form some amino acids and nucleobases; it can form some biotic phosphates as well as some abiotic sugars and fatty acids in calcified forms. Where does it ever form proteins or nucleosides (let alone nucleotides) outside living cells? And beyond living cells and the in vitro experiments conducted under laboratory conditions, where does nature ever polymerize and replicate complex compounds?

*Crickets chirping*

A nucleoside is formed when a ribose sugar is added to a nitrogenous base (nucleobase). While the purine nucleosides adenosine and guanosine can be synthesized by adding a ribose, the reaction will not occur in water. But, of course, this reaction is performed in laboratories by biochemists using ribose sugars derived from extant organisms. In the prebiotic world, the reaction would not have occurred in dry environments either. But even if ribose had been available to the primordial soup, the phosphate in biological systems is an ester of phosphoric acid, not a salt. It could have only maintained its composition in deep waters, where ribose can't go, beyond the reach of ultraviolet light. The pyrimidine nucleosides uridine, cytidine and thymidine require both ribose and phosphate to form. Ribose sugars will not bond to the pyrimidine bases without phosphate. Hence, the maturation of the pyrimidines proceeds from nucleobase to nucleotide in one step.

But even if nature could manage the synthesis of nucleotides, their mixtures would invariably be racemic. Worthless. They'd have to be purified, and after that, concentrated and activated before the polymerization phase could begin. And a template? (Whose got the friggin' template?) Well, polymerization would just have to start without one. Besides, the forces of molecular chemistry would supposedly sort things out: even if pyrimidines won't polymerize without a template and even if the significance of organic information doesn't reside in the nucleobase "letters" or even in the condon "words", but in their sequence. All of these things and more would have to occur—from molecule to compound, from aggregation to polymerization, from replication to recombination, from transmutation to realization—in a contaminate-invested environment incessantly pushing the process in the wrong direction.³⁵

You don't know what you're talking about, do you, Bob?

I suspect that in your mind you have somehow muddled the difference between abiogenesis and biochemical engineering. Yes. In the laboratory, researchers have designed enzymatic RNA compounds that can affect a ligative production system that in its turn can fabricate self-replicating strands of RNA.³⁶ The initial stage of the procedure is front-loaded, not by the mechanism of natural selection, but by the preordained manipulations of a sentient being. The second stage of the procedure arguably entails the mechanism of natural selection, but only on the basis of recombinant mutation, not transmutation. Also, researchers have designed a ribozyme with catalytic properties that consists of only five nucleotides!³⁷ In vitro, they can even synthesis a series of oligonucleotides and assemble them into the entire genome of one bacterium, transplant it into the cytoplasm of another, and then step back and watch the transformed bacterium reproduce in accordance with the hereditary dictates of the synthetic genome.³⁸

But these researchers did not devise these wonders from scratch, Bob. The basic chemical components were harvested from living cells; these were not the partially formed pieces of junk from any primordial soup. Indeed, the procedures themselves were based on the fundamentals of preexisting biotechnology, informed by the known processes of biological systems. And all of these things were achieved with a preordained outcome in mind, within pristine and insulated solutions simulating the environment and facilities of living cells.

In other words, they worked with preexistent paradigms and tools and materials suspended in midair, as it were, relative to origins. They can pound on the roof all they want, that's not going to resolve the clearly insurmountable problems of prebiotic logistics and polymerization for those notions that are predicated on the processes of accumulative chemistry. Whether they be strictly natural occurrences or not, the only reasonable explanation for the origins of the building's foundation and walls entails some kind of instantaneously synchronous event or another, at some point in time or another, as several abiogenists themselves have acknowledged in exasperation. So in spite of the hype—the political speak of research funding—none of this is new in the sense that it would lead to anything more than recycled adumbrations about the events that produced the extant biochemistry on which these researcher's endeavors are unequivocally based.

Are they going to back peddle to the very same monomeric dead ends that have already been thoroughly illustrated by others? Of course not. The problem of origins is not merely one of chemistry; it entails unobservable historical events, as the late Stanley Miller himself recognized:

Miller acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely where and when life emerged. "We're trying to discuss a historical event, which is very different from the usual kind of science, and so criteria and methods are very different," he remarked. —John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Broadway Books (1997, pg. 139)

Very different, indeed, for Darwinian naturalism rests on a scientifically unsustainable argument that is ultimately theological in nature, one that assumes without proof that the entire history of terrestrial life is an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect. Make no mistake about it, Darwinism is a religious system of thought, one that is diametrically opposed to the ontology of the great scientists that preceded Darwin and his cohorts, which include some Christians, who have inexplicably embraced a theory that spurns the testimony of God regarding the exact nature of the origin and succession of life, and, consequently, the essence of original sin. The matter is predominantly historical, and God was the only One there.

Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Pasteur—all understood that the teachings of reveled religion and the inferences of scientific observation were not mutually exclusive, but mutually affirming sources of information about the same indivisible reality of human consciousness and about the spiritual imperatives of the world beyond. They rightly held that divinity constituted the only guarantee that the rational forms and logical categories of the human mind were reliably synchronized with the apparent substances and mechanics of empirical phenomena. Indeed, what are we to make of the Darwinist's absolute affirmation of a construct that by it's very nature would confine its constituents' experience of reality to the processes of a random and cognition-altering speciation?

By what process of "angelization" could men have become cognizant of their random origins and spectators of all time and existence, as though from some superior and independent vantage-point? Do the Neo-Darwinians, like so many other system-builders, desert the system of which they are the authors, claiming special cognitive principles that cannot be justified within the system? —Richard Spilsbury, Providence Lost: A Critique of Darwinism, Oxford University Press (1974, pg. 116)

In the face of the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of nucleotide formation, the current trend in gene-first research is to concentrate less on the concerns of a generalized atmospheric or oceanographic primordial soup, and more on the facilities of isolated spheres of polymerization involving a synthesis with the metabolism-first model. As the details are beyond the scope of this writing, I'll leave them to those who wish to investigate the matter for themselves. For now, I offer only the following brief synopsis and opinion.

We have the Deep-sea vent theory, the Clay theory, the Autocatalysis model, the Deep-hot biosphere model, the Radioactive-beach hypothesis, the Ultraviolet- and temperature-assisted replication model, the Amphiphile-bubble hypothesis, the Iron-sulfur world theory, the Thermosynthesis world, and more. . . .³⁹

I have examined them all exhaustively.

The various thermohydraulic models are hopelessly vexed by the statistically immense problems of dilution and hydrolysis; the various mineral- or clay-catalytic models are hopelessly vexed by the problem of chemical calcification; and the rest would expose their products to undirected solar energy or oxidation. Regardless, the processes of every single one of them would either generate non-transitional redundancies or employ forces that would destroy the materials their processes created. Hence, taken individually or together, while they purportedly explain everything, they explain nothing.

But even if by some fantastic contingency the processes of these various schemes managed to leap over their rainbows without breaking anything, even if the sum of the materials produced added up to the whole of life's molecular precursors, and even if by some fantastic feat of coincidence these precursors were all gathered together in overflowing concentrations of each: they would ultimately amount to nothing more significant than an organic compilation of goop.

Combine all the concentrated mixtures you want. Sky's the limit.

Goop.

Go with whatever conditions you want; feel free to variously alternate them at any time during the process.

Goop.

Go with whatever sources of energy you want; feel free to variously alternate them at any time during the process.

Goop.

Take all the time in the cosmos and multiply it millions of times.

Goop.

For there are no contingencies under which life could self-assemble.

Each nucleotide base pair has an equal affinity for the backbone of every other; their sequence is not due to any chemically preordained bonding affinity. That is to say, the assembly of organic molecules is not due to their chemical properties; it is due to an extraneous source of information. Indeed, it is this factor in the hands of the Potter that best accounts for the tenacity and great variety of terrestrial life, not the shiftless mechanism of natural selection. And the countless cells on the planet, with their thousands of pieces of interdependent machinery, are no less marvelous with regard to their durability and complexity, from that of the lowliest protozoan to the millions of mammalian creatures. Clearly, the entire enterprise of life entails a series of instantaneously synchronous resolutions according to a fabulously intricate and comprehensively preordained blueprint.

But Bob has one more thing to say, and it's all so very mysterious and metaphysical, sort of touchy-feely, about as close as the stale and fatuous undertakings of the atheist's shriveled heart ever comes to real sublimity, something about empirically demonstrable evidence involving chemistry and physics and the origin of human consciousness: the materialist's version of the theist's teleological argument, except this one comes without any categorically anchored strings attached, this is, without any rational caveats or qualifications. He mentions "faith" and complains about its inappropriateness, apparently, on the science forums of Yahoo! Answers. . . . It's all so very bizarre and confused—its absurdities flying right over his pointed head. But then atheists are notoriously bad philosophers anyway.

I cleaned it up a bit, corrected the annoying violations of grammatical tense in order to present it here and not gratuitously torture the minds of my readers. Deciphering the mangled thought processes of the atheist is already painful enough:

Life can arise without any intelligence being behind it. If chemistry and physics [had] not . . . allowed life to [arise] from them, we wouldn't be here to witness it. Thinking we had to be here is what leads to beliefs without evidence. And that is faith, which has no place here.

“Thinking we had to be here is what leads to beliefs without evidence”?

Indeed. So that would mean that Bob's statement regarding the inevitability of life arising out of the self-ordering properties of insensible molecules—that is, his demonstrably erroneous belief that "[t]he RNA world has already shown easily how the early cells arose"—is a faith-based belief "without evidence". We're here; therefore, mindless molecules and brute forces did it. That's all he's really saying.

As for Judeo-Christianity, it does not hold—as Bob apparently believes by the faith of literary ignorance—that "we had to be here". On the contrary, the Bible emphatically teaches that the cosmos and everything contained in it is wholly contingent upon God. It's not the other way around, as if the recommendations of the universal, objectively apprehensible idea of God and the recommendations of empirical evidence were merely the byproducts of human culture. The whole point of creation ex nihilo is that we would not and could not be here unless it were ordained by a preexistent intelligence. Hence, according to scripture, incontrovertibly backed by empirical evidence and sometimes backed by Bob's opinion depending on his mood, there is nothing inevitable about the existence of any terrestrial life form, let alone one that is sentient.

In other words, in spite of his oft repeated observation that in the scheme of things we are an insignificant speck—as if that were some earth-shattering profundity eluding lesser mortals—it is the atheist who insists that the inherent properties of chemicals make the appearance of life on Earth an inevitability, howbeit, under the right or coincidental conditions, not the Christian! And it is the Christian, not the atheist, who observes that while the Earth's position and its axial attitude within the solar system are amazingly conducive to the formulation of life-sustaining conditions, they also entail a manifold set of conditions that are prohibitively hostile to the spontaneous occurrence of life by mere chance.

Modernity's faddish, widespread belief in chemical evolution is nothing more than a rehash of spontaneous generation. Yesterday's version entailed many events occurring everywhere all the time; today's version entails a one-time-only event occurring in the unobserved long, long ago. The former has been falsified, and the latter defies explanation.

So where's the science?

What the sane among us still recognize to be the only rational alternative, secular humanists perceive to be a nuisance, the relic of a so-called benighted tribalism, something that portends a degree of speculation that resides beyond the faculties of a supposedly enlightened modernity, though the latter be the stuff of an ancient tradition akin to alchemy. Ever since Darwin, the everyday-walk-in-the-park skepticism that is so vital to real science has been overshadowed by the arbitrary dogma that science must stick to a purely materialist narrative, even if that narrative tells an incomplete or incoherent story.
______________________________
¹Roughly, proteins are infrastructural, catalytic, metabolic and storage mechanisms. Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) store, transmit and decode genetic information; they also perform structural, regulatory, cellular signaling, metabolic and co-catalytic tasks.

Amino acids are composed of an amine group (a nitrogen atom with a lone pair, i.e., a pair of valence electrons), a carboxylic acid group (a carbonyl and a hydroxyl), and a side chain. Their elemental constituents are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sometimes sulfur.

A nucleic acid forms when two or more nucleotides combine by way of the covalent bond between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate group of the next; hence, nucleic acids are simply macromolecules (polymers) composed of at least two or more nucleotides (monomers).

A nucleotide is composed of a nucleoside, a five-carbon molecule of a ribose sugar and at least one of three phosphate groups. A nucleoside is composed of a nucleobase bound to a five-carbon molecule of ribose sugar. The five nucleosides of living organisms are adenosine, guanosine, uridine, cytidine and thymidine. The five corresponding nucleobases are adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine and thymine. Hence, nucleotides form when a nucleobase is combined with a ribose sugar and a phosphate group. The sugar of ribonucleotides is ribose; the sugar of deoxyribonucleotides is deoxyribose.

The "skeletal" structure of adenine and guanine is purine (a pyrimidine ring fused to an imidazole ring), thus, the purine bases. The "skeletal" structure of cytosine, thymine and uracil is pyrimidine (a heterocyclic ring with two nitrogen atoms at positions 1 and 3), thus, the pyrimidine bases. Nucleotides can contain either a purine or a pyrimidine base. In both DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid) the purine bases, of course, are adenine and guanine; however, the pyrimidine bases in DNA are cytosine and thymine, while the pyrimidines in RNA are cytosine and uracil. Hence, RNA uses uracil in place of thymine.

Adenine always pairs with thymine (or uracil in RNA) by way of two hydrogen bonds, and guanine always pairs with cytosine by way of three hydrogen bonds.   —Michael David Rawlings

²John W. Kimball (Dec. 20, 2010). "The Origin of Life". Kimball's Biology Pages.

Stephen K. Ritter (Oct. 16, 2008). "Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited". Chemical and Engineering News: Prebiotic Chemistry.

There are a total of 22 standard, proteinogenic amino acids. Twenty of them constitute the fundamental building blocks of life, and these are fed into specialized cellular machines (ribosomes) that read (or decipher) encoded bites of information divulged by messenger RNA (mRNA) and then "translate" that information into proteins. The encodements are derived from an organism's genes, which are composed of variously numbered and arranged codons, with each codon consisting of three adjacent nucleotides. In other words, an mRNA molecule is a copy of a gene's sequentially arranged codons and is used by a ribosome as a template for the correct sequence of amino acids in a particular protein. Hence, ribosomes translate codons, one after the other, and, with the assistance of transfer RNA (tRNA), appropriate the corresponding amino acids, bind them together in the specified order and produce peptide chains (proteins).

An organism's genes are contained in its DNA (or in its RNA for many types of viruses, which, technically, are not organisms, at least not in any sense with respect to their dormant state). An organism's genome is the entirety of its hereditary information, consisting of both the genetic and the structural sequences of its combined DNA. The genome is the master blueprint of an organism's essential design and dynamics.

The assembly of 20 of the 22 standard amino acids are encoded for by the universal genetic code, i.e., the code that is found in all living organisms. Hence, these 20 are used by all living organisms for the creation and maintenance of their essential design and dynamics. The other two standard amino acids—selenocysteine and pyrrolysine—are also assembled proteinogenically, i.e., inside ribosomes via alterations of certain canonical amino acids during the initial stage of protein synthesis. These alterations, encoded by UGA and UAG codons, are incorporated (or inserted) by dissimilar mechanisms involving discrete or highly specialized mRNA and tRNA molecules. In other words, these co-transitional mechanisms and, therefore, these amino acids are not found in all living organisms. Selenocysteine is found in all eukaryotic organisms and in some prokaryotic organisms. Pyrrolysine is found in prokaryotic organisms only (i.e., in the enzymes of some methanogenic archaea and bacteria). Only one organism—an archaea species—is known to have both.

Some routinely confound the distinction between standard and nonstandard amino acids. The distinction between them is based on the phases of protein synthesis, not on the processes/mechanisms associated with the synthesis of amino acids. Accordingly, the standard amino acids are the initial components of the translational phase of protein development, and the transitional phase occurs inside an organism's ribosomes. The nonstandard amino acids are the specialized components of the modification phase of protein development, and the post-transitional, modification phase involves certain metabolic processes that occur outside the organism's ribosomes. Hence, nonstandard amino acids are those that have been chemically modified after they have been incorporated into proteins, as well as those that are found in organisms, but not found in proteins. In addition to these, there exist an unknown number of abiotic amino acids.

The twenty canonical amino acids are alanine, arginine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamic acid, glutamine, glycine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, proline, serine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine and valine. These are divided into the essentials and nonessentials: (1) the essentials are those that an organism cannot synthesize inside its own body for itself, so they must be ingested, acquired from an organism's diet; (2) the rest are said to be nonessential because they are already produced by the organism's body. For humans, the essentials are those contained in the proteins that build muscle and organs. Human adults can synthesis 10 of the 20 canonicals via replication or intermediate metabolic processes. The rest are readily acquired from animal flesh. —Michael David Rawlings

³Tony Fitzpatrick (Sep. 8, 2005). "Calculations favor reducing atmosphere for early Earth: Was Miller-Urey experiment correct?". Washington University in St. Louis: Newsroom.

⁴Nancy Neal-Jones and Bill Steigerwald (Dec. 16, 2010). "Building blocks of life created in 'Impossible' place". Physorg.com: Space and Earth, Space Exploration.

Nancy Atkinson (Jan. 18, 2011). "More Asteroids Could Have Made Life’s Ingredients". Universe Today.

^{5 and 6}Anne M. Rosenthal (Feb. 12, 2003). "Murchison’s Amino Acids: Tainted Evidence?". Astrobiology Magazine.

Elie Dolgin (March 16, 2009). "Did lefty molecules seed life?". Faculty of 1000, Post-Publication Peer Review: TheScientist.

Daniel P. Glavin and Jason P Dworkin (Jan. 23, 2009). "Enrichment of the amino acid L-isovaline by aqueous alteration on CI and CM meteorite parent bodies" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). PNAS: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center.

⁷α-dialkyl amino acids (which include α-methyl amino acids) are relatively insignificant to protein biochemistry. They have two carbon atoms attached to the pivotal α-carbon atom of the amine and carboxylic acid groups, instead of at least one hydrogen atom.   —Michael David Rawlings

⁸Michael H. Engel and Bartholomew Nagy (April 29, 1982). "Distribution and enantiomeric composition of amino acids in the Murchison meteorite". Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona.  Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (296, pgs. 837-840).

Michael. H. Engel and S. A. Macko (Sep. 18, 1997). "Isotopic evidence for extraterrestrial non- racemic amino acids in the Murchison meteorite". School of Geology and Geophysics, The University of Oklahoma; Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia.  Nature: Letters to Nature (389, pgs. 265-268).

^{9 and 10}Jeffrey L. Bada, John R. Cronin, Ming-Shan Ho, Keith A. Kvenvolden, James G. Lawless, Stanley L. Miller, J. Oro and Spencer Steinberg (Feb. 10, 1983). "On the reported optical activity of amino acids in the Murchison meteorite". Amino Acid Dating Laboratory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California; Department of Chemistry and Center for Meteorite Studies, Arizona State University; US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California; Ames Research Center, NASA; Department of Chemistry, University of California; Department of Biophysical Sciences, University of Houston. Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (301, pgs. 494-496).

J. R. Cronin and S. Pizzarello (Feb. 14, 1997). "Enantiomeric excesses in meteoritic amino acids". Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University. Science; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (275, 5302, pgs. 951-955).

S. Pizzarello and J. R. Cronin (Feb. 4, 1999; revised June 28, 1999). "Non-racemic amino acids in the Murray and Murchison meteorites". Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (Vol. 64, Issue 2, pgs. 329-338).

Anne M. Rosenthal (Feb. 12, 2003). "Murchison's Amino Acids: Tainted Evidence?". Astrobiology Magazine.

¹¹Kate Melville (Jan. 20, 2011). "More evidence for asteroids creating life on Earth". Science A Go Go.

F Cataldo1, J R Brucato and Y Kahayan (Jan. 2005). "Chirality in prebiotic molecules and the phenomenon of photo- and radioracemization." Soc. Lupi Chemical Research Institute, Via Casilina, Rome, Italy; INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico Capodimonte, Napoli, Italy; Istituto per lo studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati, CNR, Rome, Italy. IOP Science: Journal of Physics, Conference Series (6, 139).

¹²Maggie McKee (Aug. 17, 2009). "Found: first amino acid on comet". NewScientist: Space.

¹³"Amino Acids could be produced within impacting comets, bringing life to earth". Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Public Affairs (Sep. 12, 2010).

¹⁴Aqueous ammonium cyanide is a liquid compound derived from a heated mixture of hydrogen cyanide and ammonia hydroxide (ammonia-water): HCN + NH₃(aq) gives NH₄CN(aq). —Michael David Rawlings

¹⁵Joan Oró (Sep. 16, 1961). “Mechanism of synthesis of adenine from hydrogen cyanide under possible primitive Earth conditions". Chemistry Department University of Houston. Nature: Letters to Nature (191, pgs. 1193-1194).

The reducing atmospheric mixtures used to produce nucleic bases variously consist of methane, nitrogen, hydrogen, ammonia, cyanogen, carbon monoxide and ethane. —Michael David Rawlings

¹⁶Matthew Levy, Stanley L. Miller and John Oró (Mar. 31, 1999). “Production of Guanine from NH₄CN Polymerizations”. SpringerLink: Journal of Molecular Evolution (Vol. 49, No. 2, pgs. 165-168).

¹⁷Sanchez RA, Ferris JP and Orgel LE (Nov. 11, 1966). "Cyanoacetylene in prebiotic synthesis". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. Science; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (154, 750, pgs. 784-785).

Sanchez RA, Ferris JP and Orgel LE (Dec. 14, 1967). "Studies in prebiotic synthesis: II. Synthesis of purine precursors and amino acids from aqueous hydrogen cyanide". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. Journal of Molecular Biology; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (30, 2, pgs. 223-253).

James P. Ferris, Robert A. Sanchez and Leslie E. Orgel (May 14, 1968). "Studies in periodic synthesis: III. Synthesis of pyrimidines from cyanoacetylene and cyanate". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. ScienceDirect: Journal of Molecular Biology (Vol. 33, Issue 3, pgs. 693-704).

¹⁸César Menor-Salván Dr., Dra. Marta Ruiz-Bermejo, Marcelo I. Guzmán Dr., Susana Osuna-Esteban, Sabino Veintemillas-Verdaguer Dr. (Mar. 13, 2009). "Synthesis of Pyrimidines and Triazines in Ice: Implications for the Prebiotic Chemistry of Nucleobases" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). Centro de Astrobiología, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, Carretera Torrejón-Ajalvir, Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain. Wiley Online Library: Chemistry, A European Journal (Vol. 15; Issue 17; pgs. 4411-4418; April 20, 2009).

¹⁹Michael P. Robertson and Stanley L. Miller (29 June 1995).  "An efficient prebiotic synthesis of cytosine and uracil". Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California.  Nature Publishing Group: Letters to Nature (375, pgs. 772-774).

²⁰Xanthine is a non-genetic nucleobase that is mostly found in plants and in the tissues, organs and body fluids of human beings and animals. —Michael David Rawlings

²¹"Did life begin with a meteorite? Scientists discover genetic ingredient for creation of man on rock from space". The Independent: Science (June 18, 2008).

Zita Martins, Oliver Botta, Marilyn L. Fogel, Mark A. Sephton, Daniel P. Glavin, Jonathan S. Watson, Jason P. Dworkin, Alan W. Schwartz, Pascale Ehrenfreund (June 15, 2008). "Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison Meteorite". Cornell University Library: Earth and Planetary Science Letters (270, pgs. 130-136).

^{22 and 23}James P. Ferris, Robert A. Sanchez and Leslie E. Orgel (May 14, 1968). "Studies in periodic synthesis: III. Synthesis of pyrimidines from cyanoacetylene and cyanate". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. ScienceDirect: Journal of Molecular Biology (Vol. 33, Issue 3, pgs. 693-704).

²⁴Francois Raulin, Suzanne Bloch and Gerard Toupance (April 1977). "Addition reactions of malonic nitriles with alkanethiol in aqueous solution". SpringerLink: Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (Vol. 8, No. 3, pgs. 247-257).

²⁵Robert Shapiro (April 13, 1999). "Prebiotic cytosine synthesis: A critical analysis and implications for the origin of life". The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, CA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 96, No. 8, pgs. 4396-4401).

²⁶Edward R. Garrett and Josef Tsau (July 1972). "Solvolyses of cytosine and cytidine". Wiley Online Library: Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Vol. 61, Issue 7, pgs. 1052-1061).

Robert Shapiro and Robert S. Klein (July 1966). "The Deamination of Cytidine and Cytosine by Acidic Buffer Solutions, Mutagenic Implications". ACS Publications: Biochemistry (5, 7, pgs. 2358-2362).

^{27 and 28}Matthew Levy and Stanley L. Miller (July 7, 1998). "The stability of the RNA bases: Implications for the origin of life" (ABSTRACT, FULL PAPER). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Vol. 95, No. 14, pgs. 7933-7938).

²⁹Matthew Levy and Stanley L. Miller. "The stability of the RNA bases: Implications for the origin of life".

³⁰Shapiro R. (June 25, 1995). "The prebiotic role of adenine: a critical analysis." Department of Chemistry, New York University. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (1-3, pgs. 83-98).

³¹The most interesting of the postulated pre-RNA polymers are pyranosly RNA (pRNA).  —Michael David Rawlings

^32-34Robert Shapiro (1988). "Prebiotic ribose synthesis: A critical analysis".  SpringerLink: Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (Vol. 18, Nos. 1-2, pgs. 71-85).

³⁵Robert Shapiro (Mar. 2000). "A replicator was not involved in the origin of life." Department of Chemistry, New York University.  IUBMB Life; National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: Pubmed.gov (49, 3, pgs. 173-176).

³⁶"How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time". ScienceDaily: Science News (Jan. 10, 2009).

Tracey A. Lincoln and Gerald F. Joyce (Jan. 8, 2009). "Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme". Department of Chemistry, Department of Molecular Biology and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology of The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA. AAAS: Science (Feb. 27, 2009; Vol. 323; No. 5918; pgs. 1229-1232).

³⁷"Scientists Create Tiny RNA Molecule With Big Implications for Life's Origins". ScienceDaily: Science News (Feb. 24, 2010).

Rebecca M. Turka, Nataliya V. Chumachenkob and Michael Yarusa (Jan. 27, 2010). “Multiple translational products from a five-nucleotide ribosome”. Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Feb. 22, 2010).

³⁸"Venter Institute Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome: Team Completes Second Step in Three Step Process to Create Synthetic Organism". J Craig Venter Institute (Jan. 24, 2008).

Daniel G. Gibson, Gwynedd A. Benders, Cynthia Andrews-Pfannkoch, Evgeniya A. Denisova, Holly Baden-Tillson, Jayshree Zaveri, Timothy B. Stockwell, Anushka Brownley, David W. Thomas, Mikkel A. Algire, Chuck Merryman, Lei Young, Vladimir N. Noskov, John I. Glass, J. Craig Venter, Clyde A. Hutchison III and Hamilton O. Smith (Jan. 24, 2008). “Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome”. The J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD. AAAS: Science (Feb. 28, 2008; Vol. 319; No. 5867; pgs. 1215-1220).

"First Self-Replicating, Synthetic Bacterial Cell Constructed by J. Craig Venter Institute Researchers". J Craig Venter Institute (May, 20, 2010).

³⁹The various bait-and-switch schemes of panspermia and exogenesis merely push the problem of origins off to other planets or solar systems. —Michael David Rawlings

Another Atheist's Unexamined Thought Processes: A Close Encounter of the Raw Kind

2011-03-04T05:00:00.012-05:00

by Michael David Rawlings

Ever notice that the vast majority of atheists are statists? Seriously, out of all the many atheists I've encountered in my life, only a small handful were not. But more to the point, have you ever noticed how many of them don't seem to realize it themselves, as they inexplicably perceive the Christian's defense of Lockean natural law to be an apology for theocracy? Theocracy? Lockean natural law? Ever notice how many of them never seem to really grasp the socio-political implications of their slogan-speak? But that's giving them the benefit of the doubt; that's assuming that they're really not as sinister as their expressed thought processes would suggest, just stupid.

Check out the following statement recently made by an atheist on Yahoo! Answers who considers herself to be really, really smart and "an open-minded person" who "believe[s] in equal rights for all":

Another benefit [of religion] is that for some people, religion is the primary reason for doing good deeds such as volunteering and charity work. Obviously these are misguided motives, but at least the outcome is good! —Catherine

Note the casual arrogance: "Obviously these are misguided motives. . . ."

She continuous:

Many of the negative outcomes of religion stem from organized religion. Religion and government[,] and religion and education don't mix. . . . —Catherine

"[N]egative outcomes" of "organized religion"? She might as well talk about the negative outcomes of organized political parties, organized fraternities or organized sports. Name one formal group of individuals formed around a common belief or purpose that is not "organized". Further, any person with an IQ above that of a gnat and knows his history understands that beyond the whims of nature, the biggest threat to humanity is organized government, informed by one ideological system of thought or another. In the real world, no institution exists in an ideological vacuum.

But what are these mysteriously unique, negative outcomes of organized religion? In what sense are they different from those produced by other kinds of organizations? Never mind the logical fallacy of generalization, never mind that in the real world a myriad of different religious perspectives collide. This is important. We'll just lump all religions together as if they all ascribed to the same system of metaphysics and moral philosophy.

Wait! Wait! Eureka! Religion promotes charity!

But, no, that's not a negative . . . just a misguided plus.

False alarm.

Moving on. . . .

Now, we may quickly dispatch the atheist's delusion that religion and government don't mix; after all, human beings do not just throw their ideological biases, regardless of their nature, to the four winds when they enter the political arena. There most certainly is an intrinsic relationship between religion and government, for in fact human beings just so happen to be the very essence of that relationship!

I think we just stumbled across one of those socio-political implications of atheistic slogan-speak that its practitioners routinely and mindlessly overlook. Apparently secularists in general and atheists in particular are operating under the delusion that they don't drag their ideological baggage—including its morality, such as it is—into the political arena. And if they did, so what? It's supposedly not the stuff of religion! And it follows that the theist may not enter into the political arena with any legitimate expectation that the law of the land reflect his socio-political concerns, for obviously he must defer to the secular humanist in all things governmental.

Well, gee wiz, someone has to govern!

(Is there an atheist in the house who can explain precisely where in his godless and, therefore, meaningless universe this imperative exists beyond his thuggish, self-serving rhetoric and irredeemingly convoluted mind?)

But then we've already been down that road before. Wherever atheistic and invariably totalitarian regimes have prevailed—in spite of the typical atheist's depraved indifference to the historical record—the wholesale slaughter and imprisonment of not just thousands or even tens of thousands, but tens of millions of dissenters, especially unrepentant religionists, have always followed.

But surely Catherine doesn't mean that theists should be effectively disenfranchised or perhaps slaughtered and imprisoned as they were in the Soviet Union and continue to be in the People's Republic of China . . . just for starters.

Moving on. . . .

Religion and education don't mix?!

And what are the socio-political implications of this arbitrary rash of madness?

How exactly does one attain a credible understanding of the history of ideas and events without examining the pertinent cultural , societal, political and, yes, religious aspects of that history? Are the pertinent professors at her school only partially trained in history and the humanities?

From what planet did Catherine's saucer fly in from? Her statement is essentially meaningless. Inscrutable.

But what she's really getting at ultimately goes to the abolition of parental authority over matters of education and socialization. And If not, why not? Clearly, she would apply this nonsense to public schools at the very least, the educratic philosophy of religionists be damned. That's what leftists are doing in the public schools now, shoving their rubbish down everybody's throats in their one-size-fits-all trash cans. (See "Revisions and Divisions".) And if religionists don't like it they can educate their children at home or in a school of their choice. Really? Is that before or after they are fleeced of the tax dollars they pay into the system out of which they are driven by disgust? As for the others who do not artificially compartmentalize their approach to education, but cannot afford to pay for it twice: well, their children will just have to accept whatever lefty allows.

Of course, this assumes that lefty allows anyone to leave the public schools. There's no guarantee, as leftist activists incessantly use the courts to attack homeschoolers, for example, in states like California, Oregon, Minnesota, New York and others. The plight for ideological liberty in education is even worse in Canada where Catherine lives or comes from. It's likely that since she was knee-high to a grasshopper her mind's been thoroughly conditioned to think that such violations of natural law by the state are perfectly normal and just.

Who are these people who casually prattle about what does and does not constitute a legitimate regiment of education as if they were articulating some kind of self-evident absolute to which we are all beholden? Who are these people, these perfect strangers, who would essentially invade our families and the minds of our children via some instrument of the State with their filthy, atheistic blasphemies of secular humanism? Who are these people who would that are children essentially be the property of the State, chattel of whatever educratic oligarchy they deign to erect and dictate to the rest of us what we may or may not teach? More to the point, by what authority other than brute force do these thugs first eschew the existence of God and then elevate themselves to His position above the heads of their peers? In short, who are these putatively open-minded, free-thinking enemies of ideological liberty?

Stop sputtering, Catherine. There is no other logical end to your mindless utterances.

The truth about the atheist is that he worships himself first and then inevitably some demagogic megalomaniac like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Jung-il.

Catherine reveals the agenda or her worldview, though it's doubtful that until this very moment she's ever come face-to-face with the conclusion that resides at the other end of the logical chain of thought premised on the rhetoric she's been spewing all her life—regurgitated by rote, clearly planted in her head by others, ideas never once truly her own. Well, that is, unless she really has consciously been a monster all your life . . . chomping at the bit to get her Seig Heil on.

But Catherine does lay here finger on two of those supposed negative outcomes . . . or maybe not.

[B]ut when . . . [religion] causes people to discriminate against one another or to disregard science, it quickly does more harm than good. —Catherine

While Catherine's statement is of the sort that gives leftists that weepy, snot-infested-hanky feeling, this stunningly obtuse asseveration is littered with logical fallacies. It contains (1) an obvious and thoughtlessly irresponsible sweeping generalization that (2) a-priori begs the question and (3) implicitly appeals to authority without qualification. It also contains (4) the fallacy of affirming the consequent which proceeds from (5) a fallacy of essence and leads to (6) a multi-layered fallacy of false cause (specifically, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e., because X and Y simultaneously persist, X caused Y). The latter fallacy, at least in part, most likely stems from (7) the genetic fallacy that pre-scientific biblical exegesis, for example, accurately represents the essence of the biblical narrative, or that post-scientific exegesis does not conform to the demonstrably or reasonably incontrovertible evaluations of modernity.

In short, her statement is a mess, but it would take volumes to thoroughly untangle it. I'd be moving way too fast for the minds of Catherine and her ilk anyway, minds whose cognitive faculties have been artificially stunted by years of reductionistic conditioning, wherein cognition is reduced to the accumulation of disconnected constituents, bits and pieces of information. The process is more technically assimilative than imaginatively analytic or systematic. It tends to stifle intellectual curiosity and passion. That is why so many secularists—typically leftists—think and speak in slogans.

Hence, I will simply make a few incontrovertibly self-evident observations.

Discrimination, in and of itself, is not evil or bad or wrong. On the contrary, it is an inherent, inescapable facet of human consciousness. Cognitively, it is the necessity of identifying or distinguishing the difference between characteristics or modes that are incompatible, a matter of differentiation. Duh. Ideological discrimination goes to the differentiation of cultural or socio-political beliefs and actions within the collective. These differences can either be suppressed by force or permitted to co-exist by way of untrammeled free association. Choose.

All those who believe that Catherine does not discriminate against the ideology of Judeo-Christianity and its adherents, would happily welcome a group of us bible thumpers into the hall of her atheist ho-down, i.e., not discriminate against us, but happily allow us to impose our ideological values on her group—extinguish it by way of forced assimilation—raise your hands. The rest of you, being sane, behold the arrogance, the pretentiousness and the veiled totalitarian threat of multiculturalism.

Once again, assuming that Catherine's rhetoric is nothing more than another page out of the book The Glaringly Obvious Gullibility of Unexamined Suppositions, it is essentially meaningless, another absurd example of her indoctrination. All she's really saying is that only those who disagree with her discriminate against other people. . . . Her discrimination against other people is not discrimination against other people, but merely the rejection of the beliefs and behavior of those who discriminate against other people (even though the nature of the discrimination of those with whom she disagrees is the rejection of her worldview and its values), as she does not discriminate against other people. . . . Oh, never mind.

Who made Catherine the arbiter of truth, the knower of the difference between good and evil forms of discrimination? On what uncontestable moral authority does this atheist stand?

Sure religion is a comforting thing but when it causes people to . . . disregard science. . . . —Catherine

Like the adherents of the religion of materialism?

See "Abiogenesis: The Holy Grail of Atheism" by Michael David Rawlings.

Citizenship and Nationality: Historical Foundation and Framework

2009-12-23T17:00:00.011-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

The entire legal structure of the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and nationality rests on the philosophical construct of territorial-hereditary allegiance. In accordance with the common-law rules of jus soli ("the law of the soil"), British citizenship was ultimately premised on the soil of the Realm; however, in 1350, the Crown instituted the Roman principle of jus sanguinis ("the law of the bloodline"). All persons sired by natural-born subjects—regardless of where they were born, on the soil of the Realm or abroad—owed their fealty to the Crown and were entitled to its protection from the moment of birth.

However, the English concept of hereditary allegiance was a modified version of the Roman principle. Under Roman law, all citizen fathers had an inalienable right to pass their citizenship down to their children, but under English law, jus sanguinis imparted natural-born citizenship by extending the Crown's jurisdiction on the basis of the Father's prior claim on the soil of the Realm. In other words, while British citizenship via jus sanguinis bestowed the full rights and privileges of the Crown's jurisdiction, it was strictly a statutory act of benevolence. The Crown and later Parliament could either extend or revoke the privilege, and the power of royal-parliamentary prerogative was absolute: hereditary allegiance was not an inherent right under English Common Law.

While all native-born subjects were inherently natural-born by jus soli, not all natural-born subjects were native-born, and persons without any prior claim on either the soil or the blood of the Realm—that is, born abroad of foreign subjects—could become subjects of the Crown by establishing residency on the soil of the Realm and swearing an oath of fealty. Thereafter, naturalized subjects could pass their nationality down to their children just like any other subject, but unlike their natural-born descendants, they did not enjoy the full measure of fealty's privileges. At the time, this meant they were barred from occupying certain positions of civil authority. Hence, the distinction between a subject born on the soil of the Realm and a subject born solely of the blood of the Realm was academic; the distinction between the natural-born subject and the naturalized subject was definitive.

Except for certain, obvious details owing to the differences between monarchies and republics, the foundation and skeletal framework of citizenship and nationality established in American law by the Framers of the Constitution mostly adhered to the English legal tradition. Under constitutional law, for example, citizenship by statute is not an inherent right either, but subject to congressional prerogative and conditions of retention. However, originally, there were two important differences that are not obvious. The Framers' construct of territorial-hereditary allegiance did not embrace the British common-law rules of birthright citizenship and perpetual allegiance. In Great Britain, all persons born on the soil of the Realm were natural-born subjects of the Crown—including the children of foreigners, unless the alien parents were engaged in some official capacity by a foreign power. Also, the Crown imposed a nonnegotiable, life-long obligation of fealty on all of its subjects.

Originally, under constitutional law, persons born on the soil of the nation were not necessarily natural-born citizens of the United States, and the original rule of exclusion did not just apply to the children of slaves and indentured servants. One had to be born of both the soil and the blood of the nation, with the natural-born citizenship of children born abroad of U.S. citizens predicated on the citizen parents' prior claim on the soil of the nation. In 1898, the Court superimposed the British common-law rule of birthright citizenship on the constitutional rule of jus soli in the landmark case of Wong Kim Ark.

Under natural law and, therefore, constitutional law, all men are ultimately the subjects of God. Hence, American citizens have an inherent right to peacefully expatriate themselves, and, at the same time, the people's legislative body retains the right to expatriate citizens. Though at first blush it might strike some as being counterintuitive, due to the natural-law principle of free association, citizenship retention is not an inherent right under constitutional law, and that remains the case today despite the modifications imposed by the Court on the congressional powers of prerogative and expatriation in Schneider v. Rusk (1964) and Afroyim v. Rusk (1967).

In accordance with the general specifications of the constitutional blueprint, Congress put up the bricks and the mortar comprising the rest of the structure and has periodically modified the preconditions and the requirements of retention for citizenship by statute. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment naturalized nearly five million U.S. nationals who had been barred from citizenship on the basis of race or servitude. Also, over the years, the Court, especially since 1898, has added a few touches of its own to the structure with mixed results and equally mixed reviews. But apart from the Court's unwarranted imposition of the British common-law rule of birthright citizenship and despite the structure's seemingly unfathomable maze of regulatory wiring and plumbing—particularly that behind the walls of the extensions built on to house the territorial booty of expansion and conquest—the rest of the original structure of America's system of citizenship and nationality remains essentially unchanged.

A summary:

The entire structure of American citizenship and nationality rests on the philosophical construct of territorial-hereditary allegiance.

There are two distinct legal principles of natural-born citizenship: by right of soil and by right of blood. Citizenship acquired on the basis of the latter is subject to congressional prerogative and conditions of retention.

One is either a natural-born citizen or a naturalized citizen; that is, one is either a citizen at birth or becomes a citizen subsequent to birth.

There are three distinct conceptual considerations with regards to the determination of nationality and the prerequisites of citizenship: native born, natural born and naturalized. Though significant relative to the conditional nature of jus sanguinis, the distinction between the first two is more academic than definitive. Naturalized citizenship is acquired subsequent to birth and is subject to preconditions.

The Republic's territorial boundaries of national allegiance and the government's jurisdiction for constitutional purposes are not synonymous.

Related Topics

Next article in the series: The Natural-Born Citizen Clause of the Constitution

The Natural-Born Citizen Clause of the Constitution

2009-12-23T16:55:00.008-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

The Fifth Clause of Section One, Article Two ("Natural-Born Citizen Clause") of the United States Constitution with its grandfather provision:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Of the two terms universally understood at the time of the drafting of the Constitution to be associated with the construct of territorial-hereditary allegiance, had the Framers intended a more restrictive definition of inherent citizenship, they would have used the term "native born", not "natural born", and the more expansive concept of natural-born citizenship goes back centuries: defined and established by Roman Law, passed down to English and American law.¹ Neither the Constitution nor statute defines the concept; the concept comes down to us defined and understood in legal tradition. Instead, the Constitution establishes the two fundamental classifications of citizenship in American law—natural-born citizenship and naturalized citizenship—by enunciating the fundamental characteristics that divide them—the moment of conferral and presidential eligibility—and statute stipulates the respective terms of acquisition that govern them.

As of the date of the Constitution's adoption, only those persons who had been born at home or abroad to American citizens under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were natural-born citizens. All other U.S. citizens under the Articles had been subjects of the British Crown at birth, so they were grandfathered into presidential eligibility, that is to say, divorced from all other prior allegiances outside the United States of America and effectively accorded the status of natural-born citizenship.² Hence, from the day of ratification forward, all other citizens of the United States would necessarily be either citizens at birth or naturalized after birth—respectively, either eligible to hold the Office of President or not.

Natural-born citizenship has always been understood to be acquired by right of soil and/or by right of blood.³ Current law stipulates that all children born abroad of at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen are natural-born citizens at birth. Is there an additional requirement that must be satisfied in order for such children to be considered natural-born citizens? Yes. This requirement constitutes the tie that binds the blood to the soil of the nation, and the children born abroad of U.S. citizen parents who have satisfied that requirement—namely, prior U.S. residency—are automatically considered to be natural-born citizens at birth by right of blood because their citizen parents are or were residents on the soil of allegiance. There are hundreds of U.S. citizens all over the world who have never set foot on U.S. soil, but should they ever want to pass their citizenship down to their children, they would have to come home and establish U.S. residency before they got jiggy with it. Otherwise, their children would be foreign nationals who would have to be naturalized just like anyone else who had no prior claim on the soil of the nation at birth.

Once again: a native-born citizen is a natural-born citizen at birth by right of soil; a person born abroad of a U.S. citizen is a natural-born citizen by right of blood. Hence, all U.S. citizens are either citizens at birth (natural-born) or became citizens subsequent to birth (naturalized). While naturalized citizens are barred, all natural-born citizens are eligible to run for the Office of President after their 35th birthday, as long as they have at least 14 years of residency in the United States.

Yet in response to the latest rash of hysteria fomented by widespread ignorance clamoring for clarification, Congress has periodically cobbled together some non-binding redundancy or another, and tossed it out to its constituents in order to make them go away until the next time. The most recent example of this was Senate Resolution 511, that is, the "McCain Resolution".⁴

As these legislative monstrosities have neither established anything new, nor altered or abolished anything old, they have mostly served to further confuse the public. But the greatest impetus behind the commonly held fallacies conflating the terms native born and natural born, and the jurisdictions of the Fourteenth Amendment and official stewardships (for example, leased territories, and the premises of military installations and diplomatic facilities abroad) may be traced back to United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and to the Insular Cases of the Twentieth Century when the Court had to reestablish the boundaries of the Fourteenth Amendment's jurisdiction and in some cases send Congress back to the drawing board to revise sloppy legislation, which led to a series of legislative clarifications piled on top of thusly obscured legal precedent.⁵

These are the illusions that have had daddies unnecessarily racing through traffic-control devices overseas lest their sons or daughters be born in the backseats of their newly restored '68 Mustangs on the way to "American soil".
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¹See The Origins and Interpretation of the Presidential Eligibility Clause in the U.S. Constitution: Why Did the Founding Fathers Want the President To Be a "Natural Born Citizen" and What Does this Clause Mean for Foreign-Born Adoptees?; John Yinger; RV April 6, 2000; http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jyinger/Citizenship/history.htm. U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manuel Volume 7 - Consular Affairs, "7 FAM 1130 ACQUISITION OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP BY BIRTH ABROAD OF U.S. CITIZEN PARENT (CT:CON-317; December 8, 2009)", http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/86757.pdf.

²However, not all of the persons who were residing in America at the time and had been made American citizens under the Articles of Confederation were British subjects at birth. A comparatively smaller number of them would have been the subjects of other, mostly Western European powers at birth, and the vast majority of these would have been French or Dutch or Swedish: persons who immigrated to the American colonial territories of Britain during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century to join families whose roots would have gone back more than a century. But even most of these would have been British subjects before they were made American citizens under the Articles. The rest of America's population would have been composed of indentured servants, mostly from Western Europe, and immigrants of that peculiar institution, slaves imported from Africa or from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Though counted as persons in the census, these wouldn't have been U.S. citizens under either the Articles or the Constitution until after they had completed their terms of servitude or not until after the Civil War respectively. Only free "white" persons could be accorded the status of U.S. citizenship before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment—well, at least indisputably. Under the states' rights (or Jeffersonian) Doctrine of First Allegiance, free persons of African descent and their offspring were citizens in some states and, therefore, theoretically, citizens of the United States prior to the Dred Scott Decision.

³However, under constitutional law, Congress must explicitly provide for the acquisition of citizenship via the law of the bloodline in statute.

⁴Senate Resolution 511 ATS; 110th Congress, 2nd Session; April 10, 2008; http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=sr110-511&version=ats&nid=t0%3Aats%3A2.

⁵See Appendix A, "The Insular Cases and Unincorporated Territories", Michael David Rawlings; Was Senator John McCain a U.S. Citizen at Birth?

Next article in the series: A Compendium of the History of Jus Sanguinis

A Compendium of the Statutory History of Jus Sanguinis

2009-12-23T16:50:00.002-05:00

Organized by Michael David Rawlings

Chapter III, Section 1, Statute II of Session II (pg. 103 - 104) of the Naturalization Act of 1790 of the First Congress:

And the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.¹

Once Congress established natural-born citizenship via jus sanguinis in statute, the words "natural born citizen" do not appear in statute ever again. From 1790 on, persons born abroad of U.S. citizens are alternately referred to as "citizens of the United States" or simply "citizens thereof". It is understood in statute from the context, as opposed to the context applied to naturalized citizenship, that natural-born citizenship is the status conferred at the moment of birth. Hence, Section 3 of the Naturalization Act of 1795 which superceded the Act of 1790 reads:

[A]nd the children of citizens of the United States born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, shall be considered as citizens of the United States. Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend on persons whose fathers have never been resident of the United States.

Revised Statutes Act of 1802, Section 4:

[A]nd the children of persons who now are, or have been citizens of the United States, shall, though born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, be considered as citizens thereof. Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend on persons whose fathers have never been resident of the United States.

From 1802 to 1855, Congress suspended the conferral of citizenship at birth via jus sanguinis, whereby persons who became U.S. citizens after the statute’s effective date could not transmit their citizenship to their foreign-born children.

Though enacted on the heels of the undeclared Franco-American War (1898-1800), which was mostly fought on the high seas, the events that led up to its passage date back to 1794 when the French monarchy was toppled by the French Revolution, the success of which was mostly due to the radical leadership and persistent agitation of the Jacobineans. In order to secure a loan to fund its own revolution, the Untied States signed a treaty of alliance with the French Crown in 1778, but abandoned the treaty in 1794, insisting that it owed neither its assistance nor its debt to the Republic of France. On top of that, in the same year, the United States signed a treaty of resolution and trade with Great Britain, with which the Republic of France was at war. It was on. The French began to seize American ships trading with Great Britain.

This was also the era of the "XYZ Affair" and the Sedition Acts. Spies were thought to be everywhere. And though it was not until two years after the "war" with France had ended that Section 4 of the Revised Statutes Act of 1802 was passed (the faction in Congress that had been clamoring for its passage finally prevailing), renewed hostilities with Great Britain, which culminated in the War of 1812, coupled with the era of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, which destabilized virtually all of Western Europe for two decades, conspired to cement America's isolationist mood.

But in 1855, Congress reinstated citizenship at birth via jus sanguinis, and it has continued to extend it ever since.²

Revised Statutes Act of 1855, Section 1:

All children heretofore born or hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or may be at the time of their birth citizens thereof, are declared to be citizens of the United States; but the rights of citizenship shall not descend to children whose fathers never resided in the United States.

(Note that unlike previous statute, which required that both parents be U.S. citizens and that the father be a U.S. resident at some time or another before the child's birth, only the father had to be a citizen.)

The Revised Statutes Act of 1878 reconstituted the Revised Statutes Section 1 of 1855 as the Revised Statutes Section 1993 without any changes in the language of the provision.

The Revised Statutes Act of 1906 (effective March 2, 1907) incorporated the Revised Statutes, Section 1993 of 1878 and for the first time in history imposed additional provisos on citizens born abroad in order that they retain their citizenship via jus sanguinis as follows:

[A]ll children born outside the limits of the United States who are citizens thereof in accordance with the provisions of section nineteen hundred and ninety-three of the Revised Statutes of the United States and who continue to reside outside the United States shall, in order to receive the protection of this Government, be required upon reaching the age of eighteen years to record at an American consulate their intention to become residents and remain citizens of the United States and shall be further required to take the oath of allegiance to the United States upon attaining their majority.

Then in 1934 for the first time in history, U.S. citizenship could be transmitted to children born abroad of a citizen mother alone. Also, for the first time, a residency requirement was imposed on citizens born abroad, albeit, only on those whose mother or father was a foreign national.

The Revised Statutes, Section 1993 of the Revised Statutes Act of 1934 amending the 1855 version:

Any child hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose father or mother or both at the time of birth of such child is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States: but the rights of citizenship shall not descend to any such child unless the citizen father or citizen mother, as the case may be, has resided in the United States previous to the birth of such child. In cases where one of the parents is an alien, the right of citizenship shall not descend unless the child comes to the United States and resides therein for at least five years continuously immediately previous to his eighteenth birthday, and unless, within six months after the child's twenty-first birthday, he or she shall take an oath of allegiance to the United States of America as prescribed by the Bureau of Naturalization.

(Note that the retention requirement imposed in 1906 on persons born abroad of U.S. citizens was dropped; that is, in the case where both of the parents of a foreign-born child were U.S. citizens, the child was required to do nothing further in order to retain his citizenship.)

In 1940 a more stringent residency requirement was imposed on the citizen parent when the other was a foreign national, and the residency requirement for the citizen born abroad of only one U.S. citizen was slightly altered.

The Nationality Act of 1940, Section 201:

The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:

(g) A person born outside the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, has had ten years' residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, at least five of which were after attaining the age of sixteen years, the other being an alien: Provided, That in order to retain such citizenship, the child must reside in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling five years between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one years: Provided further, That, if the child has not taken up a residence in the United States or its outlying possessions by the time he reaches the age of sixteen years, or if he resides abroad for such a time that it becomes impossible for him to complete the five years' residence in the United States or its outlying possessions before reaching the age of twenty-one years, his American citizenship shall thereupon cease.

(h) The foregoing provisions of subsection (g) concerning retention of citizenship shall apply to a child born abroad subsequent to May 24, 1934.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, reconstituted Section 201 as Section 301, which slightly altered the respective residency requirements again:

(a) The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:

. . . (7) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States, who prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than ten years, at least five of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.

(b) Any person who is a national and citizen of the United States at birth under paragraph (7) of subsection (a), shall lose his nationality and citizenship unless he shall come to the United States prior to attaining the age of twenty-three years and shall immediately following any such coming be continuously physically present in the United State(s) for at least five years: Provided, That such physical presence follows the attainment of the age of fourteen years and precedes the age of twenty-eight years.

The Revised Statutes Act 1972 amended 301.(b). It reduced the required period of continuous U.S. residency the child must achieve between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight in order to permanently retain his U.S. citizenship from five years to two years.

CURRENT LAW

The Revised Statutes Act of 1978 repealed 301(b) and was retroactively applied to the year of 1952: persons born abroad of only one U.S. citizen, like those born abroad whose parents were both U.S. citizens, were not subject to any further conditions of citizenship retention, provided that they were not born on or after May 24, 1934 and before October 10, 1952.

The Revised Statutes Act of 1986 amended Section 301(g). It relaxed the residency requirement imposed on the U.S. citizen parent of a child born abroad when the other parent is a foreign national. Instead of requiring the citizen parent to have at least ten years of U.S. residency before the child's birth, with at least five of those years occurring after the parent's fourteenth birthday, the citizen parent transmits his/her citizenship to the child at birth with only five years of total residency, provided that at least two of those years occurred after the parent's fourteenth birthday.

Born of at least one citizen parent, there are hundreds of American citizens around the globe who have never set foot on American soil and need never do so in order to retain their citizenship for life.
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¹http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=227; http://www.aca.ch/hisuscit.htm. The second link lists the "Natural-Born Citizen Statute" of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Statute 1, page 301, but it's actually Section 1 of Statute II, page 103 - 104.

²The ACA link makes the parenthetical assertion that the Revised Statutes Act of 1802, Section 4 contained the "[s]ame general provisions as" those of Section 3 in the 1795 Act. Of course, that is not correct as the Act of 1802 suspended jus sanguinis proper.

Next article in the series: The Straight Dope on U.S. Territories

The Straight Dope on U.S. Territories

2009-12-23T16:45:00.010-05:00

By Michael David Rawlings

While all formally owned possessions of the United States do reside within the wider, territorial boundaries of the United States' national allegiance and, therefore, within the United States' martial-judicial jurisdiction, the jurisdiction of the Fourteenth Amendment encompasses the several states of the Union and the incorporated territories of the United States only. The Fourteenth Amendment's jurisdiction strictly pertains to the full slate of constitutional rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, not to the administrative jurisdiction that the United States might wield at any given time over formally owned or leased possessions abroad.¹

Even the formally owned, unincorporated territories are not integral parts of the United States proper; that is, they do not constitute American soil for constitutional purposes under the Fourteenth Amendment unless explicitly stipulated otherwise by Congress, and such statutory grants are limited and conditional. Territories leased by the United States, like the former Panama Canal Zone, are foreign soil, unincorporated territories that reside within the martial-judicial jurisdiction of the United States only. They in no way, shape or form reside within the territorial boundaries of the United States' national allegiance, let alone within the jurisdiction of the Fourteenth Amendment. Currently, the only leased territory held by the United States is Guantomino Bay, Cuba.

Current law provides that persons born in the unincorporated Commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, and in the organized-unincorporated territories of Guam and the United States Virgin Islands are U.S. citizens at birth, but they are barred from fully participating in federal elections while residing within the boundaries of these territories. No doubt, many would be surprised to learn that persons born in these territories are eligible to run for the presidency should they ever decide to establish residence in the United States proper. If they are at least thirty-five years old and have at least fourteen years of U.S. residency, they could go for it.

The residents of the unorganized-unincorporated territories of American Samoa and Swains Island are U.S. nationals only, but the naturalization process for them is virtually automatic should they ever choose to come to the United States proper and reside there for the prerequisite period of time. U.S. nationals, like U.S. citizens, may move freely anywhere within the territorial boundaries of the United States' national allegiance—no passport required. Previously, the terms "insular areas" and "outlying possessions" (or "overseas possessions") were used interchangeably and applied to all unincorporated territories. Today, by definition, these terms apply to all formally owned, unincorporated territories that are not organized—that is, not equipped with their own semi-autonomous governments. Officially, by statute, these terms apply to the inhabited territories of American Samoa and Swains Island only—though these are de facto self-governing under the aegis of the federal government. The other territories that fall under this category by definition (i.e., technically, though not officially) are the uninhabited or mostly uninhabited possessions of Wake Island, the Midway Islands, Johnston Atoll, Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island and Kingman Reef.

Currently, the U.S. holds only one incorporated territory that is not organized. This is the tiny territory of the Palmyra Atoll named after the U.S.S Palmyra that was wrecked there in 1802. The Palmyra Atoll was once part of the Kingdom of Hawaii, later the Republic of Hawaii and then the incorporated Hawaii Territory of the United States. Its ties to Hawaii were severed when the latter was granted statehood, so it's been exclusively managed by the federal government ever since. As an incorporated territorial possession, it does in fact reside within the jurisdiction of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, any person born there would be a natural-born citizen, not merely a U.S. national, but, except for a small handful of custodians employed by the federal government and some scientists employed by the Nature Conservancy Company, it is uninhabited.

The distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, along with the complexities, did not arise until after the Spanish-American War when a defeated Spain ceded its colonial islands in the Pacific and Caribbean. Prior to that, before the rulings of the Insular Cases, the U.S. had acquired lands by annexation and the resulting territories were automatically conferred the status of U.S. soil—incorporated and typically organized. Ceded, unincorporated territories can be organized and incorporated, or not. It's up to Congress. Also, the native residents of organized-unincorporated territories can be granted U.S. citizenship or be left holding the bag as second-class residents of the United States, that is, U.S. nationals. Again, it's up to Congress.

Hence, the most striking difference between incorporated territories and unincorporated territories (those not fully part of the United States and to which the Constitution does not fully apply automatically) is the standing of each within the American family. Once a territory is incorporated, it cannot be "disinherited" without being granted full independence, and while the native residents of an organized-unincorporated territory can be granted U.S. citizenship by Congress, Congress can also rescind that grant for any future residents yet to be born past a certain date without granting that territory its independence. Now those who were citizens before would retain their citizenship, of course, but persons born beyond that date would not be U.S. citizens, but U.S. nationals only. In other words, while U.S. law currently confers U.S. citizenship on persons linked to the soil or to the blood of certain unincorporated territories, it does so on a contingency basis.

Would Congress ever actually snatch the conferral of citizenship back from an unincorporated territory once granted? No, of course not. Imagine the political upheaval. There would be riots in the streets. Uncle Sam would be burned in effigy. The only politically practical future for an organized-unincorporated territory like the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, for example, would be statehood or independence.

The premises of U.S. military installations and diplomatic facilities residing beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States' national allegiance are forms of territories constituting "American soil" under the provisions of treaties or those of international law only; they do not constitute American soil for constitutional purposes in any way, shape or form. The only things remotely like these that do reside within the territorial boundaries of the United States for constitutional purposes are aircraft and sailing vessels beyond the immediate surfaces and coastlines of the American landscape—up to twelve nautical miles respectively. But beyond the United States' sovereign airspace and territorial sea, even American-registered aircraft and U.S. flag vessels are not American soil for constitutional purposes. On the other hand, the extensions of the latter's roving displacements and adjacent ranges of salvage are unorganized-unincorporated territories residing within the United States' martial-judicial jurisdiction by statutory proclamation.

C. Birth on U.S. Military Bases Outside of the United States or Birth on U.S. Embassy or Consulate Premises Abroad:

(1) Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities abroad are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not born in the Untied States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth there.

(2) The status of diplomatic and consular premises arises from the rules of law relating to immunity from the prescriptive and enforcement jurisdiction of the receiving State; the premises are not part of the territory of the United States of America.²

MARTIAL-JUDICIAL JURISDICTION

Guantomino Bay, Cuba - Leased Possession, U.S. Military

U.S. Flag Vessels

THE TERRITORIAL BOUNDARIES OF THE UNITED STATES' NATIONAL ALLEGIANCE

ORGANIZED-UNINCORPORATED (NATIONAL OUTLYING POSSESSIONS)

Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands - U.S. Citizens

Commonwealth of Puerto Rico - U.S. Citizens

Guam - U.S. Citizens

United States Virgin Islands - U.S. Citizens

UNORGANIZED-UNINCORPORATED (FEDERAL OUTLYING POSSESSIONS)

American Samoa - U.S. Nationals

Swains Island - U.S. Nationals

Midway Islands - Inhabited by Caretakers Only

Wake Island - Inhabited by U.S. Military and Civilian Contractors Only

Johnston Atoll - Uninhabited

Baker Island - Uninhabited

Howland Island - Uninhabited

Jarvis Island - Uninhabited

Kingman Reef - Uninhabited

FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT'S JURISDICTION

The Fifty States

The District of Columbia

Palmyra Atoll

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¹U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 7 - Consular Affairs, "7 FAM 1120 ACQUISITION OF U.S. NATIONALITY IN U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS (CT:CON-315; September 3, 2009)", http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/86756.pdf; Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States.

²United States Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 7 - Consular Affairs; "7 FAM 1110 ACQUISITION OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP BY BIRTH IN THE UNITED STATES; 7 FAM 1113 NOT INCLUDED IN THE MEANING OF 'IN THE UNITED STATES' (CT:CON-314; August 21, 2009); 1113.c.(1), (2)"; pg. 5 of 13; http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/86755.pdf.

Next article in the series: Was Senator John McCain a U.S. Citizen at Birth?