Boston Globe: Project on the origins of life launched (at Harvard)

[Dudley_DUright]

Harvard University is launching a broad initiative to discover how life began, joining an ambitious scientific assault on age-old questions that are central to the debate over the theory of evolution.

The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.

Known as the ''Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative," the project is still in its early stages, and fund-raising has not begun, the scientists said.

But the university has promised the researchers several years of seed money, and has asked the team to make much grander plans, including new faculty and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities.

The initiative begins amid increasing controversy over the teaching of evolution, prompted by proponents of ''intelligent design," who argue that even the most modest cell is too complex, too finely tuned, to have come about without unseen intelligence.

more...

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/08/14/project_on_the_origins_of_life_launched/?page=1

[Benhurst]

1. Silly people. All they have to do is go to a motel and

snitch a copy of a Gideon Bible.

If it's good enough for Kansas, it's good enough for Harvard.