Ilya Prigogine, physical chemist, Nobel laureate in self organizing systems analysis, taught at Austin (no less), now lets see what he really said:
en.wikipedia.org
Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues actually prove, in that very article, that "the spontaneous genesis of life in its present form"
is probable, not improbable
Addendum B: Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?
infidels.org
meme
Ilya Prigogine
Schroeder cites Ilya Prigogine as stating in Physics Today (in
"Thermodynamics of Evolution," a two-part article spanning November and December
of 1972) that "the idea of the spontaneous genesis of life in its present form
is therefore improbable, even on the scale of billions of years." This is
inherently suspicious, since Prigogine is famous for proving that order results
from increasing entropy in dissipative systems, rendering spontaneous complexity
more probable than ever before. So what is the context of this quote?
As it happens, it appears in the introduction to that famous research article
demonstrating that dissipative systems explain pre-biological evolution and in
fact almost all order, even functional order, in organic systems, as a "purely
deterministic" consequence of the laws of physics (ibid. Dec. p. 44). In other
words, Schroeder is quoting a contrafactual and pretending it is a conclusion:
the authors (Ilya is only the lead author of three, the others being Gregoire
Nicolis and Agnes Babloyantz) first set out the challenging problem (the fact
that the present theory does not account for biogenesis), which Schroeder
quotes, then present the solution, which is mathematically and experimentally
proven (and not only accounts for biogenesis, but also explains many other
previously unexplained features of living organisms).
Schroeder is thus guilty of deception, like those who quote Carl Sagan out of
context (as I have discussed above). Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues
actually prove, in that very article, that "the spontaneous genesis of life in
its present form" is probable, not improbable. Indeed, their work
demonstrates that given any "fluctuations" sufficiently far away from thermal
equilibrium in a soup of polynucleotides (and perhaps also polypeptides), the
development of complex reproducing systems is guaranteed, as a result of
naturally-occurring "autocatalytic cycles" (ibid. Dec. p. 38), in just the same
way that organized convection cycles arise naturally when water is heated (a
state which is also very far from equilibrium). In a nutshell, the article comes
to the exact opposite conclusion as Schroeder leads us to believe. So
either Schroeder is trying to pull a fast one, or he did not read the
article
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