"More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution.  At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field end either in stalement or in a confession of ignorance."

         K. Dose, "The Origin of Life:  More Questions than Answers", Interdisciplinary Science Review  13, 1988, p348.
 
 
 

Though scientists acknowledge the importance of nitrogenated aromatics, they have no idea how to get from the molecules to life,

Emma Bakes, APS (American Physcial Society) NEWS July 2004, pg 6.

 

As is well-known random molecular shuffling alone is exceedingly unlikely to make even a simple microbe from a planet covered in primordial soup within the age of the universe.

P. Davies,  Int. J. of Astrobiology 2(2): 116 (2003).

 

"The chance that  higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein."

        F. Hoyle, 'Hoyle on Evolution' Nature  294 105, 1981.
 
 
 

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going."

         F. Crick, Life Itself, p 88.
 
 
 

"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet here we are - as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."

         George Wald, Scientific American, 191, 1954, pg 45.
 
 
 

"The development of the metabolic system ... poses Herculean problems.  So does the emergence of a selectively permeable membrane without which there can be no viable cell.  But the major problem is the orign of the genetic code and of its translational mechanism.  Indeed, it is not so much a problem as a veritable enigma.

Life appeared on earth:  what, before the event, were the chances that this would occur?  The present structure of the biosphere certainly does not exclude the possibility that ... its a priori probability was virtually zero."

         Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, 1972, 135-136.
 
 
 

"The difficulties that must be overcome are at present beyond our imagination....The flow sheet in Figure 2 [showing how nucleic acid coded ribosomal protein synthesis might obtain] is a scheme of ignorance.  Without fundamentally new insights in evolutionary processes, perhaps involving new modes of thinking, this ignorance is likely to persist."

         K. Dose, "The Origin of Life:  More Questions than Answers", Interdisciplinary Science Review 13, 1988 pg 348.
 
 
 

"... we desire the best available scientific status report on the origin of life.  We shall see that adherents of the best known theory have not responded to increasing adverse evidence by questioning the validity of their beliefs, in the best scientific tradition; rather, they have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology."

         R. Shapiro, "Origins:  A Skepticâs Guide to the Creation of Life On Earth", 1985, pg 32.
 
 
 

"Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one part in 10^40,000 must be judged superior to random shuffling.  The theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a probability vastly higher than one part in 10^40,000 of being the correct explanation to the many curious facts discussed in the preceeding chapters.  Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident.  The reasons are psychological rather than scientific."

         F. Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, pg 130.
 
 
 

"... the time available for the origin of life seems to have been short, a few hundred million years at the most.  Since life originated on the earth, we have additional evidence that the origin of life has a high probability."

        Carl Sagan, Scientific American, 1975, 232(5), pg 82.
 
 
 
 

"A law of nature of the sort we know and love will not create biological information, or indeed any information at all. ... The secret of life lies, not in its chemical basis, but in the logical and informational rules it exploits. ... Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually new."

        P. Davies, The Fifth Miracle, pg 210 - 216.
 
 
 

Investigations broaches four candidate laws for any biosphere.  The deepest is related to the following question:  might there be a 4th law of thermodynamics for self-constructing open thermodynamic systems such as biospheres?

S. Kauffman, Investigations, pg xi

 

"The only certainty is that there will be a rational solution."

        L Orgel, The Origin of Life - a review of facts and speculation, Trends in Biol. Sci., Dec. 1998, pg 491.