What is an "organic molecule?" When scientists announce that they have found one, the impression that a layperson gets is that this molecule can, like magic, suddenly produce life! It is, after all, "organic" and organic things are living things, right?
A science magazine recently announced, "A speck of dust that drifted into the Earth's atmosphere from the edge of the solar system shows that complex molecules can form even in the chill near-emptiness of interstellar space." (New Scientists March 2004) The article makes a few assumptions based on its evolutionary worldview and then gets backs to real facts again: "Simple organic molecules have been detected in this dust before . . . dust particles could have seeded the young Earth with organic matter." Could they? Let us consider this leap of false logic.
A chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, John Bradley, said, "Its another hint that extraterrestrial carbon may be implicated in the origin of life." The dust particle, named Benavente, was very small - it was only one femtogram, which is one millionth of one billionth of a gram, yet from this a mass spectrometer was able to detect molecules of carbon, nitrogen and . . .