Though I realize that all of the prior posts on this topic thread are from several years ago I am making this post in case others, like myself, are reading this thread. My comment is in reply to Phizzy's words on the first page of the thread. There that person posted the following:
'Dr Carol Cleland who is mis-quoted in the brochure had this comment to make about the WT in an e-mail about the matter:
"My
work has been used before by these people and it really angers me
because they are using it to defend views that I reject..... it is
deeply dishonest for theists to deliberately distort the words of
scholars for their own purposes; as I recall , this is a sin"
She was not happy !
"The Truth is not something you have to lie about".'
The quotes in "The Origin of Life" brochure of the WT of Dr. Cleland are not misquotes for the words in the quotes are accurate quotes of Dr. Cleland words as written in the source material on NASA's website. [Readers, please visit NASA's website (page 31 of the brochure lists the web page of NASA's article) to read Dr. Clealand's words in there full context.] Furthermore I don't see the quotes as being mishandled either, for in a footnote the brochure makes clear that Dr. Cleland believes/thinks that abiogenesis happened and that she is not a creationist. Note that the footnote on page 6 of the brochure says "Dr. Cleland is not a creationist. She believes that life arose by chance in some fashion not yet fully understood." I suspect that Cleland is unaware of that footnote. [I suspect that the person who emailed her about the WT's quotes of her did not inform her that the WT had a footnote saying she is not a creationist.] The WT brochure was pointing out that though Dr. Cleland is someone who considers abiogenesis to be true and who apparently also considers biological evolution to be true, she nonetheless perceives problems with certain theories of abiogenesis.
However, I do dislike that the WT chopped up here words by interrupting her words in between "astronomically low" and "Yet" and in between "Yet" and "most researchers". I also dislike how they quote her words of "None of them ... happened" after the other quotes they made of her words, rather than mentioning it before. That is because in the source of her words she said "None of them ... happened" before she said "The probability ... low". Perhaps those actions of the WT amount to mishandling the quotes of her words but I don't see how they could be misquotes of her words.
I do strongly disapprove that the WT brochure did not quote her words of:
"I suppose that if I had to pick a favorite theory, it would be Freeman Dyson's double origin theory,
which postulates an initial protein world that eventually produced an
RNA world as a by-product of an increasingly sophisticated metabolism.
The RNA world, which starts out as an obligatory parasite of the
protein world, eventually produces the cooperative schema, and hence
life as we know it today. I like the fact that this account attempts to
deal with the origin of the cooperative schema." Those words of hers were said (as shown in the original source of her words) immediately after she said "... the coordination will somehow take care of itself."
In the source article I was pleasantly surprised to read that the Cleland said "Scientists now believe that microbes can survive interplanetary journeys ensconced in meteors produced by asteroid impacts on planetary bodies containing life." I have read before that some scientists thought microbes could survive such journeys I had also read that scientists said they could not survive such journey's alive, especially while experiencing the immense heat as the meteors are passing through the atmosphere of a planet. But now I think, what if the planet (that the meteors were approaching) did not yet have free oxygen in the atmosphere, such as the early atmosphere of Earth?
Why does the WT typically not quote the explanations of evolutionist scientists [note: I am not using the word "evolutionist" in a pejorative sense, but merely to distinguish scientists which consider evolution to be true from those relatively few which don't] for the perceived problems of evolution theory? Besides of the obvious reason of the WT not wanting to present information which supports evolution and because the WT (or at least the vast majority of the believers of the WT/JW religion) is convinced that evolution is false, I think it is because they notice that the scientists strongly disagree about proposed scientific explanations on numerous topics. It is also because many scientific ideas that were widely accepted as facts (or as correct) in the past by scientists have later been discarded as false or have become greatly revised. Note for example that Cleland's (and Dyson's) idea of an "initial protein world that eventually produced an
RNA" disagrees with the idea (quoted in the brochure) of Yockey regarding a "proteins first" type of origin of life.
