Volume 1, Issue 1 of AntiMatters, a scientific journal dedicated to publishing articles from a non-materialistic scientific perspective. AntiMatters is published by quantum physicist Ulrich Mohrhoff whom some of you are familiar with.

Take a look, I think you will find it most interesting. . .

I'd be very interested in seeing this calculation.

I'll venture a guess it will fall under the rubric:

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, and for those who need to prove absolutely anything, there is Bayes' Theorem with sufficiently vague assumptions, impenetrable symbology, and irreproducible algebraic manipulations.

The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.

I'd be very interested in seeing this calculation.

Chandra Wickramasinghe is back with further evidence to support his hypothesis of panspermia: "The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against."

From the link:

The 2005 Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1 discovered a mixture of organic and clay particles inside the comet. One theory for the origins of life proposes that clay particles acted as a catalyst, converting simple organic molecules into more complex structures. The 2004 Stardust Mission to Comet Wild 2 found a range of complex hydrocarbon molecules - potential building blocks for life.

The Cardiff team suggests that radioactive elements can keep water in liquid form in comet interiors for millions of years, making them potentially ideal "incubators" for early life. They also point out that the billions of comets in our solar system and across the galaxy contain far more clay than the early Earth did. The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.

Rather than supporting panspermia this information indicates how shoddy are theories for the origin of life. This is more of the same asssociation of organic chemicals with cell generation. It lacks causal specificity. It also ignores some unpleasant realities namely, the destructive effects that a space environment would have on nucleic acids over extended periods of time. If nucleic acids are absent from the mix then so is much needed evidence for life arising through a chemical process.

"Construction of the phenotype from the information coded in the genome is often called the gene expression process in biology. Transformation of the DNA to the protein structure plays an important role in this process. Since the structure of the protein determines the efficacy of the DNA, gene expression can be viewed as the process of computing the mapping of the genotype to the phenotype. For some reason, it does not directly compute this function using the DNA itself. It first transforms the DNA representation to mRNA and subsequently to protein before evaluating its phenotype. Representation transformations play an important role in efficient problem solving in many fields such as physics, mathematics, engineering, machine learning, and optimization. Therefore representation transformations in gene expression allude intriguing possibilities. However, very little is understood about the role of gene expression in evolutionary search."
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~hillol...

Marc Toussaint. 2004. The Evolution of Genetic Representations and Modular Neural Adaptation. Logos Verlag Berlin.

http://www.marc-toussaint.net/...

In nature we find beautifully complex organisms. The only way a stochastic search scheme like evolution can find such systems is by adapting the genetic representation. This work develops a theory on the implicit adaptation of genetic representations during evolution. Non-trivial genotype-phenotype mappings, neutrality, and the adaptation of phenotypic variability form the core of this theory. Complex, highly structured phenotypic adaptability, and rich innovatability triggered by neutral reorganizations of the genetic code can be explained in these terms. Some ideas are also transferred to neural adaptation.
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/...

http://www.iscid.org/boards/ub...