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That was my point--I was attempting to *bolster* your point about current thinking. If the RNA encoding was in a book from 17 years ago, that means it isn't even "latest & greatest " anymore. :-)

It's still the best theory going, and given the amount of evidence that RNA is foundational, it's probably going to remain the forerunner. It is possible though that nucleic acids with different sugars came before RNA and then when RNA was made it took over from them and went on to catalyze the appearance of more complicated systems including DNA and protein. It will be interesting to see what comes of this research.

Duane Gish = Stephen Jay Gould

He doesn't?! ;-)

I'm not *playing* God of the gaps.

I misunderstood your post. There are a lot of posters here who seem to want to insert miraculous intervention whenever we have some uncertainty or ignorance about a process. I used to be YE creationist myself. I found to my great discouragement in (Christian, officially YEC) college that many arguments were not arguments for a young earth, but arguments against evolution based upon criticisms of dating methods, stratigraphy, phylogenetics, etc. A lot of them take the form, "Evolutionists do not understand this completely, therefore God did it." Over time I realized that many of those criticisms were invalid and things weren't as murky as others portrayed. I reached the point where I either had to acknowledge that the gaps were getting so small that God was being reduced in significance and might eventually disappear or I had to remove God from the gaps and allow the gaps to be just what they are, gaps which may eventually be filled either with natural mechanisms or supernatural, but either way should be ok with me.

At that point I had already left YEC and the removal of God from these gaps caused me to leave ID. Then I was a theistic evolutionist--God created the universe through natural means but is sovereign over it, not in the sense that he miraculously kicks it along all the time, but in the sense that he has ordained its path. I probably would have remained so indefinitely if my research into Islam had not prompted me to go back and come up with a fully integrated reason why atrocities in the OT were all right (and even laudable) but those committed by Mohommed were evil. Over a year or so I hammered away at this until I came to the conclusion that I would never resolve that without embracing an idea of God that was radically different from the one I had grown up with. I found that untenable, so right now I'm agnostic. You can read about this a bit in the post at the end of my profile. Some people use this as a gotcha--"Ah-hah! You are godless because you are evolutionist!" The reality is that acknowledging evolution occurs preceded my determination that God as I knew him does not exist, and that was based upon my analysis of morality as depicted in the Bible.