Free Republic

It has become axiomatic that life naturally evolved out of nonliving materials billions of years ago. Given enough time and the chemical opportunity, living cells self-assemble. However, the experts on the development of complex molecules from simpler ones, the synthetic chemists, do not know how this process actually occurs. There are no known pathways to create the components that make up a living cell from nonliving matter. They have no idea how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and enzymes), nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA), saccharides (also called carbohydrates or sugars, the scaffolding for DNA and...

Editor’s note: This is a post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the great State of Confusion Utopia. He is a founding member of CCCEB (Climate Change Causes Everything Bad), a charter member of President Obama’s Go For it Team, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Meretricious Relations Subcommittee. Senator Librul is also justly proud of his expertise in interfaith dialogue, on the basis of which he has explained to the entire world that Islam is the religion of peace, grossly distorted by the non-Islamic Islamic State and other textual deviants. He was recently awarded...

If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable. To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and...

Tradition marks this time of year as the occasion for Jewish calamity, and a biblical perspective helps us understand why.The weeks preceding the saddest of Jewish holy days, Tisha b’Av, have seen remarkable displays of anti-Jewish sentiment, from the deadly to the merely despicable. As Israel was slammed with long-range missiles from Hezbollah, the world’s “civilized” nations (with a few exceptions, including the United States) condemned the Jewish state for striking back in self-defense. In Seattle, where I live, a depressed Muslim gunman opened fire on six women at the Jewish Federation office, killing one. Later the same weekend, Mel...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

Assume that City slickers are dumb and their effects on markets can be reproduced, according to complexity theory. Roger Highfield reportsYou might be forgiven for wondering if the best way to invest in stock markets is to consult a chimpanzee first - it has long been suspected that City hotshots are just lucky, overpaid fools who work in an industry where chance rules. Aping it: buying and selling shares is as much a matter of luck as rational thought Now science is beginning to support the idea that randomness, not rationality, exerts surprising sway over the markets. The insights have...

The Black Swan: The 21st Century Challenge for Public Policy with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ph.D. Return to Event List | RSVP February 09 2005, 1:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Event Details What you think you know may not matter. What you don’t know certainly will. And why you are unlikely to know what matters in time. In 2001, the stock market lost $7 trillion dollars in value at about the time experts were declaring an end to the business cycle. In 1989, the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations abandoned communism, and the Cold War ended, taking the world by...