biotext.org.uk

Quote of the year so far…

They [creationists] always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

Some very clever dudes at Scripps have demonstrated mutual self-replication of a pair of RNA enzymes. They observed evolution of more efficient enzymes, and recombination, providing a proof-of-concept for the RNA World hypothesis. Wired article here or original paper here (probably requires a subscription).