The Miller-Urey experiments

This was published at the Gene Emergence Project as part of the Origin of Life Prize. If you read through the link about the Gene Emergence Project you'll see lots of disclaimers about how they really are too interested in real science. It looks like a typically dishonest creationist attempt to appear to be doing science. They proclaim they're really seeking scientific answers to origin of life questions, but all they're really doing is providing yet another outlet for ID nonsense that couldn't be published in legitimate journals.About the paper itself, the abstract reads like typical ID nonsense, especially the brief "non physical" mention he sneaks in there. If there was any peer review then it was by peers of David Abel and not by any scientists actually qualified in the field.--Percy

Anyone interested in trying to cobble together a paper we could submit to this "journal", just to see how rigorous their standards and peer review are? Sort of along the lines of Alan Sokal?--Percy

My first visit to their website made me suspicious. I saw lots of smoke but couldn't find a fire. So I've gone back and just read the abstract for the first article in their Origin of Life issue, and I couldn't make sense of it. I've never encountered the terms in that context before, and one of the authors, Rober Root-Bernstein, is both a MacArthur fellow and a form AIDS denier, so I don't know what to make of him.Being unable to make sense of it, all I can say is that it's more smoke, but after a lifetime reading technical articles and debunking nonsense I feel like I've got a pretty good bullshit detector. Given the mathematical focus (indeed, that's the only common element in the widely disparate fields they cover from biology to physics), it seems to me that at a minimum they've created a journal for mathematical speculations that provides no encouragement to connect them to the real world.This journal isn't setting off any alarm bells or at least raising suspicions for you? I mean, maybe reading all the abstracts and checking all the authors in that origin of life issue would reveal that overall nothing is really out of line, but aren't the initial impressions pretty bad?--Percy