Bad Science, Worse Philosophy: the Quackery and Logic-Chopping of David Foster’s The Philosophical Scientists (2000)
Addendum D: Precedents
Richard Carrier
Since I wrote this, I discovered that a real expert, Bernd-Olaf Küppers, had already done something similar to what I do in the rest of this chapter. His work is rigorous enough to actually prove that an organized replicator can in fact arise from a completely random replicator, by showing that a random string of replicating letters can ‘evolve’ into a meaningful sentence under life-like conditions. His aim was only to prove this particular point, and he does not work with anything possessing the huge Foster-scale specificities that I address. Nevertheless, I would love to see what Küppers could do with my work. To look at his work, see Chapter 8, “The Molecular-Darwinistic Approach,” in Part 3, “The Question of the Origin of Biological Information,” of Küppers’ book Information and the Origin of Life, MIT Press, 1990 (pp. 81-8).