[justoleme]

As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out with obvious satisfaction, the accounts that science ultimately resorts to are as removed from common sense as the products of mythological thought. When we think about the origin of life, we have to accept that, over the course of some eight or nine hundred million years, thousands of events, each highly improbable, followed one after the other to permit the transformation of an earth without life to life in a RNA world, and then to life in a DNA world. Clearly, such a history might appear as incomprehensible to non-initiates as do the stories of Creation in the Theogony of Hesiod, the Upanishads, or the Bible. Indeed, mythological tales seem closer to common sense than does the discourse of biochemists and molecular biologists.