Most of us are impressed with the apparent intelligence of those who use big words in speeches or conversation. Even more impressive are those who actually know what these words mean, how to use them, and how to spell them! On the other hand, no one is ever going to accuse Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer of Ivy League intelligence based on their pronunciation and use of the "English" language.

Despite 30 years of accumulating increasingly abundant and unequivocal geomorphological evidence, the case for past catastrophic water-related activity on Mars has remained controversial until very recently.¹ Ingenious non-aqueous explanations had been proposed for individual Martian landforms that otherwise were strikingly similar to water-generated features on Earth.

There were no human witnesses to the origin of life, and no physical geological evidence of its origin exists. Speaking of the origin of a hypothetical self-replicating molecule and its structure, Pross has recently admitted that "The simple answer is we do not know, and we may never know."¹ Later, concerning the question of the origin of such a molecule, Pross said, ". . .

In your kitchen you start a three-minute egg timer and a 60-minute hourglass simultaneously and then leave. You return a short while later to find the hourglass fully discharged but not the egg timer! Something must be wrong with at least one of the two timers.

 Introduction