Abstract
Frank B. Salisbury may be familiar to some of you as an author or co-author of texts in plant physiology and botany. He first came to my attention with his article "Doubts about the modern synthetic theory of evolution," published in no less a periodical than Nature (224:342-343, 1969). A similar article was published in American Biology Teacher (33:335-338, 1971). In both of these papers, Salisbury argues that there is an incredibly small probability that any particular macromolecule could have arisen from a mixture of components by chance. There are some flaws in his arguments, such as that the Nature paper does not allow for the degeneracy of the genetic code, but the basic conclusion seems to be unassailable.