Late Hate Mail

The total incompetence of Associate-professor of Biology P. Z. Myers comparing a cell wall to a "wall" of driftwood that accumulates on a beach couldn't be more obvious.  The sticks and logs that accumulate on a shoreline don't interact with the other sticks and longs on a shoreline except,perhaps, to have their further progress up shore stopped by them.  They don't do much of anything once there except decay.  Once they've been stopped by each other, they really can't be said to do anything, they don't interact, they don't allow in or exclude molecules or smaller particles.  THEY DON'T EVEN CONTAIN ANYTHING.  They certainly don't contain the lake, the lake isn't there because of them, its continued existence as a lake doesn't depend on the "wall" working in any way.  The lake doesn't divide into another lake due to the accumulation of molecules and structures within the driftwood wall.  The wall doesn't split and reform - even arguably resealing itself around two new bodies of water.   One stick in the driftwood wall cannot be said to have a functional relationship with any other stick not touching it as the molecules and structures within even the walls of the "simplest" organisms must have in order for it to function as a part of a living organism or part of one. 

I would argue that to consider a driftwood accumulation on the shore of a body of water to be "complex" a complex unity is a rather naive and superficial way to, look at it.  It is certainly, in no way, complex in the same way that the containing membrane of a single-cell organism is.  The improbability of it forming by  random chance events is certainly far less than the incredible improbably of a viable, working organism's cell wall forming and working by random chance.  

Certainly the complex molecules that would have had to form, persist, come come together in proximity to each other for them to spontaneously form into a cell wall that just happened to contain other molecules of the same or, perhaps, even grater improbability so as to form the first living organism on Earth are far less likely to have been there and come together in just the right way at just the right time under just the right conditions AND TO HAVE WORKED PERFECTLY THE VERY FIRST TIME IN ORDER TO METABOLIZE, INTERNALLY GENERATE THE COMPONENTS OF REPRODUCTION - WITH NO TELEOLOGICAL PURPOSE FOR ANY OF THAT HAPPENING - AND SUCCESSFULLY REPRODUCING is far, far more remotely likely than the dead parts of many thousands, tens of thousands, and more large, complex, multicellular organisms falling into a body of water and floating on top until the waves of water pushed them ashore.  

In every way P.Z. Myers' analogy is incompetent and stunningly stupid, coming from someone with his credentials and position.