Because ice cubes can be made in the freezer, all glaciers must have been made in a similar manner.

Yep, that proves it!

I thought this post was a joke.

Yes, it was facetious.

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race [to create artificial life]. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

Uh oh.

Yeah, really. He should really read Jurassic Park - "life finds a way."

/panic

Gray goo, anyone?

Seriously, though, it reads as though they're just making a stripped-down "copy" of an existing organism. And they're doing it the hard way by building the genome from individual nucleotides. If they succeed, they haven't designed anything new, though it would still be a remarkable achievement.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Can in vitro, indivisible parts of the body joined to make a human being ?

If god did exist he would have had to create the chemicals himself to produce that specific chromosome.
Here the didn't but take certain chemicals, glue them all together and then produced a new DNA strand which evidently created an new chromosome.

Using this as an arguement holds no water.

The post is still a joke.

*sigh* I wonder whether there a 'law' of some sort of the form: no statement on the web can be made sufficiently ironic/tongue in cheek, that you won't still have someone dense enough to come along and take it literally?

Corollary: even official declarations of the post's non-literalness in the comments thread will be insufficient.

In case it wasn't clear, I was responding along with JohnS and Nick to the substance of the article itself, not to the facetious question Zach wrote.