"A dumb mistake."

"Scientific American is reporting on an 82 year old chemist who is being used as a pawn by Right wing Creationists science haters.

Scientist to creationists: "Don't quote me" Is the small essay.

Former chemistry professor Homer Jacobson has requested that two passages be retracted from a 1955 paper he wrote on the origins of life after discovering that creationists were using them to support their arguments. The 84-year-old scientist told the New York Times that he made the discovery when, on a whim, he decided to Google himself and quotes from his paper popped up on creationist sites such as Darwinismrefuted.com and Evolution-facts.org. To bolster their case, the sites zeroed in on his statements that amino acids couldn't form spontaneously without energy—Jacobson says today that he failed to mention that energy sources most surely existed billions of years ago—and that life could arise only under very specific conditions, which he now calls "a dumb mistake." His retraction request appears in the November / December issue of American Scientist, which published the original paper. (NYTimes; American Scientist)

His exact words were:

In January 1955, American Scientist published my article, "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life" (Vol. 43, No. 1). I ask you to honor my request to retract two brief passages, as follows:

On page 121: "Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanisms translating instructions into growth—all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [of life's birth]."

On page 125: "From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."