I'm always interested in pop-sci articles that offer treatments of new developments in science. This one is concerned with a possible shift in the theory of how life began on Earth.
One of the things I look for in these articles is where this kind of journalism, involving itself with popular renditions of ostensibly hard science, begins to wed itself to pure opinion or, essentially, religious belief systems, in order to imply that these are "scientific" facts.
There's a good example of it in this article: "Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life," said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist from the Insitute of Botany III in Düsseldorf.
The trouble here is that the 80 year old primordial soup concept is hardly "mainstream thinking" on this planet. But by saying that it is, over and over again, authoritarianism replaces science for the non-scientist gullible enough to swallow it.
Much more "scientific" are repeated surveys that find the overwhelming majorities of populations in various countries, including the United States, are very religious. And the wedding of any theory regarding how life began on Earth with "evolutionary biology" is where some of the most vicious clashes between the religious and anti-religious come about.
Why?
Because no-one knows how life began here. Shifting the theory to suggest that undersea volcanic vents provide a more reasonable expectation of providing the conditions necessary for the spontaneous generation of life is no more palatable for anyone who refuses to accept any speculation that preceded it. It's certainly a new direction for study, wholly valid as scientific pursuit, and always interesting as hell to me.
But no amount of scientific consensus can overcome the harsh and contentious divide between the scientific community and the devoutly religious on such a key issue as how life began on Earth. So far, in the entire history of scientific pursuit, this divide has only become deeper.
Truly impartial and objective science never would've produced this result.
1 comments:
At the end of the day scientific consensus is never going to solve the problem that there's no physical evidence left of the first life on Earth. Without physical evidence any theory is just a guess. At the end of the day it comes down to belief.
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