Lost marbles (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 22, 2009, 18:04 (5303 days ago) @ David Turell

David: The old grey lady has "lost her marbles" (The NY Times), or those folks who believe in multiple side-by-side universes have lost theirs, or quantum theory has just gone daffy.-It gets harder and harder to place one's faith in science when there are so many widely differing theories, so many disagreements, and so many weird and wonderful speculations. Prior to this one, David alerted us to an abiogenetic theory that life might have evolved in alkaline hydrothermal vents. As always with such theories, it sounds impressively plausible until one reaches expressions like "evolution got underway with sets of molecules capable of producing more of themselves"..."fatty molecules spontaneously formed cell-like bubbles"..."the evolution of an enzyme called pyrophosphatase"...It's as if the very mention of the word "evolution" explains everything. You might as well say "life just happened". Maybe it did, but as with all the other unproven theories, you need faith to fill the gaps.-Here is another headline story, from today's Guardian: "Just another lemur? Scientists claim fossil hailed as missing link was really a dead end". This concerns a pre-Ardi sensation: a 47m-year-old primate named Ida, "whose exquisite fossil was touted as the remains of our earliest ancestor. She was, they said, the "link" between us and the rest of the animal kingdom." But now a team of New York palaeontologists say: "Ida is not related to humans and may represent more of an evolutionary dead end. Instead, they conclude, the $1m fossil looks more like a small lemur or possibly a loris." (I have just seen that David deals with the same topic in his "Dendrology" post, but I think our posts complement each other.)-The original researchers are defending their findings, and it's reassuring that at least scientists are challenging scientists, but what are we non-scientists supposed to make of the claims and counter-claims? Sometimes I get the impression that there are scientists, just as there are theists, who simply believe what they want to believe. One might argue that truth will out in the end, but does the end ever come? I wonder which of our scientific "truths" will still be valid a thousand years from now.