Tony (b_m) decided to scream "FOCUS! FOCUS!" into "the darkness that modern science has become". I asked: "Focus on what?"-TONY: Focus on being less focused and letting understanding come to them. I am not suggesting that they stop learning, but rather that they remove the constraints from their minds while they learn so that they are an empty cup ready to be filled instead of a full cup ready to spill out on everything they see.-I agree with all your objections to grantsmanship, pet theories and prejudices, and I share your scepticism about the sensational new discoveries that disappear from the headlines a few days after they've hit them. But I don't see how scientists can operate by "letting understanding come to them", as it did with your Game Design problem (of which more in a moment). Science can only proceed by painstaking observation and experimentation within the material world, and our advances in technology and medicine provide ample evidence that it doesn't always lead us up the wrong paths. Its range is limited, many of its practitioners may be blinkered, and many of their findings may be suspect, but the scientific method is still a richly productive method of investigating the universe.
 
David has drawn our attention to a review of a book by Paul Feyerabend (see "Tyranny"), and there are two passages that I think are very relevant to this discussion:-"Public concern with the sciences is a persistent and perhaps increasing feature of modern societies. For sure, some of that concern is justified, but much of it is not, for instance because it rests upon false ideas, misperceptions of the science, or because the public imagination has been warped by charged rhetoric and imagery."-"The Tyranny of Science should therefore be interpreted as Feyerabend's attempts to dissolve conflicts and establish harmony between science, society, and philosophy, on the one hand, and between scientists, philosophers, and the public, on the other. The concerns and alarms that concerned Feyerabend are not the exclusive preserve of any of those domains—scientific, public, or philosophical—and to properly understand and address them each must cooperate with the other."-That sounds like a well balanced view to me. Although I don't think science can "let understanding come", I certainly agree with you that there are other methods of understanding the world. Your repeated experience of "spontaneous solutions" is one that I'm very familiar with. It usually happens when I end the day with an apparently insoluble problem, go to bed, and wake up with the whole thing sorted. I would put this on a par with instinct and intuition, and if we go one step further, with the emergence of new ideas. The mechanisms of the unconscious mind are as far beyond our comprehension as those of the conscious mind, and are often more reliable than the equally incomprehensible power of conscious reason. But it all boils down to the nature of the problem, and there are some problems that science can deal with more reliably than intuition.-On the subject of wonderment, I simply cannot accept the suggestion that "unapologetic theists" are more aware of life's beauty, complexity, richness etc. than non-believers. You'll probably be surprised to hear that unapologetic atheists and agnostics can actually enjoy life for its own sake (and can also be kind to their fellow creatures for their own sake). Some would even argue that they can enjoy it all the more for not having to worry about what a UI might be thinking of them.

I am not listening to the professors' conjectures. I am challenging yours!-You can't challenge me by using the conjectures in the article. My point is we don't know what life looked like before the organelle or after. DNA has a built-in code to create complexity is my conjecture. I don't know if I am right and you certainly don't. But time will tell us, even if your Volt is not talking..

No more absurd than any other person, including myself, postulating something that they can not explain or prove in order to prove something that they do not fully comprehend.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.

DAVID: Folly, foolishness, futility mixed with a taint of scientific research, or does study of 'conserved' genes paint a real and proper picture of the first organism?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228404.300-life-began-with-a-planetary-megaorga...

Quote: “Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.”

As usual, I need help on the science, although I’m reassured by David’s scepticism. Here are some statements I don’t understand – so please put me right.

First, though, a complaint. The headline tells us: LIFE BEGAN WITH A PLANETARY MEGA-ORGANISM, but now we learn that LUCA wasn’t the first life that emerged, so life didn’t begin with the mega-organism. Misleading headline.

“It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split.”

And it must be equally hard to know what the first forms of life actually were, what happened to them, why they didn’t survive, or why they didn’t merge with this extraordinary mega-organism, or even merge to form it (in which case, they would all be LUCAs). What evidence have the researchers provided that bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes didn’t already exist before the birth of the ocean-filling organism? And what evidence have they provided that there ever was such a thing?

“The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.”

What sort of cells were these, if they weren’t the first forms of life? Where did they come from? Life’s early fight….without competition….Then the happy monster splits up and there is competition again. Why would that happen? A big, accidental oops? And why would a “single organism” split into three separate, readymade forms?

Perhaps my questions are stupid, because I’m way out of my depth, but I’m willing to learn!