the vicarian domain
Search for the Secret of Life
Preface
…scientists should follow the physical evidence wherever it leads…
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
Introduction
The difficulty of the problem is not that we lack some crucial bit of knowledge, but that we do not know how to frame the question.
Richard Lewontin, Triple Helix
History of Science
Despite loose talk about “proving” hypotheses, most scientists agree that the hypothesis that currently best explains the data is provisionally accepted, with the understanding that it may be altered, expanded, or rejected if subsequent evidence warrants doing so, or if a better hypothesis, not yet imagined, is devised. Sometimes, indeed a radically new “paradigm” replaces an old one; for example, plate tectonics revolutionized geology in the 1950s, replacing the conviction that continents are fixed in position.
Douglas Futuyma, Evolution
Speculation/Religion
Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
Origin of Life
Understanding the origin of life is one of the major unsolved scientific problems of the century.
Various Authors, The Future of Origin of Life Research, 2/26/20
The most difficult problem in accounting for the origin of life is that in known living systems, only nucleic acids replicate, but their replication requires the action of proteins that are encoded by the nucleic acids.
Douglas Futuyma, Evolution
Evolution
However attractive the extrapolation, it does not necessarily follow that, because a certain degree of evolution has been shown to occur, therefore any degree of evolution is possible.
Michael Denton, Evolution: a Theory in Crisis
Basic Functions Within a Living Cell
Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical.
Michael Denton, Evolution: a Theory in Crisis
Thought Experiment
Are there not vast areas of the cosmos, both macroscopic and microscopic, as yet unseen and, most likely, never to be seen by us, yet undoubtedly extant?
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation
Conclusion
The real question is whether certain major lines of inquiry ought to be pursued at all, whether society and the human intellect at their present level of evolution, can survive the next truths. It may be—and the mere possibility presents dilemmas beyond any which have arisen in history—that the coming door opens on to realities ontologically opposed to our sanity and limited moral reserves.
George Steiner, A Reader