Update on Abiogenesis & Panspermia/Exogenesis.
Over on the Wired.com blogs I saw an interesting article which relates precisely to the segment we did in season one, episode one. The article is here.
Did you read it?
If not, go do so.
I’ll wait.
It’s not that long.
Back?
Ok, now this article does a much better job of pointing out some competing ideas, and gets into some information I did not have time to adequately cover in the segment, I strongly suggest clicking through the links in the article as well. I know that the LHC is dominating the minds of pop-science fans, but these are major breakthroughs going on which implications to chemistry and biology on a par with what is expected to be uncovered by the LHC. So, why is this not getting any press? Well, it’s a much smaller effort, it doesn’t have a cool name with spiffy acronyms and it doesn’t inspire conspiracy theorists and pseudo-scientists to wildly flail their arms about the end of the world.
What it does do though is poke yet another hole in religious dogma. Theistic evolution has become popular in the last 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Those who still wanted to believe in “God as miraculous creator” could rest happily in the gap that was the first form of life. With significant advances in abiogenesis research (which even I’ll admit are still a long way off) yet another gap is closed. Now, there are those who believe that all of these scientific discoveries are not guilty of removing god, but merely expose his/her methods of creation. There are not scriptural literalists, and they’ve got a much more grown-up view of their religion. If you’re in this camp, good on ya, we’ve still got some issues to discuss but at least you’re probably not sending death threats to physicists or publishing horrible videos with inane “science” and poor production values.
My second point in this post has to do with the somewhat dismissive tone I used when panspermia was brought up in season one, show one. I’d like to apologize briefly, I was not being dismissive due to a disagreement with the hypothesis. Panspermia is very interesting, however, in my opinion, it is not a hypothesis concerning abiogensis, it more properly falls into the realm known as exogenesis. I dismissed it merely in an effort to stay on topic, although in listening to my own comments I realize I may have come accross as condecending or dismissive of the idea as a whole. For those who do like this hypothesis we will be covering it more in an upcoming show, pairing it with some information on big-bang and expanding universe theory. Thanks for listening!