I USED TO LISTEN to the CBC radio science program Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald regularly but not so much these days. Having access to text that can be read faster than listening to the radio and that can be reviewed on the screen or page, that's how I prefer to get science news, these days.
This week I notice that on the show there is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific science I have mentioned the last few days, brought by a prominent, credentialed, scientist from as eminent a university as Cambridge. The interview is symptomatic of the kind of decadence within modern science that will be promoted in the media.
The topic is the entirely non-scientific "study" of extra-terrestrial life. The interview starts out badly.
- Zoology and the study of extraterrestrial life may seem like two different subjects at first glance. What inspired you to write a book that combines the study of both?
- Well, the study of zoology, or the way that we zoologists pursue our science, is always about asking "why" questions. Asking why animals are the way they are, why they look the way they do, why they behave the way they do. And the answer to all of these "why" questions always come down to evolution, to the different ways that evolutionary forces are acting on these animals.
So it's really not that big a stretch to see that the evolutionary forces that we understand from studying animals all this time on Earth, those same forces are universal. Those are the kinds of things that will make animals on Earth eat each other. They'll make creatures on other planets eat each other because the fundamental laws are still the same.
It's a lie that it isn't a big stretch. It is a stretch past the breaking point to say it and pretend you're doing science. And an even bigger one to get away with it on a popular science show.
Exactly how this scientist knows that "those same forces are universal" is something that is never asked. Of course, until they have a large number of samples of "other life" to study, there is no way for them to know that that huge leap of faith is supported by scientific observation and measurement, the analysis of which could possibly show that that assumption is wrong. The fact is there is not the first such example available for study, never mind every single other example of "other life" in the universe, what would be necessary to be able to study to sustain the claim that those are universal. I will repeat that I'm skeptical that scientists know what those are here, now, today or if their ideological speculations are anything like a universal explanation of how life on Earth arose and developed in its diversity. I doubt that science today has any general idea of what range of mechanisms might have resulted in what we have now. What it has is dogmatic certitude based on ideology.
The culture of zoology and, in fact, all of Darwinian biology, is predisposed to make exactly that assumption because the theory of natural selection is one such huge leap of faith which is not based in observation or actual measurement of the thing claimed to be explained by it. As can be seen, unwarranted speculation about what can be known to be there will make the huge leap into speculation about what cannot be seen and likely, for the rest of the life of the Earth, will not be known to be there. How this is more scientific than angelology as science is something I'd really like to ask Bob McDonald or Arik Kirschenbaum. Only no one is going to pretend that we can assume angels are anything like us on anything like a scientific basis.
I wouldn't claim to have any basis for saying that that speculation is wrong because I have no more access to "other life" than the entirety of scientists who pretend they can know that.
It gets worse as the Cambridge zoologist proves that every single thing he says about this is based on not only what is scientifically knowable about life here but in a huge range of merely assumed speculations that are rampant in biology for ideological reasons and the self-interested assertions of scientists holding onto this or that ideological stand.
Q. - Carl Sagan believed in life and other planets and that they indeed would have similar characteristics to life here on Earth. But we're now learning that planets, even those within our own solar system, are really, really different from Earth. So how can it be both ways? How can alien life be similar to ours on such different worlds?
A. - The interesting thing here is that the evolution and the process of evolution and the rules by which evolution works are pretty much independent of the underlying biology. They're pretty much independent of the biochemistry. They're independent of exactly what kind of metabolism or what kind of chemicals are being used.
I will break in here to say I doubt very highly that evolution is independent of the underlying biology, I would really love to have someone try to produce a logically coherent argument that that is true, that the processes of evolution can in any way be independent of the underlying biology. The conventional Darwinism expressed in the interview is not separable from the underlying biology of the organisms in question. HOW THEY COULD SEPARATE THE TWO TO TEST SUCH AN HYPOTHESIS ON THE BASIS OF CURRENT KNOWLEDGE WOULD BE A USEFUL CLAIM TO HAVE ON PAPER IN FRONT OF YOU. I think this might count as the stupidest thing I have read or heard an allegedly reputable scientist claim in a long time.
You don't need DNA for evolution. OK, there's lots of different ways that evolution could work with different kinds of chemicals, different kinds of chemistries.
Until you have actual organisms either without DNA or which, at no point in their lives or the history of their lineage, had no knowable connection to DNA that speculation is of unknowable truth. I say that when it is one of my speculations that DNA and RNA both evolved in the ancient organisms that precede any resolvable fossil evidence with evidence of those molecules being present, though that is only based on the extremely complex structures and status of both of those molecules and the supporting cellular chemistry that they work in. But that is a speculation because there is no physical evidence to use to support that as being how things actually happened. Remember that idea, that how life happened to arise on Earth is not through some unsupported speculation BUT IN THE ONLY WAY THAT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, SOMETHING WHICH IS PROBABLY LOST IN THE EROSION, THE DECAY AND THE BURIAL OF THE PAST NEVER TO BE RECOVERED.
You could have animals based on DNA like ours. You could have creatures that are based on a different chemical that transmits information from one generation to the next. You could have animals that don't rely on water, perhaps even some other solvent they could use. But still, the evolutionary processes are still going to be the same, survival of the fittest.
That is absolutely ridiculous to claim on the basis of having absolutely nothing to base it on, no other example of "other life" which may or may not support that Darwinian supposition. This is a good example of that ultimate "Just-so story" method of doing evolutionary science without even the sky as a limit.
This is not scientific except that science is whatever scientists get away with calling science and when they do that from elite university positions and reputable science journalists let them get away with it the way Bob McDonald did here, there is nothing they can't claim.
If the role of a science reporter isn't to question what is said in a case like this, what is the use of having one?
This interview is an example of stunning factual, logical and philosophical incompetence and of basic journalistic integrity. I have not come to expect any of those when things like this are discussed as science.
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