Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
be a bit like saying that knowledge of the physical origins of silicon tells us
something meaningful about how the microcomputer
could
begin
.
A neces-
sary but remote cause has been put forth in place of more sufficient and
immediate ones that still remain unknown.
I am not faulting the Field Museum's curators for the simplicity of this
summation. The plain significance of the Miller-Urey experiment could have
easily been adapted to the understanding of the average fifth grader without
any meaningful distortion of its explanatory scope. But in this instance,
simplicity has been achieved at the expense of basic logicality. Upon close
inspection, it is apparent that the fallacy on display at the Field Museum
is the naturalistic counterpart to the God-in-the-gaps reasoning sometimes
invoked by biblical creationists. Scientists will say that creationists argue
from irrelevant grounds when they suppose that supernatural interven-
tion can be inferred from various lacunae in the fossil record. In doing so,
they are attempting to deduce a positive from a negative: “We do not know
what bridged these gaps, so let us suppose that it was God.” But the Field
Museum has responded in kind—with a Nature-in-the-gaps argument. In the
absence of any concrete explanatory basis for the origin of life, the reader
is asked to suppose that prebiotic molecules could spontaneously assemble
themselves into living organisms. To declare that “Nature did it” without
any information about how is hardly any more rigorous than to assert that
“God did it” absent any scientific means for testing supernatural causation.
Some will say that the Field Museum's language is merely reactionary,
that it may be faulted only for being overzealous in its efforts to combat the
doubts that many Americans harbor about evolution. But it seems unlikely
that scientists could hope to combat those who reject evolutionary science
by flying from science themselves. A more plausible explanation is that
the generative force responsible for this language lies beyond reason, in a
mythogenic impulse that wishes to envision infinite horizons for science.
Some hint of this can be detected in this adjacent bullet-point summary.
Rules to Live By
•Livingthingsarecontrolledbythesamephysicalandchemicallawsas
nonliving things.
•Experimentsshowthatlifecouldhavebegunasachemicalreaction.
•Exactlyhoworwherethatreactiontookplacestillisamystery.
13
The final of these three statements might at first seem to back away from
the notion that the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated the certainty of
