(March 25, 2015 at 11:35 am)dyresand Wrote: In other words chemists have claimed to solve the riddle of how life began on earth.I hate those headlines. The first paragraph says that they "believe they have solved the mystery of how it was possible for life to begin on Earth over four billion years ago." Which is exactly what you would expect a scientist or researcher to admit. It might lead us towards a viable theory on the appearance of life on Earth, but it's not something I think we will ever be able to "claim to solve" definitively.
It's an interesting discovery in any case.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
