Extreme Speculation Presented as Science

Things no one could possibly ever know are being reported by science journals and news sites as things worthy of scientific faith.

Here are some far-out speculations coming from science sites recently:

• Asteroid that killed dinosaurs might have sent life to Mars (BBC News).
• A roundworm’s mind may be the first step toward understanding the human brain (Live Science).
• One-way breathing may have evolved 270 million years ago (Live Science).
• An ancient “fig wasp” lived 100 million years before figs evolved (Science Daily).
• A meteor may have delivered the building blocks of life to Europa (Space.com).
• Exoplanet hunters may find ET by glut of alien corpses (New Scientist)
• Life was possible in the early universe in the cooling glow of the big bang (Nature News).  This weakens the Anthropic Principle and the need for a multiverse.

For the last claim in the list above, comments to PhysOrg‘s version of the story came from many who felt the subject was far too speculative and therefore unscientific.

And yet these same priests and prophets of scientism, who take on the role of delivering scientific truths to the masses, routinely become filled with rage at critics of Darwinism, claiming they are enemies of science, that they don’t understand science, that they are religious nuts.  Casey Luskin just reported on Evolution News & Views a new case where bullies threatened disruption of a non-credit, optional class on intelligent design vs. evolution, and succeeded in getting the administration to cancel the class (for fear of bad publicity).  Hypocrites; the bullies belong to a group that calls itself the “Freethought Oasis.”

Not a single one of the claims in the above list could be demonstrated by observation or experiment.  The perhapsimaybecouldness index for each one is exorbitantly high to the point of fantasy.  Any one of us could speculate wildly on similar subjects with equal credibility.  Try it; it’s fun:

• Dinosaur farts may have caused global warming on Venus.
• Alternate universe #3652908 may have had the conditions for the evolution of silicon life.
• Mutation in a newt may have caused men to be more hairy than women.
• Cosmic rays could have started the geysers on Enceladus.
• Unseen planets between the galaxies might host advanced civilizations.

Anything goes in secular science news these days; it’s Alice in Wonderland meets Stephen Hawking, like Bob Berman said of modern cosmology (10/06/04).  Notice that mentioning current-day observational facts (like a meteor crater, a roundworm, or a fossil) does not validate a speculative claim.  The presence of a connectome in a roundworm says absolutely nothing about the human brain.  A crater on Europa says nothing about life.  Don’t be fooled; none of the observational props provide necessary or sufficient conditions to establish scientific validity to any claim that is (1) speculative and (2) incapable of verification.  You can observe a robin in your yard; that does not give you the right to claim in the name of science that it got its avian lung from the ancestor of a monitor lizard 270 million years ago.  “Well, it might have” is no excuse.  Scientists need to stop imagining things; they need bigger vigor in their scientific rigor.