Embrace Your Inner Martian

The Darwin Party can
speculate about anything
and not get laughed at

It’s only January 2 and we already have a winner for the Dumb Category.

Are we the Martians? The intriguing idea that life on Earth began on the red planet  (The Conversation, 29 Dec 2025). Seán Jordan has no fear of being laughed at, because he is an evolutionist in academia (in this case, Dublin City University). Darwin Party members are protected from ridicule for two reasons: (1) Their ideas are promoted uncritically by the secular media (which never laughs at any nonsense from any evolutionist wearing a D-Merit Badge, and (2) The Big Science establishment can censor anybody heard laughing by locking him behind one-way glass in a soundproof room, metaphorically speaking: non-Darwinian ideas are routinely censored by the scientific establishment. One cannot hear a critic laughing when he can’t get his response published in the “accepted” venues of scientific conversation. Among these, The Conversation (better described as The Indoctrination) puts out some whoppers. It would benefit from some righteous laughter and learn thereby not to make a mockery of science.

With a straight face, Dr Jordan can call his whopper “intriguing” without the possibility of being shamed out of polite society. Ratcheting up his perhapsimaybecouldness index beyond the red line, he proudly displays the Darwin Party’s utter ignorance about the origin and nature of life:

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don’t yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared.

But what if Earth’s life did not originate here, instead arriving on meteorites from Mars? It’s not the most favoured theory for life’s origins, but it remains an intriguing hypothesis. Here, we’ll examine the evidence for and against.

Timing is a key factor. Mars formed around 4.6 billion years ago, while Earth is slightly younger at 4.54 billion years old. The surfaces of both planets were initially molten, before gradually cooling and hardening.

Life could, in theory, have arisen independently on both Earth and Mars shortly after formation. While the surface of Mars today is probably uninhabitable for life as we know it, early Mars probably had similar conditions to the early Earth.

From there, he repeats the myth that favorable conditions guarantee that life will emerge (by chance, of course: no intelligence allowed). That is the “If you build it, they will come” notion. Since Mars may have had hot, molten, hellish conditions like Earth, it must have been a veritable greenhouse for life to pop into existence. Jordan thinks Mars might have even been more favorable for life than Earth. Why wouldn’t a self-respecting putative life form rush to emerge there?

Lucky Luca Looking for the Right Planet to Emerge On

Jordan’s “hypothesis” builds on a house of cards: deep time, unobserved planetary histories, the mythical Theia that made our moon, and the mythical Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), a Darwin Party acronym that embeds Darwinism into the vocabulary. See if you can find the four most laugh-worthy words in this quote:

If small but fairly complex ecosystems were present on Earth around 4.2 billion years ago, life must have originated earlier. But how much earlier? The new estimate for the age of Luca is 360 million years after the formation of the Earth and 290 million years after the Moon-forming impact. All we know is that in these 290 million years, chemistry somehow became biology. Was this enough time for life to originate on Earth and then diversify into the ecosystems present when Luca was alive?

What was your choice? Ours is, “chemistry somehow became biology.” With his Darwin glasses on, looking into the crystal ball, he sees Luca alive, swimming in the chemistry that “gave rise to” its biology.

The Science of the Hunch

This useless “conversation” proceeds from bad to worse. Jordan eats his hunches for lunch—not a particularly nutritious diet.

The timing may be convenient for this idea. However, as someone who works in the field, my hunch would be that 290 million years is plenty of time for chemical reactions to produce the first living organisms on Earth, and for biology to subsequently diversify and become more complex.

The only scientifically plausible notion in his tale is that microbes would likely not survive the journey from Mars to Earth, what with radiation, the heat of re-entry, and impacts and all. Maybe they got around that problem by inventing spores.

This raises another question – if life made it from Mars to Earth within the first 500 million years of our Solar System’s existence, why hasn’t it spread from Earth to the rest of the Solar System in the following four billion years? Maybe we’re not the Martians after all.

Enough already. While he is out to lunch, let’s get real.

Dr Jordan, you are hereby arrested for impersonating a scientist (see commentary here). To post bail, you must listen to 10 hours of lectures by Dr James Tour.

One glimmer of hope is that a few readers of Jordan’s article who weren’t buying the story posted comments at the end. A few people may look at those remarks, but The Conversation would never allow a knowledgeable critic of abiogenesis like Dr Tour to post a similar-length article in response under their banner. Or would you, Vivian Lam, “Health and Biomedicine Editor” at The Conversation who gave your blessing on Jordan’s article? Hmmmm? Do you really believe in conversations? Do you really value science?