There’s a very interesting (and long) profile over at New York Times magazine:
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
I’m a little skeptical that this would actually work. But the researchers have the luxury that there is no chance that they would ever be able to test it.
The abstract was revised to (hopefully) eliminate ambiguity and make it clearer that Sylvain’s proposed chemical steps are not just a partial solution, but rather, go from the first reaction all the way to all the biomolecules necessary to “usher in the RNA world.” The full-picture illustration was also added on the home page to help readers grasp the scope of what is being offered.
To me, one of the compelling aspects of this is that all the relevant biomolecules form in one location through ‘room temperature’ chemical steps that do not require anything exotic.
Topics relevant to the Origin of Life that are addressed in this paper:
Why the relevant amino acids are all left-handed
Why there are 20 standard amino acids, and why those 20
Why the relevant amino acids are all “alpha-amino”
Why the relevant sugars are right-handed
The origin and preservation of homochirality
The origin of nucleobases A, G, C, U
The origin of RNA
The origin of the lipids
To put this into perspective, each one of these topics is a major big deal. That this model shows them as possibly being parts of interrelated cascading chemical steps is stunning. It is interesting to note that these chemical steps take place, not in a “primordial soup,” but in a sheltered microenvironment of a mineral host structure. Since these proposed reactions do not work in water, the concept of life originating in a “primordial soup” may have mislead Origin of Life chemists for many decades.
We’ll see where it goes. If it can actually tackle abiogenesis, it is a big deal.
I hadn’t realized that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, exactly two-hundred years ago today. Alan Boyle is covering the bicentennial Darwin week all week. And in honor of the event, Charles Johnson points out a story debunking one of the most common ignorant accusations against evolution — that there are no “transition” fossils.
Here are some good ones. I suspect that the socialists will have a response to this one, though:
President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn’t sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?
The response will be that the jobs will last more than a year. But of course, they’d have to last at least five years to be equivalent.
I scored a hundred percent on this quiz. But remember, it’s a test of deductive, not inductive logic (e.g., ignore whether or not the premises are valid — focus on the validity of the syllogism itself).
[Via Paul Hsieh, who got the same score as I did. Or so he says…]