Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin (2005)
Chapter: Interlude—Mythos Versus Logos
Interlude—Mythos Versus Logos
People of the past … evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential.
Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, 2000
“Whoa, wait a minute!” My wife, Margee, sets aside my draft, her expression a cross between confusion and exasperation. “Is any of this stuff true? Who’s to say you’re not just writing another creation myth?”
“What do you mean? This is science.” How could she miss the point? “There’s a big difference between myth and science!”
“But you’re just making up a story. It’s really ancient history—no one will ever know for sure how life started.” She’s warming up to the debate. “Besides, you’re constantly saying ‘We don’t know’ and ‘The jury’s still out.’ Can you be sure about anything?”
“Gimme a break!” was about the cleverest comeback I could think of, as I turned back to the word processor.
So which is this book? Logos? Mythos? Some combination of the two? Am I writing the truth, or only just-so stories?
The distinction is not always clear-cut. The studies of life’s origin are in some ways like the efforts of archaeologists to document the history of ancient Troy. Troy fell to the Greeks in about 1190 BCE and eventually was buried under the litter of later cities. Real people were born, led their lives, and died in Troy; nevertheless, most of that rich, poignant history is lost forever. We learn fragments of the truth from excavations, artifacts, and ancient documents. But mythology always lurks in the background. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid inevitably color our understanding of the great city’s past.
Life, too, emerged through some real process. Molecules formed, they combined, they began to replicate. Much of that history is also lost forever. We will never know exactly where or when the first living entity arose, nor is it likely that every chemical detail of the process will ever be known for certain. Scientists flesh out the process with their own favorite origin stories: Miller’s primordial soup, Gold’s deep hot biosphere, Wächtershäuser’s sulfide surfaces. We tend to favor the stories told by our friends or our mentors, while discounting those of our rivals. And even if we do succeed in making life in the lab, there’s no guarantee that that’s exactly the way it happened 4 billion years ago.
Nevertheless, science and myth differ in a fundamental way. Scientific stories must win support through logically sound theory, rigorously reproducible lab experiments, and independently verifiable observations of nature. A scientific hypothesis must make unambiguous predictions. If those predictions fail, the story is deemed false by the scientific community and is cast aside. Today we may debate the details of the process, but all scientists agree that there must be a true origin-of-life story. That truth is our common goal.
There’s so much we don’t know and, as you have undoubtedly noticed, much of this book is qualified with phrases of uncertainty. Hardly an experiment or theory goes unchallenged, and groups of researchers often reach diametrically opposed conclusions. But we have attained a vibrant stage in origins research, one in which we are increasingly aware of what we don’t know and, consequently, are increasingly focused on what we must learn. A sustained, confident international program of research has supplanted the naïve optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. And so the scientific stories come thick and fast as theory, experiment, and observation winnow the universe of possibilities.