Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many problems in the world"
I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.
it's very easy in academic science to end up working on projects that are just
little extensions of previously known stuff, and that's sort of a waste of time.Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem.
--This is a rare, intellectually honest view of Evolution. Notice, there is reasonable doubt. However so constrained.
I just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem.
There is no doubt. No-one is debating if he is a scientist. He doesn't [bracket] the problem [for science]. In other words, "It's an intellectually honest view of Science". Not that there's anything wrong with that. We all know that just because something is falsifiable, does not mean it is false.
Edits: Tone
Interesting. Turing had a go at this in his last paper, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] ~ http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing..... attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis" This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells. (previously written at ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077817
[1]: http://videolectures.net/aaai2012_papadimitriou_computable_n...
[1] Or, 'Functional' as an alternative formulation. [2] As in, problem to solve. Not a counterargument against.
Of interest, there is on-going research into just how good reproduction has to be before evolution can bootstrap. If you have a process that successfully reproduces 50% of the characteristics of the original "cell", is that enough to allow evolution to work? 75%? 95%? We know that the number is less than 100%, indeed it needs to be to allow evolution to adapt, and obviously if the copy can be a very bad copy, that reduces the constraints on what the very first cell needs to do, increasing the solution space.
--What's rare, is that he is not making this point.