Who Told You Science Had All the Answers?

I love this paper and the responses, mostly because it really points up what science is all about -- asking questions and testing hypotheses.

Chalk up one more disagreement to one of the most contentious issues in human prehistory: the question of who settled the Americas. A decade ago, intellectual battles raged over a bold synthesis of linguistic, genetic, and dental data named after co-creator Joseph Greenberg, a Stanford University linguist. The Greenberg theory suggested that the first Americans arrived from Asia in at least three separate waves, each wave giving rise to one of three linguistic groups. Linguists opposed putting the diverse languages of most native Americans into one "Amerind" group, but the theory fit dental and genetic evidence from several labs, including Wallace's.

But now the pillar of support from genetics is showing cracks, thanks to new data from Merriwether and others, including a European team whose review is published in the October issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. Additional DNA samples and better resolution show that native Americans aa diverse as the Eskimos of Alaska and the Kraho and Yanomami of Brazil share more gene types than previously thought, which suggest that they are descended from the same founding populations in Asia-and that their ancestors entered North America in only one or two migratory waves, says Oxford University evolutionary geneticist Ryk Ward. Scientists are already searching for those ancestors' closest kin in Siberia and Mongolia.

It gets better. (Or worse, I guess, depending on your attitude toward linguistics, genetics, and paleoanthropology.)

Aside from the tempest in an academic teapot, I think this illustrates something very important about the problems that some conservatives have with science: they expect it to provide answers, preferably carved in stone. The problem is that science can't do that, both because of the way it's structured, and because the universe itself doesn't seem to operate on absolutes -- every answer we've come up with in science, except for broad, general theories, seems to be either temporary or a special case. ("Ah hah!" you say, "What about the speed of light?" To which I reply, "What's the speed of the light generated by a neutron star or a black hole?" And try pinning down the bases for human behaviors.)

I chalk it up to the way our whole way of thinking has been conditioned by authority-based religion.

But then, I usually do.