As we learn things...

An interesting contrast in how scientific progress is treated.

Wizbang links to an article about a repair mechanism that catches scientists by surprise. He titles his post, "Evolution stood on its head?" His premise seems to be that because scientists are astonished at one thing they discover in nature, they must not know anything about the rest of nature, including all the stuff they think they know.

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Not only do scientists have good reason to be confident in their knowledge of a lot of things they know, they have very good reason to be very confident in what I call the fundamental doctrine of science: Any phenomenon that currently lacks an explanation will eventually be explained using only processes that can be discovered and described by science.

So, for example, the origin of life, although currently unexplained, will be explained in terms of natural processes. No process that doesn't exist in nature will be needed, and at no time will we need to resort to Sid Harris' step two, "And then a miracle happens".

The reason science is so confident in this belief is that it's never had to invoke miracles in the past. Any phenomenon that has hung around long enough to be examined, or has left traces of its existence, has yielded to scientific scrutiny sooner or later. We can expect questions like the origin of life will do the same.

It's interesting to compare this with some of the comments I've heard in passing with respect to Terri Sciavo. I've heard any number of commentators mention discoveries that show surprising amounts of activity in the brains of people in a persistent vegetative state, or surprising amounts of regeneration or recovery. There are accounts of people who have been misdiagnosed, and new discoveries that give us nuances in diagnosing and classifying patients we didn't have years ago.

Yet I've not heard a single commentator say that, therefore, brain science is all wrong and the seat of intelligence and personality is in the heart or the liver. Everyone still trusts the science that says the brain is what matters.

Go figure.