History and Epistemic Theory in Search of the Origin of Life

Gould's statement is relevant to my dissertation because this essay, too is concerned with the stories that are told when data is lacking. While Gould's proximate concern in the above citation is baseball, he is at pains to formulate a generalization about the ways we generally tell stories to ourselves, and about the ease with which many such stories are generated. (This caution is only appropriate from the foremost critic of "justso" stories in evolutionary biology - the adaptationist narratives that have been unreflectively applied or assumed by many biologists.) The statement applies with some legitimacy to the question of life's origin, where scientific data is, arguably, still lacking. That has not stopped the creation of stories accounting for the phenomenon. Only a century ago there were few if any serious scientific theories of life's origin; today there are many theories. And they are only tenuously supported by the data.