The scientist — Javier Campos-Gomez at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — was easy to find and I emailed him to confirm that he is who he says he is.
Dr. Tour is highly skeptical that theorists have got it all figured out about how life arose on a barren early Earth through known material processes alone.
“It’s easy to say things that aren’t true and get people to believe them, especially when they sound science-y and are mixed in with well-known facts.”
As one of our students last year said at the concluding banquet, the Summer Seminars represent “science as it should be, rather than science as it is.”
Did scientists like Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton speak easily of God as the intelligence behind nature just because that’s how everyone spoke at the time?