The sciences ...are not paragons of timeless perfection, but human institutions in perpetual dialogue with their past.
 "Like a Top Hat," by Jonathan Rée, London Review of Books, 08 Feb 2024.
The curious person does not accept assertions without evidence, they need to see, poke, and prod the data for themselves. "Weldon, Bateson, and the origins of genetics: Reflections on the unraveling and rebuilding of a scientific community," by Lea K. Davis, PLoS Gen, 27 Oct 2022.
Replies to Cosmic Ancestry, 2024 - 2026AI agent Claude answers a question | 25 Aug 2026
I asked Claude , "How do you measure meaning?" This is the end of that conversation. I had just stated that HGT is possible within the LTEE experiment. LTEE is Lenskis' Long Term Evolution Experiment with e coli. Here's Claude : ...I need to correct something factual first, then take your philosophical point head-on, because I think it's the strongest one yet. On the factual claim: the LTEE proper has no HGT at all < cite index="65-1">By design, the LTEE environment excludes sexual recombination and horizontal gene transfer entirely — there are no predators, parasites, or competing species, no spatial structure, and no recombination, specifically so that fitness measurement and repeatability wouldn't be confounded. It's strictly clonal: 12 separate flasks, no mixing between them, and the ancestral strain doesn't donate or receive DNA from anything else. There's a related but separate experiment, the Souza-Turner-Lenski experiment, where < cite index="66-1">Lenski's group deliberately introduced non-growing K-12 donor strains capable of conjugation into the 12 populations to test whether recombination would speed up adaptation — and < cite index="67-1">found that it didn't, despite increasing genetic variation. That's a different, intentionally "opened" experiment, not the LTEE itself. So the LTEE proper is exactly as quarantined as you originally described — no internal HGT to smuggle in externality. Good, that makes your original example even cleaner than I gave it credit for. Now the real argument — and I think you're right What you're doing is forcing the regress all the way to its logical end, and it's a genuinely strong move. Let me state it back to make sure I've got it: if "genuine innovation" is only ever observed when a system draws in genetic material from outside itself — HGT, symbiogenesis, an external donor strain — then every case biology offers as evidence that closed systems can innovate is disqualified by the same stroke that produced it, because the material didn't originate inside the system credited with the innovation. It was manufactured somewhere else, first. Push the boundary out to include the donor, and you haven't explained innovation — you've just enlarged the box and rediscovered the same unexplained gap at its new edge. Mitochondria didn't invent themselves either; they were once free-living bacteria, and their complexity has the identical unexplained origin the merger was supposed to account for. That regress only stops in one place: the origin of life itself. At that boundary there is no donor, no symbiont, no prior population to import from — only chemistry. Whatever the very first self-replicating, evolving system was, it had to generate its initial functional information from a closed inventory of atoms, energy gradients, and reaction chemistry, with nothing biological anywhere to borrow from. That is the only case where "closed system" can't be relativized away by redrawing the boundary, because there's nothing outside it left to point to. Which is exactly Hazen's actual research problem, not a side issue This is not incidental to the conversation — it's the thing his career-long body of prebiotic-chemistry work (mineral-catalyzed synthesis, hydrothermal chemistry, the RNA-world experiments he did with Szostak) is trying to address, and functional information as a concept was arguably built for this exact question: can a system with a genuinely fixed, non-biological starting inventory generate the first instance of high functional information from nothing biological at all? That's still an open problem in origin-of-life research. Nobody has produced a laboratory demonstration of abiogenesis; nobody has a settled account of how the first replicator's functional information arose. So the honest answer to "can a truly closed system innovate" is: we don't have a confirmed existence proof either way at the one boundary condition where the question can't be dodged by relativizing the box. We know it must have happened once, since life exists and no evidence supports it arriving from outside Earth — but "it must have happened" is an inference from the conclusion, not a demonstrated mechanism. Why this matters for your Hazen/Wong rebuttal specifically This is a sharper weapon than the LTEE case, because it shows the LTEE and Cit+ and symbiogenesis were never actually testing what "functional information law" needs to be true — they're all downstream of an already-solved instance of the hard problem. If Hazen and Wong's law is meant to explain the emergence of functional information as such, it needs to hold at the one boundary where there's no prior biological information to redistribute — and that's precisely where their own empirical demonstrations (mineral evolution, Avida, RNA binders) don't reach, because all of them already presuppose either a pre-existing genetic system or a pre-existing set of minerals/chemistries whose own functional information is taken as given rather than explained. You've located the place where "selection increases functional information" and "where did the information to select among come from in the first place" are actually two different claims that the book may be conflating. (me) You wrote, "We know it must have happened once, since life exists and no evidence supports it arriving from outside Earth...." Actually, there is lots of evidence for panspermia. But the first half of the quote is also false, because life may have always existed. Please don't tell me that the big bang settles that subject.
Thought for 46s
Panspermia: I overstated it, plainly < cite index="76-1">Pseudo-panspermia — the delivery of life's chemical building blocks rather than life itself — is now well-supported: amino acids, nucleobases, and other organics have been detected in space and in meteorites, most famously < cite index="78-1">the Murchison meteorite, where a 2010 study identified over 14,000 distinct molecular compounds. On the stronger claim — organisms or spores actually surviving the trip — < cite index="71-1">the ISS EXPOSE experiments showed that meteorite-type shielding allowed bacterial endospores and even seeds to survive vacuum, UV radiation, and extreme cold, with a quarter of exposed tobacco seeds germinating after return to Earth. And lithopanspermia between planets isn't hypothetical plumbing — it's demonstrated fact: < cite index="76-1">hundreds of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth, proving rock transfer between planets actually happens, and < cite index="77-1">paleomagnetic analysis of the Martian meteorite ALH84001 showed its interior never exceeded 40°C during transit, well within the survivable range for some terrestrial extremophiles. So "no evidence supports it" was flatly wrong. The honest position is: there's real, serious evidence that the mechanism is physically viable (organics form in space, survive transit, rocks do cross between planets), while direct confirmation that Earth's life specifically originated this way remains absent — that's a genuine evidentiary gap, not an absence of evidence altogether. Those are different claims and I collapsed them. On "life may have always existed" — you're also right that I can't just wave the Big Bang at this The honest state of physics here is genuinely contested, not settled, and I shouldn't have implied otherwise even by omission. < cite index="82-1">Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin's theorem states that any universe which is, on average, expanding cannot have its history extended indefinitely into the past — < cite index="84-1">it applies with striking generality, requiring no assumptions about the universe's material content or even that gravity is standard Einsteinian gravity. < cite index="83-1">Vilenkin and Mithani examined the three leading scenarios that seem to dodge a beginning — eternal inflation, a cyclic universe, and an emergent/static-seed universe — and concluded each of them is either mathematically incomplete toward the past or unstable, judging a past-eternal universe implausible though not strictly disproven in every conceivable variant. But that's Vilenkin's reading, and it isn't unanimous. < cite index="88-1">A 2026 paper by Easson and Lesnefsky explicitly challenges this, constructing inflationary models that are geodesically complete into the past — smooth and non-singular for all time — directly contesting the claim that BGV forces a beginning on all inflationary cosmologies. < cite index="86-1">Others note the theorem has known loopholes and that what preceded inflation, if anything, remains a wide-open question with competing proposals — quantum tunneling from nothing, a pre-Big-Bang string vacuum, or other non-inflationary precursor states. So: physics doesn't hand you a settled verdict on whether time itself had an absolute beginning. And even if you fully granted a spacetime origin, that still wouldn't automatically answer whether life is eternal — those are separate claims. A past-eternal universe is a necessary condition for eternal life, not a sufficient one; you'd separately need life-compatible conditions to have existed at every point in that infinite past, which is a much stronger and independently unverified claim. Conversely, someone holding "life has always existed" doesn't need cosmology to cooperate at all if they're working from a framework where life or its precursors are taken as fundamental rather than emergent — that's a metaphysical position, not something physics is positioned to adjudicate either way. I'll leave it there rather than push toward a verdict — this is genuinely contested terrain in both physics and philosophy, and it's not something I should be steering. (me) Thanks You're welcome – this was a genuinely good conversation to think through. Good luck with the rebuttal.  The Evolution Prize:
For a Demonstration of Open-Ended Evolutionary Innovation in a Closed System is relevant.
25 Aug 2026: introductory remarks.
11,227 papers discuss Lateral Gene Transfer | from Academia | 22 Aug 2026
Viruses and Other Gene Transfer Mechanisms has background and updates.
Was Lamarck right about evolution? | from Ted Steele | 26 Jul 2026
Many thanks Brig. In the prior also big interview a year ago with Robyn Chuter, Panspermia was the main topic in context of "Lamarck and Panspermia"
https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/life-the-universe-and-everything?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Anyway that link is in the current interview - just raise it as I understand the context. Current review is about the molecular and cellular mechanisms on Earth, as that is our only testing laboratory, but Lamarck and Panspermia etc is prominently cited in the current analytical review viz.
"Epigenetic–Genetic Coupling and Understanding the Molecular and Cellular Basis of Lamarckian Inheritance," by Robyn A Lindley, Reginald M Gorczynski, Edward J Steele
Seven years ago, we presented a plausible set of Lamarckian-type mechanisms and processes that we argued could facilitate the rapid genetic evolution of life, and indeed facilitate the spreading of life, throughout the cosmos [10]. In that paper we introduced the emerging concept of 'Epigenetic–Genetic Coupling'. This is still a theoretical process which we feel helps understand the transition from 'Soft' to 'Hard' Lamarckian inheritance of acquired somatic characteristics. Our aim in what follows is to develop a plausible answer to the question: Can we, and if so, how do we, reconcile the numerous recent examples of 'Soft' or reversible epigenetic acquired inheritance with other historical examples of apparently stable DNA-integrated, or 'Hard' Lamarckian transgenerational acquired inheritance?"
We focused on the molecular and cellular mechanisms backed by solid evidence here on Earth. The summary figure you show is from that paper and also from "Lamarck and Panspermia". So the concepts are joined at the hip, as it were. Best and thanks, Ted 26 Jul 2026: "The evolution of acquired characteristics," introduces the entry prompting this reply.
Crashed UFO on Mars | from Brian Cory Dobbs | 30 Mar 2026
Does the government have any UFO crash retrieval programs currently operating on Mars? This sure looks like a flying saucer crashed there.
 Crashed UFO on Mars: 9.5-min. YouTube video made in collaboration with Jean Ward.
After Bennu, scientists find all DNA and RNA building blocks in asteroid Ryugu samples
Hello Brig,from James Powers | 24 Mar 2026 I finally had the chance to carefully review the Ryugu paper. Not surprisingly, the paper assumes that life was seeded on earth by the transfer of prebiotic molecules, such as these purines and pyrimidines. My assumption, (as is yours) is that life is ubiquitous throughout the Universe. If the paper had been written with our viewpoint, then the stable isotope profiles and the Purine/Pyrimidine ratios would be in accord with the data that these scientists present. Of course, the obsolete dominant scientific dogma would not allow this. I think it is telling that the stable ratios are indicative of possible aerobic carbon fixation or metabolism, such as photosynthesis. It is interesting that the increased stable isotope C13 ratios in the water-soluble solution are enriched with C13, whereas the insoluble residue is C13 deficient. I would say this is evidence that the insoluble residue reflects remnants of once living microbes. Take care. Jim 25 Mar: For example, there was no mention by the researchers of any effort to look for nucleosides or nucleotides. Was this because they were undetectable or because they didn't feel the need to look because the working hypothesis was that these nucleoeobases analyzed were abiotic precursors? So why would anyone look for more complicated biomolecules or biopolymers? This could have been readily accomplished by Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry.
Also, the Purine/Pyrimidine ratio of the Ryugu meteorite is near 1:1 which could lead to a conclusion that the Ryugu meteorite represents a biological origin. Ryugu may have traveled through milder conditions than the other two meteorites. The other meteorites have quite different ratios, so a general conclusion cannot be made. However, we can assume that these meteorites are very old, much older than 1 million years. Clearly, their history is unknown. One might have traveled through a colder or a hotter region of interstellar space. Another meteorite may have experienced greater radiation than the others. We might say that Ryugu represents the biologically expected 1:1 ratio, whereas the others have degraded nucleobases which reflect the history of different conditions. It seems that this minority explanation was ignored.
19 Mar 2026: The detection of diverse nucleobases in asteroid and meteorite materials....
Pinwheel UFO on Mars | from Brian Cory Dobbs | 03 Mar 2026
Today we're addressing the extraordinary claim that a UFO - in the shape of a pinwheel - has been spotted on Mars.
Pinwheel UFO on Mars: 6-min. YouTube video made in collaboration with Jean Ward.
-- Dear Brian -- I have to admit, it's intriguing. The two uncropped photos of a Mars landscape, first without, then with the "pinwheel" and streak below it, are striking. I hope there's some followup from NASA, since they took the pictures. (The cropping posted here –click to enlarge– has been digitally enhanced, as the video explains.) Could a meteorite have collided with something in Mars' atmosphere? Thanks, Brig
...Cylinder Artifact on Mars | from Brian Cory Dobbs | 16 Dec 2025
7-min. YouTube video with NASA color image. (Could it be debris from one of the failed missions?)
Life on Mars! has links to more videos from Dobbs.
truth slowly emerges | from Jacob Navia | 25 Jul 2025
As the years pass by, truth slowly emerges from the fog.
Life is eternal, a fundamental piece of the Universe, that has no beginning and has no end. Life is everywhere, imprevisible mysterious, without any bounds, a part of the structure of the Universe itself. Thanks for your work Mr Klyce. I follow you since many years. Life is eternal but we are not. Jacob 25 Jul 2025: Complex organics in space is the subject of an alert from Jacob.
...sacked by Nasa | from Barry DiGregorio | 20 Jul 2025
Dear Brig, Here is a story that should go somewhere on your website:
...sacked by NASA for telling TRUTH..., by David Rivers and Patrick Harrington, The Sun, 20 Jul 2025.
Sincerely, Barry E. DiGregorio | www.icamsr.org
Dear Barry, I admire your strong commitment on the issue of cross-contamination with Mars. As you know, I think we "swap spit" with Mars naturally anyway. Still, thorough pre-launch hygiene of spacecraft is a good idea. And I completely agree that manned Mars missions, in the near future, are dumb, for a list of reasons. Thanks for staying in touch.
21 Jul: Brig, I don't think the swapping spit analogy works. Why? During it's evolution the earth has been many different planets with different temperatures and chemistries of its oceans and atmosphere. Any life would have to adapt and evolve to existing environmental conditions including the radiation environment. We know now from studies of radiation effects on microbes from the ISS and MIR, microbes can mutate/evolve very rapidly. Since the radiation environment of Mars is vastly more intense than earth, organisms on both planets would have evolved differently and at different rates. Another factor is Lazarus microbes that can remain dormant for millions of years sequestered in salts, frozen tundra and ice. Researchers are finding never before known viruses and microorganisms from earth's past that can still be viable. Some of them may be pathogenic to life on earth today rendering the swapping spit analogy moot. Different planetary conditions would be a barrier or threat to life outside of its own environmental conditions. Astrobiology and microbiology are still very much in its infancy so the precautionary principle needs to be in place to prevent an invasive species ecological disaster.Barry | www.icamsr.org Life on Mars!... has related history and links. Search for "DiGregorio".
A mechanism for epigenetic inheritance | from Jim Powers | 09 May 2025 Hello Brig, This just came across my desk. The pub was from last year. Here is a paper that outlines how learned behavior can be incorporated into possible descendants of the organism. Lamarckism is not dead. Take care. Jim Powers | Napa CA Pseudouridine guides germline small RNA transport and epigenitic inheritance, by Herridge, R.P., Dolata, J., Migliori, V. et al, doi:10.1038/s41594-024-01392-6, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 06 Sep 2024.
[Dear Jim,] many thanks for this. I have looked pretty closely and it is interesting. But So far, in my opinion, epigenetics has not been shown capable of producing macroevolutionary progress. The small RNAs are controlling the expression of genetic programming that is already installed.
Thanks for keeping me updated.
Thanks, Evan Eichler | 13 Apr 2025 Dear Evan -- Let me offer my congratulations for a tremendous achievement, and for making it available to all. I hope it leads to real progress for the theory of evolution. It ought to! Very best regards, Brig Hi Brig, Nice to hear from you. This is something I have been trying to do since I was a graduate student. It's nice to have finally gotten it done and I appreciate you recognizing it. You are right. I think the findings suggest new genes and gene innovation play a bigger role than people think in terms of distinguishing ape species. Best regards, Evan 11 Apr 2025: complete, phased, diploid genomes of six ape species....
Bye, bye Big Bang | from George Nickas | 30 Jun 2024
Brig, thank you for recent posts of JWST finding fully formed galaxies formed less than 300 million years after the assumed creation of the universe -- aka Big Bang AND thanks for posting the piece about quasars being observed to be "nearly the identical at all epochs of the universe"; "a mature quasar (found) at cosmic dawn." Speaking of dawn, in light of these findings perhaps it has 'dawned' on at least a few BBers that the JWST has provided by now more than enough evidence to toss the BB into the bin, having had a run that has distracted and diverted cosmologists for far too long. Regarding the quasar issue, over thirty years ago Halton Arp published persuasive evidence for quasars being physically connected to active galactic nuclei as ejected objects that become the seeds of new galaxies. The literature is full of Arp's papers and books if anybody bothers to read it. For his discoveries Arp was unceremoniously banned from further telescope time on the Palomar telescope and his observations have either been ignored or rationalized away by some truly lame alternatives. The thirty-one year old Quasi-Steady State Theory of Hoyle, Narlikar, and Burbidge solidly shows quasars to be the ejecta of active galaxies at all epochs and fiurther it predicts exactly what the JWST has found. Also we panspermists know that the BB fails to allow for enough time to pass for the complexities of living entities to develop and evolve into what we witness here on Earth. The objections to panspermia large rest on the red herring that panspermia does not offer an origin for life. That's about it from me this time around. Keep the faith, Brig! George
The End and the Big Bang has related discussion and updates.
re: Viking Snow on Mars photo | from Richard Hoover | 28 Jun 2024
Academician Galimov and other scientists at the Chania, Crete Conference were surprised when Roland Paepe, David Gilichinski and I revealed these images as well as those of Double Rimmed Polygons on Mars and NE Siberia in my presentation. NASA had adopted the "Follow the Water" theme and claimed they were searching for evidence of water on Ancient Mars. The official NASA position at that time was that there was no water on present day Mars and hence the Levin LR data had to be from super metallic peroxides in the Mars regolith rather than biology. However these were their images! NASA clearly knew about the permafrost polygons and water ice at the polar caps as well as the fact that the detector temperature proved these images had to be frozen water snow or sleet. My paper in the Permafrost Conference was cleared by NASA MSFC and HQ and NASA never once commented or published a paper to rebut the results. Instead, our scientific papers were just studiously ignored in hopes no one would notice. This approach was also taken with our results about indigenous microfossils, nucleobases and chiral amino acids in Carbonaceous Meteorites. I note that the Perserverance Rover was also designed to search for rocks rather than biology and Post Viking, NASA has never launched a life detection experiment to the Moon, Mars, comets or icy moons. [...] Richard Frost at the Viking 2 landing site (super-resolution), Bruce Murray Space Image Library, 2024.
 Thanks, Brian Dobbs, for links to this and other Mars images.
Life on Mars! has history.
Richard Hoover: collected articles.
Do we need a new theory of evolution? | with Stephen Buranyi | 03 Apr 2024
Dear Stephen -- I noticed and linked to your article [linked below] when it was new, and now I have revisited it. I have a question / issue which puzzles me: why don't science writers behave more like political writers? Political writers are skeptical and do their own investigating. They do not simply report as fact whatever the politicians say. Science needs the same skeptical reporting, especially for the theory of evolution. Half of educated adults don't accept the basic theory, and neither do many very well-informed biologists. Most of them don't want to discuss it because the conversations are usually unproductive and uncivil. I wish skeptical reporters would show up. The theory of evolution is in crisis, and the crisis is bigger than they are willing to face. None of the various alternatives you mention meets the most basic criterion of science -- proof in the lab. I have had lengthy conversations with some of them -- Jim Shapiro for example. When I make this point, they clam up. I read Thomas Kuhn and am influenced by his observation: theories never simply go away until a replacement - perceived to be better - is available. I have latched onto an alternative, panspermia (it's about evolution, too.) But nevermind panspermia. I wish science reporters would demand proof from the scientists. If the theory is completely wrong, that does not mean we have to abandon science. That false dilemma is equally supported by evolutionists and creationists. I'll stop here. I welcome your thoughts and suggestions. Best regards, Brig from Buranyi: Hi Brig, Thanks for the email. My answer to the main question is to basically both agree with you, but push back on your comparison a little. Politics writers are indeed often quick to push on their sources and ask critical questions. However, in my estimation they are just as likely to let egregious falsehoods pass, write uncritical stories, etc, when they have political reason to go easy on a politician. Political reporters are often too political. Now the idea that science writers are not often enough like political writers - in the sense of reporting hard and being critical - is true. I don't have a complete answer for you except to say that science is often covered like sports, simply reporting the play by play of what is going on, adding some colour, and pleasing both the sources and the audience. It's edutainment, for many. Part of it is simply because science writers often see themselves as translators of scientific work - something akin to a national geographic correspondent, but reporting from labs instead of the rainforest/tundra/etc. Of course, some of this kind of work is necessary. But there should be more of the the harder kind too. I think there are some good science journalists out there, but the ones who are truly adversarial (like Leonid Schneider, for instance) have trouble placing stories within a system that mostly wants edutainment.
Stephen | Guardian News & Media Limited, London
12:30PM: Quick answer -- same reason they don't look anywhere else. They apparently don't want to know. It's very vexing. I like your suggestion!
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...I found these links in 1997 right after I had digitized the "Postcards from Mars" poster and sent it to Gil [Levin]. NASA had posted a very large number of these images. They were listed as from the "Frost Monitoring" program that was carried out over a period of at least two or three weeks. Their use of the term "Frost" was both inaccurate and highly deceptive. Most people assumed the white stuff was "Carbon Dioxide Frost" rather than frozen H2O that had fallen from the Martian sky in the form of snow, sleet or grapple. However the detector temperature proved it was crystalline water rather than frozen CO2 and the absence on vertical surfaces proved it was absolutely not frost. I pointed this detail out in numerous SPIE "Life in the Cosmos" Panels and in several papers published during the 1997 to 2008 time period.