Via EvolutionBlog, here's a NOVA interview with Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll on the origins of life.

NOVA: In a nutshell, what is the process? How does life form?

Knoll: The short answer is we don't really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance.

Ah, those arrogant scientists, claiming to know everything.

EvolutionBlog quotes a typical creationist talking about how because evolutionary theory can't fully explain the origins of life, it must be wrong. Okay.

Moving on...here's another interesting philosophical point to ponder, one that came up in a discussion last week.

Some people believe that the world and the perceiver form a coupled loop, that is, one can't exist without the other. This is a variation on the old forest falling in the woods.

Did the universe exist before there was life? Seems pretty patently obvious that it did, since we can see evidence of things that formed before life did.

And yet some people insist on the observer/world dichotomy (which seems incredibly egocentric and solipsistic to me) to the point where they think someone or something (god? aliens?) had to be around for the universe to be around. But then, of course, where did those things come from?