Scientific literacy is a skill to which all of us nonscientists can aspire. I was good at science and mathematics at school; but not so outstanding as to consider a career as a scientist. As we age, we regard science as something for students, children and boffins at universities. This is rather disturbing, because all of us are impacted by the findings and applications of the sciences.

If you regard scientific issues as outside the purview of the general public – think again. It is true that scientific research is nonpolitical – the physicists examining the nature of subatomic particles are far removed from the everyday thrust-and-parry of parliamentary politics. Nuclear power, however, is not.

Be that as it may, let’s focus on a recent and worrying development. The new authorities in Syria, from the fundamentalist organisation Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) have revised school textbooks and curricula by removing all references to evolutionary biology, and the Big Bang, the current paradigm for the origin of the cosmos. The new HTS regime wants to repudiate the more secular platform advocated by the previous ruling party in Syria, the Ba’ath organisation.

It is their country, to be sure, and the Education ministry can modify the curricula at all levels of education if it so decides. However, there have been strong protests by ordinary Syrians against this revision of the curricula. This measure, deleting evolution and Big Bang, places the HTS authorities squarely in the same camp as the fundamentalist religious right in the United States, who intend to replace scientific theories in biology and cosmology with creationism and its modernised cousin, Intelligent Design.

Of course there is debate about evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin was extremely worried about the reception of his theories by the scientific community. The most preeminent paleontologist of his time, Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873), world-renowned expert on the natural history of life, strongly opposed evolution. When Agassiz spoke, people listened. Darwin and his supporters in the scientific community responded to all the objections launched at evolutionary biology. Agassiz, the ‘great man’, was proven wrong, back in the nineteenth century.

The material, natural causes of the biological and geological worlds has been a sore point for many religions since then. Darwin was not the first, nor the last, to navigate what is broadly termed the culture wars.

Being a materialist, in the philosophical sense, does not automatically make you correct. There is currently a strong materialist explanation for the origins of human behaviour – DNA. The claim ‘it’s in the genes’, has become a standard explanation for every aspect of human social behaviour, from war-making to mathematics. As we can all see, attributing human and animal behaviour to genes is seductively simple, yet wrong. Ok, if the word wrong is too strict, let’s say simplistic instead.

The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), American paleontologist and historian of science, wrote regular science and natural history columns which, among other things, attacked the genetic reductionist view of human nature. Originally called sociobiology, and now repackaged as evolutionary psychology, Gould heavily criticised his fellow scientists, such as Konrad Lorenz, for falling into a genetic determinist trap.

The sociobiology trend went against the rising demands for gender and social equality advocated by the Left in the 1970s and 80s. Sociobiology’s proponents, such as the late great Edward O Wilson (1929 – 2021) responded to critics by suggesting that they were motivated by preconceived political prejudices, not pure science. Gould demonstrated that the practice of offering supposedly scientific rationales for existing inequalities goes back centuries.

Gould’s approach to science could hardly be labeled anti-scientific. He helped to communicate biology and natural history to the public.

Abiogenesis, the origin of life itself, is not part of evolutionary biology. It is however, a growing topic of interest to biologists and geologists. While the first materialist, nonsupernatural explanations for the origins of life go back to Ancient Greece, it is the work of Soviet Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin (1894 – 1980) that must be singled out here.

Working on the origins of life from chemical processes, he was the pioneer in formulating a scientific approach in explaining how pro to life forms could arise in the conditions of life in the Earth’s early history. Amino acids formed from the chemical and highly volatile conditions prevalent on Earth – the prebiotic soup – was the theory formed independently by Alexander Oparin in the Soviet Union, and J B S Haldane, a British scientist investigating the same topic. Known as the Oparin-Haldane theory, it blazed the trail for other scientists to follow.

Oparin’s initial findings got a recent boost, when researchers recreated the high levels of radiation and electrical energy conditions of the early Earth in a laboratory. The gradual changes of lifeless chemicals into self-replicating nucleotides, combined with enzyme catalysts, has been reproduced by researchers.

American scientists from the 1950s were able to recreate the spark of life – the famous Miller-Urey experiment. Recreating the conditions that gave rise to the earliest organic molecules is no longer in the realm of science fiction. Scientists are now looking for life in places which we would initially consider too hostile for organic matter to form. Hydrothermal vents, located at the bottom of the ocean, are a place where mineral-rich fluids bubble up and interact with CO2, and that combination forms long chains of fatty acids.

When examining science news, it is important to remember that no single person can be an expert in every branch of scientific endeavour. We can however, aim for a scientifically literate population, and make ourselves immune to rampant misinformation circulating in the toxic ecosystem of social media. No one person possesses the gateway to an ultimate truth. All of us must come together with the scientific community for the purpose of reaching greater understanding.