At Science and Culture Today, a news item last week focused on a strange state of affairs in evolution studies today:

As noted here yesterday, Matthew Haber at the University of Utah proposes “the rejection of absolute biological history, the idea that there is an invariant, privileged biological history against which other histories are measured or deviate from.” Our comment, “If one says that something isn’t real, and yet we can know it — not far down that road lies utter incomprehension.” Haber calls it “biology’s Einstein moment,” but it feels more like a surreal state.

Now along comes a new video from New Scientist instructing us that “The Human Family Tree Has No Beginning.” No biological history and no biological beginning: are you seeing the trend? Both seem to be responses to being battered by evidence undermining ideas of universal common descent and gradual rather than abrupt human origins.

“Study of Biological Origins Is Entering a Surreal State,” August 14, 2026

Briefly, University of Utah’s Matthew Haber has long noted the conflict between lines of evidence in the effort to reconstruct a history of life. In an open access article in 2025, he maintained that “ there is no invariant, absolute biological history against which all others may be measured.”

And he is allowed to say it. This is not your great-grandfather’s Monkey Trial, where Darwin’s followers claimed to know the facts about evolution and, cheered on by anything-but-skeptical media, accused doubters of ignorance. Darwinian biology seems — in a remarkable turnabout — much less sure of itself today.

The New Scientist video manages the feat of admitting to massive uncertainties while implying a coherent narrative:

This video gets surreal starting around the 19- or 20-minute mark, where the host, paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, basically concedes that there’s a massive anatomical gap between Lucy’s species and Homo erectus (pictured at the top), as we have emphasized many times. Then what follows is a truly strange discussion of rainbows, gradualism, and abrupt change. It’s riddled with contradictions, but all delivered with the ease and confidence of a philosopher cinching an argument with an airtight syllogism. “A Surreal State”

This is probably not intentional deceit. The champions of Darwinian evolution (and we may count New Scientist among the most fervent) cannot imagine that they are not the representatives of Fact as opposed to “faith” even when their fact base is largely disappearing.

This uncertainty is part of a pattern

There is much doubt in the academic world these days, at a pretty fundamental level. Recently, for example, it came out that there is very little agreement among theoretical physicists about whether the basic facts of our universe imply anything about its origins.

That’s a sobering finding — all the new information over the past century did not result in a growing consensus among cosmologists.

Image Credit: Peter Jurik - Adobe Stock

We see a similar story with origin of life. Many of us will remember when a staple of popular science media was the latest claim about life’s origin from a single cell — or perhaps protocells or hot vents or hospitable primordial ooze. Life’s origin was considered such an unlikely chance that it would have to be a single event.

It now appears that bacteria and archaea likely had separate origins:

A new [open access] paper in Science Advances cites an “incomplete” or “insufficient” enzymatic metabolism of the proposed last universal common ancestor (LUCA) as evidence for “independent origins of unrelated enzymes for the same reaction” in two of the basic domains of life, Archaea and Bacteria. The breadth of genomic evidence surveyed in this study is impressive, and their finding is striking because, when properly understood, it strongly contradicts the expectations of universal common ancestry.

Casey Luskin, “Enzymes in Bacteria and Archaea Are So Dissimilar There Must Be “Two Origins of Life”,” Science and Culture Today, August 11, 2026

But consider. If there were two separate origins of life, by definition the universal common ancestry that all educated people are supposed to believe in cannot be correct. And that raises the question, could there be more than two origins? Many? If so, perhaps more than chance is at work here.

This level of fundamental uncertainty can’t be waved away by breezy assurances that “science, unlike religion, changes its mind.” Change of mind is not the issue. Rather, new information suggests that basic assumptions underlying many disciplines may be inadequate or mistaken. How they respond will predict their future.

Bringing it closer to home

Stories like the ones above tend to lurk in specialty media. The level of uncertainty they convey takes time to leak into general awareness.

The front pages of major media have been screaming in recent days about a quite different matter, the Cambridge affair, which culminated in the apparent suicide of Jason Arday, a black prof accused of plagiarism and fabulism. There, the basic question seems to be, why was Arday promoted so far beyond his capabilities that his descent ended in tragedy? His angry supporters focus on the fact that he was black. Fair enough, but the question naturally arises: How many underqualified pundits who would not stand out in a crowd, as he did, stride through the ivied halls unchallenged? Which leads us to ask:

Are these places we can really turn to for answers any more?

Then of course, there was the Covid fallout, which, for anyone paying attention, put a bullet through Trust the Science!

The question of why we should trust the current science and scholarship project to tell us about our world is not going to be settled by putting down the skeptics. Perhaps we should start by assessing more honestly what we don’t really know and why we don’t really know it.