Abstract

In person.

Epistemic pessimism, the idea that there are fundamental barriers to the possibility of explaining an event, has been expressed under various guises in the context of the origin of life since the inception of the field. In this talk, I unpack three ways in which the epistemic pessimists’ argument has been mounted. The first claims that the origin of life cannot be explained because it is a unique event, which hinders researchers’ ability  to formulate generalizations about it. The second claims that the origin of life cannot be explained because it left no traces. Unlike palaeobiological research, origins of life researchers have no direct fossil evidence to work as ‘smoking guns’ (i.e., to verify one hypothesis about the origin of life over another). The third claims that the origin of life was a highly unlikely combination of events, making it impossible to recover the sequence of events leading up to life. I show how each argument fails. An upshot is that appeal to god-of-the-gaps or alien-of-the-gaps style arguments as possible explanations for the origin of life is unnecessary and unwarranted.