re: The Harriet Tubman legend is literally a myth invented by 2 Communist writers

You’re right that MU doesn’t explain the origin of life, and no serious biologist has thought it did for decades. It showed that organic molecules can form under plausible early-Earth conditions and not how life itself emerged. Calling it “discredited” though, is a bit misleading. It’s been superseded by much better models involving stepwise chemistry, energy gradients, and selection long before DNA enters the picture.

The probability arguments like Hoyle’s usually assume a modern genome assembling randomly in a single step. That’s not how origin-of-life research frames the problem, so those numbers don’t really apply.

As for textbooks, intro models are teaching tools, not frontier science. We still teach Newtonian physics even though it breaks at relativistic scales. That’s pedagogy, not propaganda.

The real challenge isn’t that science has a tidy “official story” here. It’s that the problem is genuinely hard, and simplified explanations can be mistaken for final answers if we’re not careful.

Rosa Parks’ story is more believable but who knows.

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You’re right that MU doesn’t explain the origin of life, and no serious biologist has thought it did for decades.

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And yet, if you look in any high school or college textbook that's what it will say. That was the point. That the mainstream narrative is not accurate.

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It showed that organic molecules can form under plausible early-Earth conditions

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Incorrect. The whole problem with MU is that the early earth conditions it sought to imitate were discovered to NOT be plausible at all. The makeup of the atmosphere, the percentage of organic material in the "ocean"—remember, the assumption was pre-life—so where did all that organic raw material come from tin the ocean? And every time they repeated the experiment with what they thought were more realistic early earth conditions, they got significantly worse results.

Not to mention the problems with the chiral forms of the organic molecules.

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The probability arguments like Hoyle’s usually assume a modern genome assembling randomly in a single step.

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My understanding of that estimate was based simply on the fact that we now know—which again, we didn't then—exactly what amino acids and molecules are required to build proteins (including the correct chiral forms of the molecules) and under what conditions. After that, it's pretty simple math. i could be wrong, but that's my understanding of his estimate. (So I'm pretty sure those number do apply.)

Which means he's not even attempting to deal with the fact that in order to build proteins you have to have DNA, and in order to have DNA you have to have proteins already. Yeah, there are some RNA workarounds to that, but none in which researchers haven't had to apply the correct information by controlling the experiment. No one's ever been able to get it to work randomly.

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As for textbooks, intro models are teaching tools, not frontier science. We still teach Newtonian physics even though it breaks at relativistic scales. That’s pedagogy, not propaganda.

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bullshite.

If that were true, you'd see disclaimers applied to this subject like you almost always do when you read a chemistry textbook on Dalton's model or the Bohr Model, for example.

I've never seen a disclaimer that says anything like that applied to this topic and I'll bet you haven't either, and there's a reason for that and we both know what it is.

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It’s that the problem is genuinely hard, and simplified explanations can be mistaken for final answers if we’re not careful.

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And yet, the simplified narrative is the only one ever given, without a disclaimer.

Why do you think that is if the big problem is avoiding that very outcome?

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And yet, if you look in any high school or college textbook that's what it will say.

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Which ones? Be specific.

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That the mainstream narrative is not accurate.

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You have no captured any part of the debate with any accuracy. Referencing Hoyle without referencing work now that has superseded his objections is either dishonest or ignorant.

I don't know if you are intending to reply to me, but my guess is this wack guy is using Hoyle to launder some nonsense about intelligent design or something.

Ha. no, I thought you were him.

And since I'm mistaking you for him, he's not all wrong. I agree with his strongest concern, that students often leave with the impression that “science has this solved” when it absolutely doesn't. That’s a failure of pedagogy.

Where I’d push back is the motive. You don’t need indoctrination to explain this. You only need institutional lag and curriculum inertia, and by the way, uncertainty is hard to teach without losing students entirely.

If there were a clean disclaimer to add, it wouldn’t be “this is false”, but something like "the experiment showed one narrow possibility, but how life actually began remains an open problem”.

That omission is a real problem. I just don’t think it requires a hidden hand to explain it. And yes, I suspect ID is in there, but I'm interested to hear his reason for how he knows all this is ideological.

Absolutely. A lot of modern science fights aren’t about falsehoods, but are about outdated truths being mistaken for lies (see a lot of the vaccine discourse you and I engage in around here).

In fast-moving fields, facts have a half-life (and I would be regularly reminded of this when I was teaching clinically because the residents would regularly fix me on "newborn" facts. ). What’s safe to teach at scale almost always lags behind what’s actively debated, simply because textbooks and curricula move slower than discovery. As you say, by the time material is written, reviewed, & adopted, parts of it are already stale.

Origin-of-life research is especially vulnerable to this because there isn’t a clean replacement story. There’s no single model that supersedes Miller-Urey, just a landscape of partial mechanisms and open questions. That would make it hard to teach honestly and accessibly at the same time.

The real loss here isn’t truth so much as context of knowledge. Students often aren’t shown the difference between a historical stepping stone, a teaching model, and a settled result. When those categories blur, simplifications later feel like deception (and open themselves up for weaponization...)

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Secondly, before you go on your usual course of not answering anything directly, think for a moment. Did Parks know her actions were going to cause a boycott? Think for a moment you unbelievable moron.

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You are being willfully ignorant. If someone has to lie to make a point, they do not have a point.

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Bro, the actual literature on Civil Rights and Reconstruction is far more somber in tone and analysis than the popular versions of that get told. As others have pointed out, myth-making is its own thing but there are plenty of interesting things in the primary source documentation that are fascinating in their own right.

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Sure.

But people like the comfortable myth, and can get crabby when they see the truth