Eturnalshift wrote:
I'm sure, prior to this discovery, most scientists in her field would've laughed off that notion because it doesn't follow the conventional understanding of DNA composition. Yet, if this is true, their team has been able to go against the 'settled science' of so long and laugh in the face of all science up to that point.
Just goes to show you that regardless of how right you may think you are - even with all the data stacked in your favor... you might not be right, afterall.
There is a difference between asserting a negative and being skeptical of a positive. Science is a means, not an end, and it doesn't need to pretend to be omniscient to be valid.
Science adapts and expands - not collapses or props itself up with internal contradictions - when experience increases our knowledge and understanding of the world.
The fact DNA can be built with arsenic improves our scientific understanding of DNA, it builds on the foundations established by past work, it doesn't prove everything we knew was wrong...it proves what we knew was right, because if we didn't know it, we wouldn't be able to comprehend this new information. It would be like a caveman trying to understand the power of the Internet.
This is precisely why science provides useful and factually correct information.
