But, she added, since Darwin much has been learned about mate selection and competition.īetween these Rumsfeldian bookends, scientific skepticism was rampant. Gowaty agreed that exceptions to Darwin's theory exist and that there are many unknowns.

'People are surprised to learn how much sex animals have for purely social reasons and how many species have sex-role reversal in which the males are drab and the females are colorfully ornamented and compete for the attention of males,' Roughgarden said.

Rumsfeld's heuristic was summoned again at the end of the conference by University of Georgia evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty, in response to Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden, who declared that Darwin's theory of sexual selection is wrong in its claim that females choose mates who are the most attractive. We do not know the precise environments of the early earth in which these events occurred we do not know the exact chemistry of some of the important chemical reactions that led to life and we do not have any knowledge of life in a pre-RNA world.' As for what we have failed to consider, Schopf noted a problem with what he called 'the pull of the present'-it is extremely difficult to model the early earth's atmosphere and the biochemistry of early life because we are so accustomed to conditions today. The summit revealed a scientific discipline rich in data and theory as well as controversy and disputation over the known and unknown.įor example, Schopf began with the known: 'We know the overall sequence of life's origin, from CHONSP, to monomers, to polymers, to cells we know that the origin of life was early, microbial and unicellular and we know that an RNA world preceded today's DNA-protein world. Rumsfeld's wisdom was first invoked by University of California at Los Angeles paleobiologist William Schopf, who, in a commentary on a lecture on the origins of life, asked: 'What do we know? What are the unsolved problems? What have we failed to consider?'ĭisputation is at the heart of a robust scienceĬreationists and outsiders often mistake the last two categories for signs that evolution is in trouble or that contentious debate between what we know and do not know means that the theory is false. The June conference, hosted by San Francisco University of Quito, was held on the Galpagos island of San Cristbal, where Charles Darwin began his explorations.

Rumsfeld's logic may be tongue-twisting, but his epistemology was sound enough that he was quoted twice at the World Summit on Evolution. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.' That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. At a February 12, 2002, news briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the limitations of intelligence reports: 'There are known knowns.

Known unknowns