I had this moment at the grocery store that’s been sitting with me. The checkout clerk was telling me about a customer who “didn’t believe in evolution,” and there was this eye-roll energy between us — like, can you believe these people? Then I mentioned I’d worked on the Human Genome Project, and his whole body relaxed. Relief. Like he’d found his tribe. And I felt it too, that instant recognition. But then I started thinking: what is that feeling, really? And why does it bother me?
Because here’s what I’ve been noticing — both in my own past and in the world around me: we’ve replaced one set of priests with another. Religious authorities gave us dogma wrapped in scripture. Scientific authorities give us dogma wrapped in equations. Both say: trust us, we know, here’s what you should believe. And I’m not saying evolution is wrong or that science hasn’t given us real insights — it has. But there are massive gaps. Origins of DNA? Consciousness? The possibility of life being seeded from elsewhere? These are legitimate questions, and yet asking them feels like heresy. Meanwhile, I’m watching lights in the sky that don’t behave like anything we can explain, and the response is either silence or “must be military tech” — because that fits the authorized model.
So I’ve been wondering: what if the real issue isn’t which authority we trust, but our dependence on authorities at all? What if your direct observations — the things you see, the questions you have, the patterns you notice — are just as valid as their peer-reviewed papers? Maybe more valid, because they’re yours. I’m not saying throw out science. I’m saying: what if we stopped outsourcing our sense of truth to external voices and started trusting our own capacity to observe, question, and discover? What’s your experience been with this? I’m genuinely curious.
