ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Science of the gaps.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We consider the problem of evaluating and expanding upon speculative hypotheses about the origin of life. The combination of life's complexity and its potential for historical contingency makes missing knowledge and missing ideas, which we term 'gaps', obstructive for an unusually wide variety of its most basic questions. The methods of scientific empiricism developed to justify beliefs in mature and stable sciences have proved less useful for reasoning through gaps, where criteria of consistency may rarely be met, and weaker criteria such as metaphor serve as motivations in practice. We consider the particular role of scenarios in the justification of speculative hypotheses, as they relate to questions of chance and necessity and the sources of causation. We demonstrate how making causal frameworks explicit may support more systematic reasoning about speculative and fragmentary hypotheses than the scenarios in which they are often framed.This article is part of the theme issue 'Origins of life: the possible and the actual'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.