Science Quote by Sidney Altman

Altman’s phrasing is doing two jobs at once: staking a claim and policing the borders of it. “The RNA World” sounds like a grand, almost mythic origin story, but he immediately reins it back with “referred to” and “an hypothetical stage.” That careful, slightly stiff diction is scientific self-defense. It signals: don’t confuse a useful model with a revealed truth, don’t turn a research program into a bedtime story.

The intent is clarifying and, quietly, legitimizing. By naming “The RNA World” as a discrete “stage,” Altman frames early life as a sequence of solvable problems rather than a single miraculous leap. The subtext is methodological humility: we can’t watch prebiotic chemistry happen, so we build narratives that are testable, provisional, and subject to replacement. “On Earth” matters, too. It narrows the scope to a specific planet’s contingent history, resisting the temptation to universalize from one data point.

Context sharpens the edge. Altman helped crack open the idea that RNA isn’t just genetic bookkeeping but a catalytic actor - ribozymes made the “RNA-first” hypothesis feel less like speculation and more like an experimentally anchored possibility. So when he calls it “hypothetical,” it’s not dismissal; it’s a credibility move. He’s reminding the audience that the romance of origins has to answer to the discipline of evidence, and that the best scientific stories are built to be argued with.