Recieved an interesting email on from the ECOLOG mailing list today. This is not from somebody at NASA, this is not an official position, but it’s certainly an interesting theory (ahem):

Evolution isn’t merely a hypothesis or a theory with NASA. It isn’t even a
“fact”. Rather, it’s become NASA’s blueprint for the next half-century of
exploration. In the oddest of all developments, NASA, a standard governmental
agency, is transforming itself into perhaps the most philosophical organization that
has ever existed, perhaps more so than any historical university or church.

NASA understands what it’s doing — but it’s very likely that most of the
American population doesn’t. Several big events are perhaps only a few years
away, including possibly for the first time the novel creation of life in the
laboratory from inanimate chemicals. NASA, for a very long time, has played down
the evolutionary biology aspects of what it was doing, but all of that has
changed in the past few years, and the search for the origins of life throughout
the universe now dominates NASA’s mission statement.

The rest of the email can be read here.

Well damn.