From astronomer and physicist Milan Ćirković at Nautilus:
When H.G. Wells wrote about aliens, his wild imaginings were shaped by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In The War of the Worlds, giant Martian invaders with whip-like arms are threatened by extinction and so expand into a new ecological niche by colonizing other planets, notably Earth. In The Time Machine, a time traveler visiting the future stumbles upon two posthuman species. What led Wells to these majestic speculations, inspiring science-fiction buffs and also many scientists to this day? A firm belief in the universality of evolution by natural selection.
But does evolution operate the same on life everywhere? The success of Darwinian theory to explain life on Earth has lulled many of us into thinking that it must be. In fact evolution might have functioned by different mechanisms in Earth’s distant past as well as elsewhere in the galaxy. We could envision a planet dominated by Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits, or a world where large mutations—and not the gradual variation of natural selection—are the main agents of change.
Say no more, Milan. Here in the wilds of North America, many of us are thinking that way already about life on Earth.
The trouble is that we don’t have a way to confirm if the mode of terrestrial evolution is generalizable to all life or is the result of mere happenstance. More.
It is unlikely that Darwinism is generalizable to all life. Milan, check your mail. Darwinism is in enough trouble here at home. But exploration of other planets will be great anyway.
See also: Epigenetics: What China’s government famine can teach us about inherited starvation effects The famine in question was the government-imposed Great Leap Forward, estimated to have killed up to 45 million people.
Darwinism: Replacement or extension?
and
Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted in the conference room!
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OT:
Notice how in H.G. Well’s science fiction there is no real foundation or grounding for morality or universal human rights. For example, the alien invaders in his novel War of the Worlds are pictured as pitiless and machine-like with no regard for the human race– indeed they use spider-like machines as a kind of exoskeleton. To them humans have no more value than termites have to an exterminator. Humans, in his novel, were simply pests they needed to rid the earth of, so that they could move in and enjoy their new home. Of course, there is morality in his stories. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have morality but to Wells it appears that our morality is more like customs which have been shaped by a mindless process of Darwinian evolution and the conventions of society.
When we compare Well’s thinking with Darwin’s there is no doubt that they shared the same basic world view.
Darwin who was a committed materialist by the time he wrote Descent of Man thought at least he could use his theory of natural selection to explain the origins of morality. Nevertheless, he was forced to concede that this did indeed lead to moral relativism.
He writes:
“If… men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.” (The Descent of Man, p. 73)
In other words, nothing is really intrinsically right or wrong or good or evil. Morality would be relative to its basic utility and social/environmental context.
As a self-confessed Darwinist, philosopher Michael Ruse says, “Morality… is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends… In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.”
Again, there is no foundation for any kind of morality or universal human rights. These things are only illusions.
as to:
Translation, “Darwinian evolution is not really a science in the first place but is more realistically classified as a pseudo-science since it has no universal law to appeal to.”
The first major unification in science was when the Christian founders of modern science, particularly Newton, realized that the same force that caused an apple to fall at the Earth’s surface—gravity—was also responsible for holding the Moon in orbit about the Earth. i.e. When he realized that the law of gravity was ‘universal’
As the article from Nautilus unwittingly confessed, Darwinian evolution simply does not have any universal law to appeal to so as to establish itself as a testable science with a rigid mathematical basis:
Without a universal law to appeal to in order to base its math on, Darwinian evolution is not testable, (i.e. potentially falsifiable by direct experiment), and therefore Darwinian evolution does not qualify as a proper science:
In fact, not only does Evolution not have any universal law to appeal to, to base its math on, as other overarching theories of science have, Entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science, almost directly contradicts Darwinian claims that increases in functional complexity can be easily had:
In fact, empirical evidence itself tells us that “Genetic Entropy”, the tendency of biological systems to drift towards decreasing complexity and decreasing information content, holds true as the overriding rule for biology over long periods of time.
And whereas Darwinian evolution has no known law of nature to appeal to so as to establish itself as a proper, testable, science, (in fact it almost directly contradicts entropy), Intelligent Design does not suffer from such a disconnect from physical reality. In other words, Intelligent Design can appeal directly to ‘the laws of conservation of information’ (Dembski, Marks, etc..) in order to establish itself as a proper, testable, and rigorous science.
And since Intelligent Design is mathematically based on the ‘law of conservation of information’, that makes Intelligent Design testable and potentially falsifiable, and thus makes Intelligent Design, unlike Darwinism, a rigorous science instead of a unfalsifiable pseudo-science:
Verse:
Of supplemental note: In so far as Darwinian evolution is dependent on the premises of reductive materialism, and regardless of whether Darwinists ever personally accept the falsification or not, Darwinian evolution is now empirically falsified by advances in quantum biology: