∃ternity, Or Bust¡

In the first place, I would agree that evolution is not a perfect theory, that it doesn't explain everything, and that it might be considerably improved. Having said that, though, I find it risible that anybody could doubt the chain of evolution from monkey to proto-man to man or, worse, imagine that man in his current form was somehow planted into an earthly paradise in the somewhat recent past. (Or for that matter believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, but that's a whole other confection.) Face facts, will you please? Our ancestors lived in caves, their ancestors were tiny hominids, and that's just not in any scientific dispute.

Note, however, that there are two problems in play. The first is the train of events leading from monkey to man. The second is why. Conflating the two is probably not helpful to understanding either and therein may rest the actual objections, however inarticulate, raised by creationists. Indeed, it is not clear why nor does the notion of natural selection on its own seem fully convincing. One may reasonably, intelligently, postulate some sort of outside force at work, whittling away, as it were, down the evolutionary chain.

Which brings me to the further problem of scientific validity and whether and to what extent to trust the scientific establishment. A priori, not all establishment science is going to be right; indeed, a priori, the most interesting mistakes the establishment makes will be the biggest ones. We non-scientists, however, can reasonably understand from the fossil record the path of human evolution—we don't have to have Ph.D.'s to do it. But evolution is a relatively easy case and not all science translates so well into the vernacular. Cosmology, for example, is entirely different, or at least it seems so, yet I would suggest that establishment cosmology is entirely in error and, further, that a proper understanding of it may well relate to the evolution debate in surprising ways.

In 1970 a fellow named Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995) won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Alfvén, one of the great brains of the twentieth century, made many contributions across a wide range but, for my purposes here, is thought of as the father of plasma cosmology. In a nutshell, plasma cosmology argues that the universe is not governed by gravity, that there was no big bang, that for all practical purposes we may assume the universe has been around forever, that red shift is not a metric for how distant other galaxies are, that the sun isn't powered by fusion but instead is sort of a giant light bulb (my translation), and, well, that almost everything we see on the super-macro scale and much of what's smaller is the product of electrical interactions. OK, you can laugh now. Most scientists did, in fact, laugh at Alfvén during his lifetime and continue to laugh at his intellectual offspring.

Plasma cosmologists, though, are a hardy bunch. Dr. Halton Arp, for example, an award winning astrophysicist, after 28 years was kicked off the telescope at Mount Palomar for his heretical ideas; he's now in a sort of exile at the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik and continues his work. (His book Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science is a classic and can be profitably read even if you don't follow the abundant math.) He's also a very nice guy, who's corresponded with me occasionally over the past several years. There are plenty of other stories, most of which I don't know. What I do know, however, is that many very distinguished scientists, for good, solid reasons that they can explain in plain English, do not agree with establishment cosmology. For what it's worth I believe the plasma cosmologists are right, that they continue to be proven right by the evidence, and that eventually theirs will be the establishment view.

Without going into how big science can get things so wrong I will simply mention money, staggering amounts of it, and posit that special interests on the whole are more concerned with their own welfare than scientific truth.

So what has this to do with evolution? Well, for all that I've been following, through the internet, the journey of the plasma cosmologists I've never seen any discussion of what, for me, would be the most interesting implication of all if they are right, namely, that not only are we not alone in the universe we could reasonably assume that being of an infinite existence the universe is chock-a-block full of intelligent life. Way old intelligent life. The kind of life that might like to grow planets and people. As a hobby, or whatever.

Aha! the skeptics will say: "Why aren't they here then?" as if this were a dispositive statement. In fact the opposite case is far stronger. The irony is, we must assume they are here and that they have some reasonably good reason not to say so. The hypothesis I like best is this: once we humans have figured out our place in the universe and have proved that we won't destroy the planet and have gotten comfortable with the idea of some kind of outside stewardship of our little spaceship, then, and only then, will we have earned admission into the club. It may well not be a guaranteed birthright...

There you have it: George Kenney's ™ natural philosophy. Mind you, I haven't yet got into the meaning of life...