July 6, 2024 | David F. Coppedge

SETI Pseudoscience Passes Peer Review

Impossibilities presented as probabilities
and ignorance presented as science

 

How can peer review filter out pseudoscience, if the reviewers are in on the scam?

The great silence: Just 4 in 10,000 galaxies may host intelligent aliens (Space.com, 6 July 2024). Keith Cooper gives good press coverage to a couple of SETI advocates, Robert Stern of the University of Texas and Taras Gerya of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Concocting probabilities out of thin air, Stern and Gerya use the fanciful Drake Equation to arrive at 0.0004% for the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. Taras explained, “A value of 0.0004 means that there could be as few as 4 civilizations per 10,000 galaxies.” With 100 billion galaxies, that would still imply tens of millions of civilizations may have “evolved.”

Their somewhat pessimistic estimate for the number of advanced civilizations comes from speculating on the need for plate tectonics and how many planets they imagine have it. The pair’s reasoning depended entirely on their faith in evolution’s ability to produce minds from atoms by chance, along with a complete repudiation of creation or intelligent design.

The environmental stresses that modern-day plate tectonics places on the biosphere could have instigated the evolution of complex life a little over half a billion years ago, as life suddenly found itself living in an environment where it was forced to adapt or die, creating an evolutionary pressure that pushed the development of all manner of life that existed in the oceans and on the dry land associated with the continental plates. Given that kickstart, life eventually — through no design or evolutionary imperative other than natural selection — ended up evolving into us, the idea goes.

No units or equations were supplied for “evolutionary pressure,” nor any charter cited for some “evolutionary imperative” forcing natural selection to push microbes toward brains capable of engineering and reason.

Drake Equation (SETI Institute). N is the number of advanced civilizations. Almost all the other factors are unknown. See comments by Hunter.

The importance of continents, oceans and plate tectonics for the evolution of complex life: implications for finding extraterrestrial civilizations (Stern and Gerya, Nature Scientific Reports, 12 April 2024). This is the peer-reviewed paper published by Nature‘s open-access journal. It mentions “evolution” 45 times. Stern and Gerya’s house of cards is built on multiple pillars of vapor:

  • A belief that plate tectonics creates “evolutionary pressure” on life.
  • The notion that the Cambrian Explosion was a result of “evolutionary pressure.”
  • Trust that the Drake Equation consisting of numerous unknown factors can yield a meaningful probability.
  • Unfeigned faith in the power of natural selection (the Stuff Happens Law) to generate complex life.
  • Willful ignorance of any and all arguments from intelligent design.

By calculating a lower probability for complex life, Stern and Gerya believe their speculations help answer the Fermi Paradox, the “Great Silence” that perplexes SETI advocates.

Tom Bethell, Darwin's House of Cards (2017)

Classic book on Darwinism by the late journalist Tom Bethell who interviewed leading evolutionists.

The only redeeming feature of this paper is its pointing out a few (but not nearly all) of the conditions for habitability. Other than that, the paper (and Keith Cooper’s blessing on it) illustrates the sad state of science these days, where rank speculation can get published in a “peer reviewed” science journal. This would never happen if qualified Darwin skeptics were allowed as peer reviewers. It’s a uni-party scam.

For real probabilities, calculate the odds of getting one usable protein by chance under ideal conditions.

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