The Universe Wants to Evolve Humans

It’s only natural, evolutionists at
Penn State claim: planetary evolution
favors our emergence

 

Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? (Penn State University, 14 Feb 2025). There is zero evidence of life beyond Earth. None. Zilch. Nada.* But that doesn’t stop Darwin’s imagineers from speculating about evolution over the entire universe. According to a “study” at Penn State (did they study hard?) their research, analyzing zero data, “ups the odds that we are not alone.” So powerful is the Stuff Happens Law in their imaginary reality, they dreamed up a new worldview that “proposes that humans — and analogous life beyond Earth — may represent the probable outcome of biological and planetary evolution.”

*Incidentally, all the hope and hype that the Viking Landers in 1976 might have found life on Mars came crashing down last week. Astrobiologist Christopher McKay and two colleagues looked at the “ambiguous” data from the labeled-release experiment. They came up with bad news: the activity some thought was due to organisms was instead due to perchlorates in the soil. Perchlorates are reactive salts that were discovered long after the Viking missions to be common in Martian soils. Writing in Icarus, McKay et al. said, “Perchlorate, plus abiotic oxidants, explains the Viking results and there is no requirement to postulate life on Mars.” Some evolutionists had clung to hope that the unexplained activity in the experiment indicated living microbes in the soil despite the negative results of the other two experiments. After 50 years of speculation, that hope is now dashed.

How, then, can the Penn State imagineers be so confident that life and intelligence are flourishing all over the cosmos? For one thing, they simply reject the “hard steps” theory. This is the idea that evolving intelligence is an incredibly improbable event. But if they had read our online book or this book or watched this short Illustra video, they would have known better than to permit such outlandish, radically unscientific notions into their imaginations.

By simply assuming evolution is omnipotent and purposeful, their imaginations became as free as winged unicorns, flying to heights of speculation unmatched at Disneyland. Their kind of dice-rolling is called a “model” and works best at a high perhapsimaybecouldness index setting. One psychological side effect of turning up this dial is euphoria, causing one to blather in the excitement of untethered possibility thinking.

The model, which upends the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event, suggests that maybe it wasn’t all that hard or improbable. A team of researchers at Penn State, who led the work, said the new interpretation of humanity’s origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

“This is a significant shift in how we think about the history of life,” said Jennifer Macalady, professor of geosciences at Penn State and co-author on the paper, which published today (Feb. 14) in the journal Science Advances. “It suggests that the evolution of complex life may be less about luck and more about the interplay between life and its environment, opening up exciting new avenues of research in our quest to understand our origins and our place in the universe.”

Who is “we” in this Tontological statement? Was the “we” thinking very hard? A more dispassionate thinker might struggle to imagine how dead minerals on a dead planet could turn into cogitating dreamers pretending to be scientists. But to those who trust the Stuff Happens Law, all things are possible.

In their wish-dreams upon a star, Macalady and her friends in Darwin Fantasyland envisioned the spirits of living beings distributed throughout space and time. Then they imagined that the Earth just needed permission to let evolution loose, so that the spirits had an “opportunity” to become embodied.

In the new study [did they study hard?], a team of researchers that included astrophysicists and geobiologists argued that Earth’s environment was initially inhospitable to many forms of life, and that key evolutionary steps only became possible when the global environment reached a “permissive” state.

For example, complex animal life requires a certain level of oxygen in the atmosphere, so the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere through photosynthesizing microbes and bacteria was a natural evolutionary step for the planet, which created a window of opportunity for more recent life forms to develop, explained Dan Mills, postdoctoral researcher at The University of Munich and lead author on the paper.

Evolving intelligent life took billions of years − but it may not have been as unlikely as many scientists predicted (The Conversation, 14 Feb 2025). Dan and his partners in speculation wrote more about their mystical dreams in this article. Why doubt us experts, O ye of little faith?

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare.

But as experts on the entangled history of life and our planet, we propose that the coevolution of life and Earth’s surface environment may have unfolded in a way that makes the evolutionary origin of humanlike intelligence a more foreseeable or expected outcome than generally thought.

In one ‘swell foop,’ by their decree, these three self-proclaimed experts toss away the Fortunate Universe book, the Miracle of Man books, the mathematics of probability, the Mind and Cosmos book by atheist Thomas Nagel, and the writings of numerous physicists and philosophers whose knowledge of the complexity of life powerfully refute the notion of easy-to-evolve life.

Less evolved thinkers, Jennifer and Dan say, lack imagination. They need to close their eyes and meditate on Deep Time and Darwin. The Earth wanted to evolve, and life wanted to co-evolve with it. They just needed oxygen and the opportunity, then bang!

Geobiologists reconstructing the conditions of the ancient Earth can easily come up with reasons why intelligent life did not evolve sooner in Earth history.

For example, 90% of Earth’s history elapsed before the atmosphere had enough oxygen to support humans. Likewise, up to 50% of Earth’s history elapsed before the atmosphere had enough oxygen to support modern eukaryotic cells.

By extension, all that’s needed for jumbo jets is more tornadoes—except that jumbo jets, composed of millions of non-flying parts, are far simpler than living organisms.

Toss away real probability measures and embrace the Stuff Happens Law, and there’s no stopping. Once life appeared, and had enough oxygen to transform into eukaryotes, human intelligence could not be far behind, now, could it? That is the power of two entities evolving together. Dancing idols make the world go round.

If our view is correct, then the Earth and life have evolved together in a way that is more typical of life-supporting planets – not in the rare and improbable way that the hard-steps model predicts. Humanlike intelligence would then be a more expected outcome of Earth’s evolution, rather than a cosmic fluke.

A reassessment of the “hard-steps” model for the evolution of intelligent life (Science Advances, 14 Feb 2025). This is the paper that resulted from the “study” of the three “experts” who have mastered the art of imagination. Unsurprisingly, it mentions the e-word “evolution” 169 times. It also depends on Deep Time: “the geological timescales necessary for creating the global-environmental conditions required for humans or human analogs.” Deep Time supplies the requisite closets for hiding Darwin’s miracles from the prying eyes of empiricists. Like Finagle said in his rules for science: “Don’t believe in miracles. Rely on them.”

Dear readers, after 25 years of exposing these shamans, it’s getting downright tiresome to see their tenacity and incorrigibility. We need more help. We need everyone to laugh harder and louder, until the Darwinians become too ashamed to show their red faces in public.