Opus 2024-042: Inherit the Hot Gas

My enthusiasm for reading was born with the science fiction in the library of my junior high school.  Up until that time I might make it through a Dr. Seuss book.  The works of Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and so many others caught my attention and there was not turning back.  It helped that this was still in the day that they were writing to entertain not to advance a social agenda.

That has all changed.  I now find it hard to read science fiction, or almost any genre.  As I became more socially and politically aware I began to see the way in which authors would push the mantras of the left.  Nuclear destruction, environmental disaster, climate suicide, homosexuality, eugenics (yes, eugenics):  You name it they were pushing it.  

I recently came across an old paperback from 1977 and thought I would read it.  I assume I had read it before but could not remember.  The title was Inherit the Stars and the author was James P. Hogan, a name I remembered.  The cover blurb was “A Novel about Man’s Place in the Universe”.  Sounded good.  I started reading.

The author wrote well.  The characters and pace were strong enough that you didn’t notice at first that there wasn’t much action.  I was about half way through before it was clear that he was pushing one of the common themes science fiction has been dealing with for decades:  Where did man come from?  You would not believe some of the wild and crazy plots that are used to find an answer.  Actually, they have a couple of answers that all the stories fall into.  They all push and assume evolution but they began to realize that the universe was not old enough to allow for the development of advanced species and intelligent.  Thus they had to turn to other forms of deus ex machina.  The two most popular, as voiced by Richard Dawkins in the documentary Expelled, are crystals and aliens.

Hogan goes with aliens.  He does a good job of making evolutionary theory breath taking, but it gets old after a time.  What you miss is the minor detail that everything being proclaimed is based on theory, not on scientific evidence.  He covers the Cambrian explosion without mentioning it by name.  It is the unexplained appearance of massive numbers of new species with no trace of ancestors in the fossil record.  In all the verbiage it becomes impossible to separate what is actually articulated by the evolutionists and how much Hogan was making up to fill in the gaps.

It is a good example of what we see going on in science today.  At one point, near the climax of a solution I had already figured out, the lead biologist makes this declaration,

“As I have said, all this follows purely as a chain of reasoning from the observations with which I began.  I can offer no evidence to support it.  I am convinced, however, that such evidence does exist.”, p. 208-9

Notice that he admits he has no evidence.  It is all theory and a form of logic.  That is why pure logic is not enough to advance science.  

An example of how science is going could be illustrated by Beaver or Opie.  These were the children on “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show”.  Picture either one of the boys doing something genuinely stupid and getting caught.  The adult asks them what happened.  Then the boy would go into a long story about how it happened.  The story has a certain logic to it.  There might even be a remote possibility.  It might touch the real world at one or two points.  However, the adult knows how life works and what the facts show and rejects the argument.  In science we have no adult in the room.  The theories get wilder and the jargon gets more creative and the feces gets piled higher.

Keep this in mind when you hear the next earth shaking revelation from a field that used to generate some respect.  Times are changing.

Hogan, James P.  Inherit the Stars.  New York  Ballantine Books, 1977.

homo unius libri