It Is Curious How Often Erroneous Theories

To Take An Unequivocal Stand, It Seems To Me, Is Of Greater Heuristic Value And Far More Likely To Stimulate Constructive Criticism Than To Evade The Issue.

Given The Fact Of Evolution, One Would Expect The Fossils To Document A Gradual Steady Change From Ancestral Forms To The Descendants. But This Is Not What The Paleontologist Finds. Instead, He Or She Finds Gaps In Just About Every Phyletic Series.

The Issue, As Correctly Emphasized By Carl Sagan, Is The Probability Of The Evolution Of High Intelligence And An Electronic Civilization On An Inhabited World. Once We Have Life (and Almost Surely It Will Be Very Different From Life On Earth), What Is The Probability Of Its Developing A Lineage With High Intelligence? On Earth, Among Millions Of Lineages Of Organisms And Perhaps 50 Billion Speciation Events, Only One Led To High Intelligence; This Makes Me Believe In Its Utter Improbability.

It Is Curious How Often Erroneous Theories Have Had A Beneficial Effect For Particular Branches Of Science.

As A Consequence, Geneticists Described Evolution Simply As A Change In Gene Frequencies In Populations, Totally Ignoring The Fact That Evolution Consists Of The Two Simultaneous But Quite Separate Phenomena Of Adaptation And Diversification.