The Space Brothers

I don't really feel like writing tonight. See what you think of this article.

The notion of extraterrestrials is not contradicted by the grand mythological narratives of evolution nor ancient creation myths based on "Those who from heaven to earth came." and so on, nor even the mythos of Christianity. In that last instance "they" would be more like extracosmosials, although still technically extraterrestrials too. Given that almost all mythological narratives comport with extraterrestrials one would expect that there would be little opposition. Yet what happens is that some people are kooky and other people don't want to look like the kooks, so evidence for UFOs is treated with a lot more skepticism than is evidence based on little bone fragments fitted to Darwinism. The UFO evidence is not allowed to generate much of a narrative to be taken seriously and instead tends to generate science fiction, yet little pieces of rocks do generate rather vast narratives all said to be "scientific fact." It seems that the skeptics sometimes stop being skeptical based on looks, and concern for their own credibility as opposed to perceptions of kookiness.

But sometimes what is taken to be a scientific fact, is in fact not a fact. For instance, I think this hoax was used against me in a debate on dino-birds and then there is what seems to be a modern case of Piltdown revisited in the case of human evolution. The thing about it is this, these "fitting frauds" that seem a lot like Haeckel's (Who defended himself with the telling argument, "Every biologist fits the data!") as well as skulls and bone fragments are used to generate rather vast mythological narratives of Naturalism that end up shaping people's philosophy of life, if not their religion. Some in the face of scientific fact "separate" their religion from all of physical reality, which becomes involved in a fact/value split, etc.

In the case of UFOs small amounts of physical evidence generating grand narratives would be looked on as science fiction, yet in the case of evolution the evidence is said to generate a narrative that is a "scientific fact," pretty much just like a narrative about gravity.

Given such associative propaganda and an apparent fear of being associated with rubes (the equivalent of UFO kooks in the other debate) skepticism towards the grand narratives of evolution is often smothered...or relegated to kooks and rubes, which works to validate the epistemic rules being created.

It's interesting to note that finding living dragons probably wouldn't change much as far as the epistemic rules. Some creationists seem to think that it would, yet there are already many empirical observations that seem to contradict Darwinism that are "fitted" into it anyway. If the fossil record shows millions upon millions of years of an organism not changing, then Darwinism explains that. If it shows changes, then Darwinism explains them too. If dinos were alive, then Darwinism would be said to explain them. Since they are dead, it explains that instead. One thing will be consistent, the purported vast explanatory power of Darwinism, even if it doesn't seem to be explaining things in a defined and scientifically falsifiable way.

It is pretty much unshakeable and comports with almost any observation one can make.

On the other hand , gods/space brothers coming down from the sky and claiming that they've been directing evolution and so on would probably shake things up a bit in both religion and philosophy.

Related posts, on mythological narratives of Naturalism based on bones:
(Ancestor Hunting: The Significance of the Piltdown Skull By George Grant MacCurdy American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 15, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1913), pp. 248-256)

(Man Had Reason Before He Spoke The New York Times; Dec 20, 1912, pg. 6)

(Science and Discovery; WHY THE APE-LIKE PROGENITOR OF MAN MUST HAVE WALKED INSTEAD OF CLIMBING TREES Current Opinion (1913-1925). New York: Nov 1913. Vol. VOL. LV., Iss. No. 5)