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Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe |
I. Introduction
II. Chapter I: On the Tendency of Human Societies to
Depart Indefinitely from the Objective Truth
The popular belief is that the Copernican Revolution and the inquisition of Galileo are things of the past. Human societies, it is claimed, have progressed beyond the stage when such outrages could happen again. In this book we show that the Copernican Revolution is far from over, and that society has not improved since the sixteenth century in any important respect. If anything the situation may have got worse, with the successes of the Industrial Revolution conferring upon human beings a degree of arrogance not seen before. The dogma has shifted from an Earth-centred Universe to the equally unlikely idea that life, which is the most complex and amazingly intricate phenomenon in the entire cosmos, must be centred on the Earth. The new dogma has Judeo-Christian roots, but today its custodians are scientists rather than the high priests of the Church.
Our capacity to probe the Universe around us, to ask and discuss questions concerning origins (always to ask, sometimes to answer), sets us apart from all other creatures that inhabit our planet. This remarkable capacity, or intelligence as we prefer to call it, may be seen as the end product of a long history, a history that according to the thesis of this book must have predated the formation of the Earth some 4500 million years ago. For close upon 4000 million years, terrestrial life meandered along in a seemingly mindless way. Starting from microscopic single-celled creatures, it built up to become more md more complex, more and more sophisticated and diverse, through long periods of geological time, until at last a species emerged that was endowed with the capacity to look back on the very processes that created it. We are all members of that uniquely privileged species.
How did this whole process come about? Did it arise through a sequence of random events here on the Earth, or was it instigated from outside the Earth, from space, and is it even possible that it might have been driven by the agency of an external cosmic intelligence? These are some of the questions we shall address in later chapters of this book.
The orthodox explanation of these facts, which is attributed to Charles Darwin and a long succession of his disciples, is well known. In its modern extended form, Darwinian theory asserts that the earliest living cell was assembled through a purely mechanistic shuffling of the basic building blocks of life, and that subsequent mistakes of copying (mutations) and occasional doublings of genes, together with a continual sieving out of the 'unfit' in relation to every terrestrial environment, led to the products of evolution that are seen today. All this is taught nowadays as though it embodied proven unquestionable facts, but in reality it is little more than dogma, dogma that has come to be fossilized in our educational system. A great deal of this dogma has turned out in recent years to be inconsistent with the real world. Yet the theory dies hard. This unfortunate situation has arisen through a sustained campaign of propaganda on the part of biologists, and by a blind eye being turned to every fact to emerge in later years that appeared to go against the theory. Several distinguished physicists have questioned the basic premises of this essentially pre-Copernican, earthbound theory and attempted to point the way towards a cosmic view of life. Among them are figures of no less stature than Kelvin, Hielmholtz and Arrhenius, but all their protestations have come to taught in the face of the unrelenting propaganda of the Darwinian front. In addition to the conflict with Darwinism, the idea of terrestrial life being influenced by the external Universe runs counter to a long-established belief in the Christian Church. By about the sixth century AD , Christian beliefs included the dogma that nothing that happens in the heavens could have any conceivable effect on the Earth. The heavens were merely an adornment that was of no practical importance in day-to-day life ( except for the Sun, whose beneficial effects were not denied).
We begin our book by recounting the beginning of the Copernican Revolution, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which still appears to have repercussions to the present day. Next we discuss the sociological forces that operated effectively to raise Darwin 's theory from the reasonable speculation that it was: first to belief, then to entrenched dogma, and finally to the exalted status of 'irrefutable fact' .The situation that now faces us is potentially dangerous, not merely for a handful of interested scientists but for the entire human species. For when human beings collectively refuse to distinguish propositions about the world that are demonstrably true from those that are manifestly false, we must surely be heading down a road to disaster. The struggle against the power of the Church in the 1860s that fuelled Darwinian propaganda in the early years might now, in the 1990s, be transformed into a blueprint for ultimate extinction.
In this book we present evidence, which we think is irrefutable, to support our point of view that life is a cosmic phenomenon. At the same time we seek to analyse the sociological forces that appear to be rallied against an acceptance of this point of view. Components of cosmic life were, in our view, added to our planet in the form of bacteria and viruses from space, and perhaps, in a remarkable event which occurred about 570 million years ago, whole creatures arrived here from space; it has been from this cosmic assembly that terrestrial life has evolved over long periods of geological time. The rival theory asserts, without any tangible proof or evidence, that electric discharges in the atmosphere of a primitive Earth led to the inception of terrestrial life. The only empirical basis that could conceivably be claimed for this assertion is that the chemical building blocks of life -amino acids, nucleotides, sugars -have been synthesized under laboratory conditions that were considered to mimic conditions that may have existed on a primitive Earth. It has also been shown experimentally that' these molecular units could be made to form into long polymer chains resembling, very superficially, biological polymers. Yet the result of such experiments is a far cry from life itself. All such experiments and inferences beg the most important question of all: the origin of the information content of life. The information content of life (that is to say, the information needed to put life together) is specific in kind, and super-astronomical in quantity. How was this highly specific information acquired in the first place, out of initial chaos? Darwin's allegorical 'warm little pond', cosy as it may sound, will scarcely suffice.
Astronomical evidence accumulated over the past decade has pointed to the existence of vast quantities of complex organic molecules in interstellar space. Moreover, we ourselves have found that the observed properties of cosmic dust grains are similar to the properties of freeze-dried bacteria as measured in the laboratory. The correspondences between our model and the data are so precise that we have been encouraged to suggest that cosmic dust grains are indeed bacteria, implying that cosmic microbiology operates and evolves on a galactic scale.
It is a necessary corollary to this point of view that bacteria must be space-hardy, and so indeed they are found to be. For example, a viable strain of Streptococcus mitis was recovered after two years of exposure to conditions on the surface of the Moon. It has been shown that bacteria can be taken down to near zero pressure and temperature without loss of viability, provided suitable care is exercised in the experimental conditions. Bacteria can survive after exposure to pressures as high as 10 tonnes per square centimetre, and after flash heating under dry conditions at temperatures of up to 600°C. Viable bacteria have been recovered from the interior of an operating nuclear reactor, having survived intense fluxes of ionizing radiation. These are not properties one would expect to have evolved on the Earth, but they are all properties necessary for survival in space.
At the birth of the Solar System, cometary bodies condensed at about the distances of the present planets Uranus and Neptune. We argue that even the smallest population of cosmic bacteria present within this primordial comet cloud would have been vastly amplified within individual comets in their warm watery interiors on a very short timescale.
Biological material from a comet is peeled away layer by layer when it approaches the inner regions of the Solar System. Some of this material could rain down intact onto the surfaces of the planets, including the Earth, providing the genetic building blocks from which life evolved. The recent return of Comet Halley offered a unique opportunity to test this theory of comets. We had predicted that the surface of the comet would at close quarters look dark, like a1l organic tarry substance, and so it was found to be. We also argued that a spectral signature of bacteria and viruses would be seen in the cometary dust, and this prediction was also verified to a startling degree of accuracy. We also predicted that the proportions of the chemical elements in the dust would be like those in bacteria, and sure enough they were.
Upwards of 1011 (1 followed by 11 zeros, or 100 billion) life bearing comets, in our view, envelop the Solar System, populating the so-called ??Oort cometary cloud. From time to time, individual comets are deflected out of this cloud into the inner regions of the Solar System by interaction with a passing star or molecular cloud.. At the present time we know that only a few cometary objects each year are thus deflected to show up as new comets, but in the past much larger numbers might have been deflected, and cometary incursions would then have been much more frequent.
A life-bearing comet arriving at an Earth that had already acquired its oceans and atmosphere would effectively have seeded our planet with life. From the available geological evidence it would seem that this first successful seeding occurred about 3800 million years ago. However, the process of cometary injection of life could not have stopped at this distant prehistoric time. Comets are with us in the Solar System today, and the Earth continually picks up debris from comets. About 1000 tonnes of cometary debris enter the Earth's atmosphere every year, a fraction of which must surely contain microorganisms that actually arrive at the Earth's surface in a viable state.
This conclusion, bold though it may be, has the advantage of being susceptible to testing, especially if the Earth is being showered with microorganisms that are pathogenic to plants and animals. Viral and bacterial invasions could thus lead to epidemic outbreaks of, for example, influenza. The known patterns of influenza outbreaks over the surface of the Earth clearly prove, in our view, the direct incidence of the causative pathogen from space. This conclusion seems to have been reached by medieval doctors and readily conceded well into the nineteenth century. But nowadays the facts that relate to the matters are often suppressed or distorted by a society eager to disown its cosmic heritage.
Besides influenza, a wide range of other viral and bacterial diseases are also caused by the introduction of causative agents from outside the Earth. Many common epidemic diseases have a record of abrupt entrances, exits and re-entrances exactly as though the Earth were being seeded at periodic intervals. In the case of smallpox, the time interval between successive entrances appears to have been about 700-800 years. Likewise, periodic occurrences of bubonic plague in historical times, and of epidemics such as the plague of Athens, all point to a direct incidence from space. In recent times, it would seem that the 3.5-year period of whooping cough can best be linked to bacteria expelled from Comet Encke. We also argue that highly localized outbreaks of viral and bacterial diseases ( e.g. legionnaire's disease, viral meningitis) can be interpreted as the effect of small cometary bodies that enter the atmosphere and become dispersed near ground level over local areas of the Earth's surface.
To sum up: we argue that a
wide range of facts point decisively to life being a phenomenon that must be
connected with the much wider cosmos outside the Earth. Life on Earth is
derived from an all- pervasive, galaxy-wide biological system. Life was
derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the Earth, in
direct contradiction to neo- Darwinian theory as it is generally understood.
Our theory of biology has applications that are of immediate practical
importance, for instance in the prevention or alleviation of the ravages of
future epidemic disease. It would appear that there lies ahead a
sociological struggle to get human beings to respect objective truth, even
when such truth runs counter to prevailing beliefs. The very survival of our
species could well be at stake. [pp. 1-6]
II. Chapter
I:
On the Tendency of Human Societies to
Depart Indefinitely from the Objective Truth
We are all in a mysterious situation, born as we are into a strange world without anyone troubling themselves even to ask our permission. We learn in our earliest months, with an amazing precociousness; first to see, then to stand and talk. Eventually we burst through the language barrier, understanding what others are saying, and speaking ourselves, without having any previous knowledge of language in our minds to serve as an example. We learn all these things seemingly out of nowhere. The one unfortunate thing, however, is that at this stage we have no really effective way of telling the adults around us the unvarnished truth about the state of the world, so they are permitted to go on living with illusions -illusions of which they would soon be disabused were a proper two-way system of communication available. The sad thing is that, by the time we acquire the ability to communicate such unprejudiced views, we have lost them because of the process of education.
Education does of course have a good side to it: it gives easy access to a thousand and one items of indisputably correct knowledge, ranging from the abstract processes of mathematics to the correct way to make a horse's collar (a good horse's collar being one that gets more work from the horse than the choke used by the civilizations of Greece and Rome). Education ensures that knowledge which is factual and correct carries forward from one generation to the next, and because of the forward momentum of this process technology too moves unerringly forward. Trouble comes, however, when what we think to be knowledge is actually no more than illusion. Education then serves to transmit illusions from generation to generation, with the situation getting worse all the time. A mild illusion in one generation becomes less mild in the next, each generation impressing on its successors a growing belief in the illusion. As a mathematician might put it, the educational system is unstable against the spread of incorrect beliefs; wrong ideas eventually become so deeply entrenched as to become unshakeable dogma. This is basically why, sooner or later, all nations and all cultures go into decline: tlle burden of dogma builds up more and more until its weight causes the social structures to collapse.
The situation in this respect is worse today than it ever was in the past, because the educational process at higher levels nowadays continues to the age of about twenty-five,. the age at which advanced students complete the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. By this time it is too late to return to the inner inventiveness of childhood, far too late to put right mistakes in the system, far too late to escape from the mental prison-houses in which as students we have been locked up for so long.
In the nineteenth century it was less difficult for boys leaving school at fourteen or even earlier to make an immense mark on the world. George Stephenson was able to laugh almost audibly at a parliamentary committee of 'experts' who declared that his project for building a railway from Manchester to Liverpool was an impossibility. Evidence was given at great length showing the utter impossibility of forming a road of any kind over Chat Moss, an exceedingly swampy terrain. Mr Francis Giles, the Chief Engineer, had been 22 years in the profession and could speak with some authority: ,
No Engineer in his senses would go through that moss ??ifhe wanted to make a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester. In my judgement a rail road certainly cannot be safely made over that moss without going to the bottom of tile Moss. The soil ought all to be taken out, undoubtedly; in doing which, it will not be practicable to approach each end of the cutting, as you make it, with the carriages. No carriages would stand upon the Moss short of the bottom. My estimate for the whole cutting and embankment over Chat Moss is £270,000, nearly, at those quantities and those prices which are decidedly correct. It will be necessary to take this Moss completely out at the bottom, in order to make a solid road. ( Samuel Smiles, The Lives of Engineers, David & Charles, 1968).
Can one imagine a government committee today rejecting such advice from an expert witness in favour of the contrary opinion of a man who, like George Stephenson, had no schooling at all? Can one even imagine a Ph.D. student standing up to his professor over the professor's opinion that it was necessary 'to take this Moss completely out at the bottom'? Yet as it turned out:
The road across Chat Moss was finished by 1st January 1830, where the first experimental train of passengers passed over it, drawn by the 'Rocket', and it turned out that, instead of being the most expensive part of the line, it was about the cheapest. The total cost of forming the line over the Moss was £28,000, not the 'decidedly correct' estimate of £270,000. It also proved to be one of the best portions of the railway. Being a floating road, it was smooth and easy to run upon. ...There was, and still is, a sort of springiness in the road over the Moss. ( Ibid. )
The invention of the horse's collar in the West, around AD 700, an invention that had entirely escaped the formidable civilizations of Greece and Rome, doubtless came from some young fellow who, like George Stephenson, had not attended school at all. All this, one might be tempted to say, is ancient history and not relevant to the present day. While it is generally acknowledged that in past times the world suffered from monstrous illusions, the present-day belief is that, by being educated for longer and longer, we have somehow been freed from illusion; in fact the opposite is much more likely to be true, for the longer one is immersed in a wrong situation the more self-deceiving it could become.
It is not hard to identify the kind of problems and situations where illusions are likely today to be most deeply rooted. Wherever ultimate origins are concerned, one finds, not the caution and humility that common sense might suggest to be advisable, but an immense show of intellectual arrogance. Almost every week nowadays one reads that the Universe originated in a Big Bang, not might have originated that way, but did originate that way, undoubtedly. A detailed picture is developed of how all the matter in the Universe was compressed essentially into a point source that 'exploded' at some defu1ite moment in the past. The truth is that we have no such knowledge. All one can properly say is that, if there was a Big Bang of a certain kind, then there would be consequences which happen to match one particular observed aspect of the world relating to the abundances of the so-called light elements -which it is also possible to explain otherwise. Two other aspects have also been counted as successes by Big Bang advocates, but one of them can also be explained otherwise rather easily, while the other ( the cosmic microwave background) has very recently been found to have proper tits that seem likely to prove an embarrassment to the Big Bang. This is not much for a belief to develop around, but develop it has, to a point where there is no shortage today of half-informed commentators who assure their readers that it is really and irrefutably so.
There is nothing wrong in trying to understand ultimate questions, provided one realizes from the beginning that such an aim is a bit like trying to steal apples. Make the attempt if you like, but do not be surprised if you get caught. One of the present writers was involved in the first work on what nowadays would be called an inflationary cosmology. The title of his paper, ' A new model for the expanding Universe', meant just what it said: a new idea available for discussion, not a final decisive answer to what is plainly the most immense of all scientific problems. The essential point of this paper of 1948, namely a connection between the creation of matter and the expansion of the Universe via a new concept of negative pressure, survives to this day, although the astronomical framework into which the discussion was fitted is nowadays changed. This is pretty much the best one can hope for in trying to steal apples -a partial survival of the original plan.
A river flows smoothly over a near-horizontal bed. Suddenly, however, the bed of the river falls a few metres -a common enough occurrence. Describing the initial smooth flow mathematically is fairly easy, but anything like a full description of all the physical phenomena set in train by the sudden drop of the river bed, especially if the drop itself has irregularities in it, would be ferociously hard, harder than any mathematics yet used to describe the origin of the Universe. Now, quite clearly the whole Universe is not going to be simpler than the flow of water in almost any stream or river, so it is evident that we make simplistic attempts to understand the Universe at our peril. This is not to debar such attempts; rather, like a surgeon attempting a difficult operation, we must know exactly what we are doing.
Some parts of present-day knowledge are clear-cut. No matter how much science may advance in the future, no matter how complex the Universe turns out to be, what we clearly know to be true cannot become untrue. The essence of knowing what you are doing lies in being aware to a hair's breadth of the distinction between such certain knowledge and mere conventional opinion and dogma. Opinion and dogma can be booted out of the window, if you please, but certain knowledge must be respected to its last letter, number and symbol. It is just here that the educational system makes things so difficult for the student. By being rushed from one examination to another at breakneck speed ( as in the tripos system at Cambridge, to take what is perhaps the most extreme example ), there is no time for the brain to order its priorities correctly. In respect of what really matters in the learning process, it can be said with some emphasis that it does not pay to be a student for too long.
The trap operates both ways. Just as, within the educational system, dogma becomes easily confused with knowledge, so from the outside it is all too easy not to respect, or even to understand, the certain areas of knowledge. Certain knowledge is not something one can take or leave as one pleases. It has to be taken, and if it happens to be medicinal in taste, then one must swallow it without complaint. The books of Immanuel Velikovsky ( Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos and Earth in Upheaval) caused a sensation both with the public and among scientists when they first appeared about thirty years ago. What was unexpected was Velikovsky's total rejection of a certain area of knowledge, knowledge attested to by tens of thousands of facts derived from observation and experiment. Velikovsky lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and he often attended astronomy seminars held at the observatory of Princeton University, where one of the present authors met him on a number of occasions. He seemed to believe quite genuinely that the contents of ancient documents were of greater reliability than the science of celestial mechanics, which is one of the best understood a1ld closely studied parts of science. This wrong judgement was probably due in considerable measure to the natural bias we all have in favour of what we happen to know well. Velikovsky had an expert understanding of ancient languages, so he could translate the documents in which he put his trust, whereas his knowledge of the precision mathematics of celestial mechanics was virtually nil. This is a good example of how one may and may not attempt to steal apples. Stealing apples means rejecting a dogmatic component of the beliefs of experts. But before making a raid on the orchard you have to master the details of the expert view in the certain areas of knowledge. Otherwise you will surely be caught.
Velikovsky was caught, in the public eye, not by the fury of contemporary scientists, but by the development of the space programme. Space probes can be set on courses that are predicted even years ahead to reach precisely specified targets, as for example in the recent Giotto encounters with Comet Halley and Comet Grigg- Skjellerup, in which the probe was set on a path to within an accuracy of ten kilometres or so. If Velikovsky had been right in his dismissal of celestial mechanics, that error would have been something like 100 million kilometres. The public can now see that when scientists calculate from celestial mechanics they are vindicated, which every mathematically oriented scientist has known for generations to be true because celestial mechanics is an area of certain knowledge, an area that within its stated measure of accuracy is never going to be changed, however much science progresses in centuries to come. The same cannot be said for the latest sophisticated theory in particle physics or the latest theory of the origin of the Universe, both of which are subject to change without notice. In stealing apples you have to know exactly the difference between the strong and weak points in the position of conformist opinion and dogma. In other words, you have to know exactly where the owners of the orchard have set their traps.
Let us pass from Velikovsky to the targets of modern scientific fury, 'creationism' and 'creationists'. The meanings presently attached to these words are unfortunate degradations of language. On the verb 'to create' the Concise Oxford Dictionary says: 'bring into existence ...make or cause. ..originate (an actor creates a part) ...invest (a person) with rank ...make a fuss, grumble'. And on the noun 'creation': 'the act of creating ...the creating of the universe regarded as all act of God ...a product of human intelligence, esp. of imaginative thought or artistic ability ...the act of investing with a title or rank'. But when we come to the noun 'creationism', we run into sometl1ing quite different: 'a theory attributing all matter, biological species, etc. to separate acts of creation, rather than to evolution'.
The odd thing about modern scientific dogma is that to be respectable you must be a half-believer in creationism. You must believe matter to have arisen in a Big-Bang Universe by special creation, but you must not believe that biological species arose by special creation. Those who believe both are considered beyond the pale, as are those - like ourselves -who believe neither. Where 'creationism' is concerned you have to get it just right: one half one way, the other half the other way, otherwise the editors of scientific journals will force you to walk the plank, and those who disburse public money on science will laugh you to scorn.
An even more remarkable transmogrification occurs when '??-ist' is added to 'creation' a transmogrification from an actor creating a part to a believer in the literal interpretation of the biblical Pentateuch, a believer particularly in the Book of Genesis. How difficult the English language has become! The writer (s) of the Book of Genesis were equipped with scarcely any scientific knowledge as we understand it today, so their description of cosmology was inevitably primitive, a crude interpretation with which the creationist is nowadays encumbered. Chronology is a matter of especial embarrassment, for according to the Book of Genesis the earth has existed for hardly a tick of the cosmic clock, only a few thousand years.
On every day of the year, visitors make their way to High Force, a waterfall near Middleton-in-Teesdale in Durham, England. This particular waterfall has special interest because there the river Tees is cutting its way back into a flattish sheet of extremely hard rock called the Whin Sill. The rate of cutting can hardly be more than a few centimetres per century; even very simple observations made over a fraction of a ???lift time would show that the rate cannot be more than about 30 centimetres per century. Yet the gorge and V-shaped valley below the present-day waterfall are together over a kilometre long. Since this valley has clearly been cut by the river in times gone by, the time required for the cutting must have been at least a few thousand centuries, requiring the Earth to have had a long past history. Similar situations can be found in many places.
The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, the Quoran or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This we think is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.
By 'science', in the previous paragraph, we mean areas of certain knowledge. When one passes from certain knowledge to still unsolved problems the situation becomes different; conformist opinion and dogma then take over. 'Scientists' often cease to be real scientists, preferring dogma to facts, thereby adopting the same mental processes as the creationists. This was the essence of the testimony given by one of us in defence of the state of Arkansas in 1981. The state was under trial before a US Federal Court on account of an educational policy that permitted a hearing to the creationists, who form a fair fraction of the population in that region of the United States and whose taxes help support the education system. The whole affair struck us as an odd phenomenon in a land that was supposed to be dedicated to the concept of free speech. Our point of view was that in their interpretation of the origin and development of life on the Earth, the so-called evolutionists were just as surely wrong as the creationists, but whereas it is easy to see that the creationists are wrong -a visit to the High Force waterfall will do that –the evolutionists hide behind a facade that is not so easily penetrated, especially by children at school.
The method used in all scientific advances is to proceed outwards from areas of certain knowledge. Where frontiers are extended gradually by careful investigation the method works extremely well. Sometimes, however, there are sudden major advances which form the great stories of science: Newton's sudden advance in dynamics, leading to the development of celestial mechanics; the theory of light and of radiation in general in the nineteenth century; and quantum mechanics in the present century. The accolades given to those taking part in such advances are great, and they become household names. Rather naturally, it is the ambition of most scientists to become a leading figure in such a major advance. Some succeed by ability, others by luck, and still others, unhappily, by design and deception. The trick is to pretend that a major advance has been made, when in fact there has been none. To achieve such a deception, a cabal of scientists, rather than a lone individual is usually needed. Speaking with one voice, a cabal is often able to shout down lone individuals. working in other directions and eventually, by gaining control over what material is published in scientific journals and what is not, a cabal can in the end wipe out all opposition.
Such situations cannot arise entirely by design. There must first be what in sport is often called tile 'run of the ball'. Facts must at first sight appear to favour the line taken by the cabal. Design comes in when contradictory facts later appear and are deliberately suppressed through the control which the cabal has obtained over the scientific journals. When, furthermore, the cabal's views proceed to invade the educational system, becoming taught to large numbers of students, who, faced by the constant burden of difficult examinations, are not in a position to defend themselves, dogma becomes established. Society becomes saddled with a false area of supposed certain know- ledge, which besides the damage it causes directly impedes the development of all nearby surrounding areas of science.
This same process happening simultaneously in many directions is what, more than any other factors, produces the decline, decay and ultimate collapse of human societies. [pp. 7-15]
[Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution, London: J M Dent, 1993]
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