Physics, Earth & Space Icon Physics, Earth & Space

Books and Journals Continue to Promote Misrepresentations of Copernicus and Human Exceptionalism

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A review in Nature shows how entrenched the Copernican "demotion" myth remains, even after scholarly works have refuted it:

All the astronomical discoveries made since Nicolaus Copernicus demoted Earth from its position at the centre of the Universe have continued to erode humanity’s perceived physical significance in the grand scheme of things. (Emphasis added.)

The facts are quite different. Copernicus (who believed in intelligent design) would never have endorsed the "Copernican Principle" ascribed to him. To the medieval mind, the center of the universe was the cosmic sump, Dennis Danielson explains in his history, The Book of the Cosmos. The highest glory belonged to the stars; for Earth to move from the center to planethood represented a promotion, not a demotion. (Danielson also explains this in the film The Privileged Planet.) So why do authors and their reviewers continue to repeat the myth?

Mario Livio, the reviewer for Nature, is relishing Caleb Scharf’s new book, The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities. Even though Scharf appears to consider our planet’s significance thoughtfully, much of his thesis is built on the Copernican demotion myth. According to Publishers Weekly, he seems to consider it part of his mission to salvage the myth:

Scharf shows how the answers to fundamental questions of existence will come from embracing the peculiarity of our circumstance without denying the Copernican vision.

So while Scharf takes seriously the unique properties of Earth, he pushes the demotion myth even further by considering the possibility of a multiverse.

As the book The Privileged Planet by Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez explains in detail, numerous properties of Earth and the universe put humans in the optimum position for making scientific discoveries. This evidences intelligent design, they argue. Scharf cannot deny that many factors of our habitation look too "peculiar" to be matters of chance. Scharf ends with a compromise position.

Scharf ends his book with the reflection that life inhabits the border between order and chaos. For instance, the dynamics of the planetary orbits in our Solar System are so complicated that they may become unstable within a few billion years. Similarly, Earth’s climate and geophysics occupy that interface between order and disorder. From that, Scharf concludes that "our place in the universe is special but not significant, unique but not exceptional". Note, however, that from the perspective of thermodynamics (entropy), life itself is an extremely ordered system.

Livio himself takes our significance up another notch:

…notwithstanding our physical insignificance, the human mind is significant. Why? Because all the discoveries described in this book, from the subatomic realm to the multiverse, were made by us.

That’s the point that Richards and Gonzalez emphasize: We make scientific discoveries because the Earth, the galaxy, and the universe at large make it possible.

The Privileged Planet leads to an exalted view of human significance. The Copernican demotion myth has the opposite effect:

What sets this book apart from those that simply describe the hunt for exoplanets is Scharf’s emphasis on the significance, or lack thereof, of our own existence. For instance, the realization that the human body contains ten times as many microbial cells as human cells — as well as impressive advances in the understanding of the chemical origin of life — has forced us to rethink how we classify the ‘importance’ of life forms on Earth, and perhaps even to consider placing microbes at the top of the hierarchy, rather than at the bottom.

The ethical and political ramifications of that idea are, indeed, staggering. That’s why we should offer the readers of Nature not only The Privileged Planet, but Wesley J. Smith’s The War on Humans.

Image credit: Earthrise Revisited 2013/Wikipedia.

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