Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the common thread to them is that the point is we should expect our situation to be run of the mill.
We should be suspicious of theories that afford a special place in the living or physical cosmos to human beings.
And I think that this is where the biology and physics start to come apart.
And this is where the contingency comes in.
So this is where I was going with that.
And, you know, I think, and maybe you'd be better off saying whether you agreed or not, because it's not my specialty, but I think that the Copernican stuff holds up quite well in physics.
You know, you have the universality of physical laws, the same laws that govern terrestrial affairs also govern the celestial phenomena, like Newton showed.
Everything that we can tell seems to suggest we're living in a garden variety solar system with inner rocky planets, outer gas giants, a garden variety main sequence star in a sort of unremarkable location on the galaxy, which is just one among many in the observable universe.
Now, that all seems to work.
But then when you extend those principles, those ways of thinking, those modes of inference that are very familiar in the physical sciences to biology, things start to break down pretty quickly.
for a bunch of reasons.
Continuity is going to be one of the big ones.
But I think what's happened, especially in the 20th century, where evolutionary biologists were largely not part of, I don't know if I can say historically excluded, but they weren't active participants in discussions about
about SETI and, you know, an extraterrestrial life, and it was always sort of a foo-foo question in biology, whereas in the physical sciences, it started to be taken more seriously.
And then the interesting question is why, and why were biologists not playing a big role?
And part of the reason is they were very skeptical, and they would be real...
They would be naysayers at these conversations.
So, the most prominent evolutionists of the 20th century that were involved in the major evolutionary synthesis, like Ernest Meyer, Dobzhansky, Gigi Simpson, they were all very negative about the SETI project.
Interesting.
Yeah, and so, you know, it's interesting because, meanwhile, you have in the mid-20th century, right, you know, the Fermi paradox is coming out, right, where it's like, well, look, you know, if we're going to go by something like a Copernican principle, then, you know, we should expect intelligent life to be pervasive in the universe, yet we haven't found a single shred of extraterrestrial life, whether on Earth or in the history of our visible universe.
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