du Prel, Carl Freiherr (1839–1899)
Popular 19th-century German philosophical writer whose influential Die
Planetenbewohner und die Nebularhypothese ("The Inhabitants of the Planets
and the Nebular Hypothesis", 1880) drew a close (and fallacious) analogy
between cosmic and biologic evolution. du Prel argued that the same process
of Darwinian natural selection that had acted on terrestrial organisms had
also operated on the planets of the solar system, so that those most advantageously
placed during their formation period actually survived. From this du Prel
concluded that "all planets that have cooled down are habitable and therefore
inhabited." Life, he conjectured, had reached a more advanced stage on some
worlds so that what man had achieved through technology, nature had accomplished
elsewhere organically – for example, through the evolution
of extra senses.
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• PHILOSOPHY
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