Matthew, William Diller (1871–1930)
|
William Diller Matthew
Credit: American Museum of Natural History, New York
|
Paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1895–1926)
who later became Professor of Paleontology and head of the Paleontology
Department at the University of California,
Berkeley. Matthew cast doubt on the view expressed by some astronomers
that life might be common in the Universe. He found it "noticeable that,
as usual, the astronomers take the affirmative and the biologists the negative
side of the argument"1 and was certainly not alone among biologists
in believing that the origin of life had come about as a result of "some
immensely complex concatenation of circumstances so rare that even on earth
it has occurred probably but once during the eons of geological time," a
view first expressed by Alfred Russell Wallace.
This cautious attitude, emphasizing the difficulty in understanding how
life came about even on our own planet, partly explains why biologists failed
to join astronomers in debating the subject of extraterrestrial life until
the 1950s with the dawn of the Space Age and the search for more universally
applicable principles in the life sciences (see
evolutionary theory and extraterrestrial life). On the subject of extraterrestrial
intelligence, Matthew thought that, if it existed at all:
... it probably – almost surely –
would be so remote in its fundamental character and its external manifestations
from our own, that we could not interpret or comprehend the external indications
of its existence, nor even probably observe or recognize them.
References
- Matthew, W. D. "Life in Other Worlds," Science, 44,
239 (1921).
Related entry
• "Beta Life"
Related categories
• ASTROBIOLOGY
• BIOLOGISTS
• SETI
Also on this site:
Encyclopedia
of Alternative Energy & Sustainable Living
Encyclopedia
of History
BACK TO TOP
|
