Science fiction seen through an ID lens

I've been reading some early science fiction lately, and I thought I'd take a look at a famous sf story in terms of Intelligent design.

Quotes and comments;
Martian Odyssey - Stanley Weinbaum [1.] This story, from 1934, involves a kind of travelogue of a man's journey across Mars, with an alien sidekick. The plot is thin, and mainly exists as a device to let Weinbaum picture some odd life forms. (He was famous in his all too brief career for his depictions of aliens.) The tale is told to some buddies after the ordeal is over.

1. "'There'd been water in it [canal] sometime, though. The ditch was covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn moved out of my way!'
'Eh?' said Leroy.
'Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one, a little grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy legs."

- This is the old 'life is everywhere' motif, that was so common in early sf and in the early Darwinian imagination.

2. "'That freak ostrich,' explained the narrator. 'At least, Tweel is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something like 'Trrrweerrll!"

- Our hero discovers an alien (i.e. Martian) Not only is 'life' everywhere; but intelligent life too is everywhere, it would appear. (It's just that kind of universe I guess.)

3. "But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent. That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist."

- He apparently discovered the 'ostrich' was intelligent by using design theory. i.e. "Hmm, looks like a bag or case, therefore we must have an intelligent agent."
- Our hero apparently sees no trouble distinguishing intelligent from non-intelligent life (the ostrich is being attacked by some kind of plant) and no trouble thinking intelligent life is more important.

4. "Anyway, I put up my gun and said 'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort, and the thing came over and we were pals."

- You can laugh if you want; but things haven't changed all that much. (Some, it's true.) It's still considered commonplace that aliens and man can be friends... naivete still reigns. In a real sense sf is about seeking cosmic friends. (One can't be friends with evil creationists, but one can be friends with aliens from Mars or Betelgeuse :=)

5. "I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it, and the fire was blazing - and you all know what a job we have starting a fire in this atmosphere!
'And that bag of his!' continued the narrator. 'That was a manufactured article, my friends; press an end and she popped open - press the middle and she sealed so perfectly you couldn't see the line. Better than zippers."

- The two cosmic friends start up a fire to fight off the cold of the Martian night; again our hero has no trouble spotting intelligent design. How does he know? I'm not sure, but he compares it to a design he knows (zippers) and considers this bag an improvement. He thinks he knows it was manufactured, but I'm not sure how... I guess he compares it to items he's familiar with (e.g. with items that work by pressing something)

6. 'Well, we stared at the fire for a while and I decided to attempt some sort of communication with the
Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick'; he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me
and repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him, 'Tweel.'

- Our hero just assumes that all aliens will have personal names. (Evolutionists often operate with assumptions that don't spring from a materialist worldview.)
- He just assumes it will be possible to communicate with the alien. (We take communication for granted; since it comes so easily. We don't see it as evidence of design.)

7. 'Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!
'Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses telescopes - that they're civilized!'

- Our hero is making deductions about intelligence (and the quality of it); he sees things as evidence of intelligence. (i.e. x can only be the result of intelligence.)

8. "Our minds simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps
his viewpoint is as true as ours. But - we couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I liked Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."

- In the origins debate both sides accuse one another of having 'queer certainties' they can't prove :=) We certainly look at things from different viewpoints. (Are different viewpoints necessarily proof one is wrong? are different viewpoints necessarily contradictory? Is it true that only one viewpoint is true, and the others wrong? It depends on whether they're talking about the same thing in the same way. Our views differ because we look at things in terms of different wviews.)
- Martians and humans really can be said to have different world views! Maybe we could call them different planetary views.

9. " In fact, I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two."

- Over and over in sf you see human intelligence disparaged. I'm not at all sure where this idea (feeling) comes from. I don't know what this motif expresses. Repeatedly we see aliens who are more intelligent than human beings. (As if IQ somehow could be applied to both aliens and humans, as if it were some kind of generic quality... as if some kind of disembodied intelligence existed.) I suppose if intelligent life is everywhere, spread profligately throughout the universe, it's only 'reasonable' to expect a lot of aliens will be more intelligent than humans. (Intelligence defined by what can be produced in terms of technology?)

10. "'He is a desert creature,' ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.
'Huh? Why?
'He drink no water - he is adapted for sand storm"

- We might call this an evolutionary assumption; it assumes the creature evolved to adapt to desert conditions. The idea Mars might have once been a lush planet seems out of the question. The idea Tweel was created doesn't seem in the picture either. (i.e. evolution is just assumed)

11. "By noon they were shoulder high. I looked into a couple - all just the same, broken at the top and empty. I examined a brick or two as well; they were silica, and old as creation itself!' [They stumble across a long line of small pyramids.]
We, and Tweel, and those plants out there, and even the biopods are carbon life; this thing lived by a different set of chemical reactions. It was silicon life!'

- The hope 'life' could have a different basis than carbon has long been a theme in sf. (It expands the possibilities for finding alien life forms.)

12. "Lord! That queer creature Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless - just a mechanism, and yet - immortal Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past."

- Here we have a picture of what 'life' might be like without creation. i.e. this is about the only 'life' form materialism could give us. (I doubt if even such a thing as this is possible; because it would have to have had some kind of information content you'd think... and where would it have acquired it.) If m. were true this is the best we could hope for... this is what we would be.

13. "Tweel had his glass pistol out, pointing it at her. I grabbed his arm, but he tried to push me away. He pointed at her and said, 'No breet! No breet!' and I understood that he meant that the Fancy Long thing wasn't alive."

- Apparently Tweel could tell the difference between design and the appearance of design. (Maybe he'd read something from the Dawkins library.)

14. "The people of the mud cities along the canals.' Jarvis frowned, then resumed his narrative. 'I thought the dream-beast and the silicon-monster were the strangest beings conceivable, but I was wrong."

- One of the positive things sf can do is to show us that our ideas of what is or is not conceivable might be wrong. i.e. we can be sure something is inconceivable and be wrong. (I won't press an obvious example.)

- By employing his imagination the sf writer can picture things for us that aren't a part of our everyday intellectual furniture. i.e. maybe our ideas about X are wrong. It gives the writer a canvas on which to present ideas and pictures that would seem out of place in an ordinary novel.

15. "I don't know; maybe there's still another intelligent race on the planet, or a dozen others. Mars is a queer little world."

- The mars of sf is certainly a queer world in any event. It's the old 'anything is possible' idea that has been so dominant in sf. (This is really the beating heart of sf.) It's turning out that not as much is possible as was once assumed; but this is still a very strong idea. The very size of the universe gives the idea a strength that will be hard to exhaust.
- Intelligence seems to be imagined as merely a matter of chemical accident in this story; i.e. a simple thing. (In the early days of sf everything seems to have looked simple. One reason for this is that people didn't yet realize how complex things were, or how exquisitely designed things were. This was before the discovery of DNA of course, before the discovery of the genetic code. Imagination raced far ahead of what was truly known; as I suppose it always does.)

16. "I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was curious to see it. It didn't look like a
flame or torch, you understand, but more like a civilized light, and I thought that I might get some clue as to the creatures' development."

- Again, our hero is pretty sure he knows design when he sees it. (Even on another planet.) Not only does he think he can tell artificial light from 'natural' light; but he thinks he can determine a creature's degree of intelligence from its artifacts.

17. "The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old arc light, but came from a single black rod set in the wall of the corridor. It was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were fairly civilized, apparently."

- Intelligence is seen in terms of what a 'species' can produce in terms of technology. The idea seems to be that the more sophisticated the device, the greater the intelligence behind it.

18. "We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of the corridors, but they didn't seem to be doing anything - just wheels turning."

- He assumes he can tell what a machine is by its appearance. How? I suppose by its similarity to machines he knows of.

Summary; in the early days of sf, the rancorous debate over origins hadn't begun, and so we get to see a less self conscious expression of evolutionary materialism. (I didn't give you the end of the story because I want you to read it if you haven't. It's not a deep story, but it's great fun.) I think I've shown that it was once considered obvious that a person could tell whether or not something was designed.
- M. Johnson [frfarer -at- gmail.com]

Notes;
1. Martian Odyssey can be found online at Free sf reader list [freesflist.blogspot.com]