Although the question of extraterrestrial life is very old, the concept of a full-blown cosmic evolution—the connected evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and life on Earth and beyond—is much younger. As historian Michael Crowe has shown…But such a set of general ideas is a long way from a research program. In the first half century of the post-Darwinian world, cosmic evolution did not find fertile ground among astronomers who were hard-pressed to find evidence for it. Spec…5. Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 224–225, 274–277, 464–465. Simon Schaffer has shown the place of the nebular hypothesis in a general “science of progress” i…
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