Greetings, all. I’m not sure if this question is more appropriate for Great Debates, General Questions, or Cafe Society, so if a moderator wishes to move it I won’t object. This post is a modified version of a message I posted to talk.origins a few months ago.
First some background. I’m working on a story and could use a little input persons more up-to-date on biology and geology than I am. In my fantasy tale, two human children find themselves in an alternate world, the “Fabulous Plane,” inhabited by fauns, centaurs, merpeople, and other mythical figures rather than by humans. (The Fabulous Creatures word for their own world translates, naturally, as Earth; they refer to our world as “Counter-Earth.”) The Fabulous Plane is a flat world, which, according to the lore of its inhabitants, was once the same world as the humans’; eons ago, it was separated in a cataclysmic event called the Drowning. In other worlds, the Fabulous Plane is exactly as old as our world.
The Fabulous Creatures have a level of technology comparable to that on our world, though one based on a different set of natural laws (as should be obvious; for example, a planet with earthlike-gravity, in which cyclopes and other giants walk around without any difficulty, obviously either does not follow the principles of scale in our universe or is constituted of a different soft of matter). Much of what the Fabulous Creatures consider science and technology (or rather “natural philosophy” and “craft”) would be thought magic on Earth. The same rules of logic apply in both worlds, however; their natural philosophers follow the same methodology that our scientists do (and that creationists perversely ignore).
Anywhere, here’s the evolution-creationist tie-in. One significant way the Fabulous Plane’s nature is different from Earth’s is that intelligent design is not merely the accepted theory of the origins of life, but is actually the correct one; the theory of evolution is a minority opinion there, and very nearly a crackpot one. I’m considering adding a running joke to the story in which a genuine natural philosopher argues with an evolutionist about why evolution doesn’t make sense in their world; in each of the arguments, the natural philosopher will mention something evolutionary theory predicts which is NOT found in the Fabulous Plane. For example, the natural philosopher may point out that, if all life forms in the Fabulous World share a common ancestor, there should be a nested hierarchy detectable in the relationships based on their anatomical structures. But there isn’t. Instead, the evidence shows that creatures who seem completely unrelated (giant spiders, cyclopes, kraken, and walking trees, for example) are closely related genetically, while other creatures which might seem more likely to be akin (such as unicorns and centaurs, or fauns and werecats) have no real similarity on a cellular level.
Which brings me (finally!) to the bit of help I was hoping for. What other predictions of evolutionary theory do you think I might use in these hypothetical arguments? In other words, what evidences would you expect to see in a world where ID was true?
