The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.
Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.
I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.
Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be. . . We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.
Future is not extrapolation of past
The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance. . . . Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
