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Date: 2013-11-25 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:14 am (UTC)"in science fiction biology is the redheaded stepchild that comes to school covered in bruises"
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:30 am (UTC)I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the fact-denying end of Christianity.
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:38 am (UTC)http://austringer.net/wp/index.php/2008/07/05/a-pournelle-misunderstanding/
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Date: 2013-11-25 08:45 am (UTC)http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/04/30/empathy-and-epistemic-closure/
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Date: 2013-11-25 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2013-11-25 03:57 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-25 04:50 am (UTC)Clarification: Not all physicists hate everything squishy. Just the annoying ones.
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Date: 2013-11-25 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:45 am (UTC)(I am thinking of that passage where Space Belisarius slaughters the Space Nika rioters at the Space soccer stadium,)
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Date: 2013-11-25 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 07:40 am (UTC)Doug M.
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:35 pm (UTC)It seems unlikely that he's going to change his method in the final years of his life. Rather, one should expect him to get even odder and more gullible as the inevitable processes of aging (and the damage caused by earlier decades of drinking) take their toll on his capacity for critical thinking, which was never terribly strong. It's why conmen prey on the elderly; it's the FOX News business model.
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Date: 2013-11-25 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:47 pm (UTC)(Of course this doesn't mean OoL required supernatural intervention, only that science hasn't demonstrated a good solution to the problem.)
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Date: 2013-11-25 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-28 02:34 am (UTC)He says "Darwinian selection postulates that each step must be an ‘improvement’ over the last, not just a step toward an eye from a light sensitive cell, but a definite improvement over its predecessor causing the improved model to have more survivable offspring."
Then someone tries to explain that 'shaking a bag of watch parts to assemble a watch' is not the same as gradually building on past 'successes'. He replies "but sieving the ‘successes’ implies that you know where you are going. That is what we haven’t settled."
Well, no to either of those. Most changes are neutral, like duplicating globin genes, freeing the genome up to experiment on one copy while keeping the essential one optimal. You just can't postulate a requirement that every change is a "definite" improvement.
And "success" is having offspring. It has nothing to do with 'knowing where you are going'. It might even have nothing to do with your genome, e.g. when the local volcano goes off or the sea level changes.
And someone writes: "Now the idea that a mid-Victorian country squire hit on the Truth About Everything is remarkable, and biologists could learn a bit from the physicists, who have quite happily abandoned what they thought they knew ca. 1860. There could easily be multiple processes at work in evolution, just as there are in local motion (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — and we have turned "gravity" inside out since the Widow of Windsor’s day). So the "striving to the utmost" to reproduce coupled with the "struggle for existence" that forms the Darwinian engine may not account for everything in sight — except in the tautological sense that "survivors survive."
Hey, thanks. As a geneticist I really thought Darwin nailed it in 1859 and nobody ever had to do any more work on this "evolution" sorry I mean "Darwinist" thing. I better go check to see if anyone has ever done any experiments or anything because it sure sounds like we should get with the program!