I had no idea

[james_davis_nicoll]

As pointed out in email, JEP on evolution.

Comments

[wild_irises]

Neither did I.

[mishalak]

I did not know, but I am also not surprised.

[wild_irises]

Actually (I almost put this in my first response), having watched JEP hijack Poul Anderson's funeral (where he was officiating) and against the family's express request make it religious, I am not surprised either.

I also hate the pseudo-intellectual sounding anti-evolution arguments.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

*headdesk*

"in science fiction biology is the redheaded stepchild that comes to school covered in bruises"

[alienne.livejournal.com]

Of course he doesn't believe in evolution. He, himself, is a dinosaur who's still alive...

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

Please don't associate him with our avian friends.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I am always extremely gratified to find out that people whose views I consider to be vile are also provably idiots or fools. It had never occurred to me that Pournelle was either a fundy or the sort of contrarian fool who rejects the evidence of solid natural and physical science rather than merely someone who merely rejects both compassion and the evidence of social science.

I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the fact-denying end of Christianity.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I missed the religion bit, I thought he was just suffering terminal contrarianism. Someone in 1995 said he was a believing Catholic, but I don't find much else on his current faith if any. I do find that defending intelligent design isn't new for him:
http://austringer.net/wp/index.php/2008/07/05/a-pournelle-misunderstanding/

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Only mildly apropros of this thread, the first time I ever met JEP (at an awards ceremony), he took the opportunity to gratuitously insult me from the podium for laughs, then privately insult me in the restroom after. This did little to endear him to me.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Damn. That's wrong. (But you knew that.)

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Denying evolution would be going against Roman Catholic Church teaching.

[owlmirror36.livejournal.com]

I am nearly certain that this is wrong.

As I understand it, the RCC teaches that it is permissible to accept the findings of modern science, so a Catholic in good standing can accept Big Bang cosmology and deep time, and the fact that species have evolved over time. But it is not a teaching of doctrine that Catholics must accept all findings of science, so it is possible to be a Catholic in good standing and also be a YEC, and/or a geocentrist, and/or even a Flat-Earther.

I await with interest the possibility that the future might bring us JEP questioning the dogma of that whole heliocentrism fad.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Choosing to forsake empathy makes you an idiot. It's evil that makes you stupid, in other words.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/04/30/empathy-and-epistemic-closure/

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, thank you for that link!

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

If leftists were in favor of "intelligent design" Pournelle would be mocking them for evolution. It's not an intrinsic facet of his right wing politics, its that he's picking up a cause leftists are opposed to and championing the other side.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I had an uncle who would do the same with anyone he knew after he had a few beers. It didn't matter what the topic was, he would take the other side. I think he even argued against views he privately held just for the entertainment.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My father always argued with whoever was seated to his left. Hilariously, he was unaware of this pattern until it was pointed out.

[avram]

How was the hearing in his right ear?

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Jerry just hates liberals.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

It's not an intrinsic facet of his right wing politics, its that he's picking up a cause leftists are opposed to and championing the other side.

But isn't "opposing everything the left supports" the second most important goal of the right, after "tax cuts for the rich"? Heck, some of them flat out say it's their #1 duty.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty much.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Once an American politician publicly claims obstructing Obama as his first priority (over serving the nation or, say, getting re-elected), that should probably be the end of his career. On the other hand, it's seemed to be a winning strategy; we'll have to see what happens after 2016.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the fact-denying end of Christianity.

I cannot parse this sentence. Care to explain what you are trying to say?

[(Anonymous)]

If I'm interpreting it correctly it may be clearer if you replace "end" by something like "section", i.e.

"I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the section of Christianity that denies facts."


-- Paul Clarke

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

There is a group of authoritarians who are radical. Call this Group A. Pournelle is in group A.

There is a group of Christians who deny facts. Call this Group B. If Christians are placed on a spectrum, those in Group B fall at one end of the spectrum.

I'm now curious to know how many members of Group A are also in Group B.

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

There's probably a heavy overlap between the two groups among the sedevacantists, but there aren't very many of them around.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Made me look. I didn't know the word or the people it refers to. I am amazed but not surprised.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Another in the list of people I thought were stupid when I was a kid in the 80s and have only gotten more obviously stupid since then.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, good old "try using the on-off switch, Jerry". (Those Byte columns ... )

[(Anonymous)]

Well this makes me take his opinion on global warming a lot more seriously. Not.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Any person whose answer to a complex theory is, "I'm not able to wrap my mind around it, therefore it is flawed and/or unlikely," isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Perhaps he's afraid he'll come to be considered a RWWINO (Right Wing Wingnut in Name Only) if he doesn't completely fill in his bingo card.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I always assumed Pournelle was a physicist or something, ie hates biology because it's squishy and unpredictable. But he's that most hated of things, a social scientist! Two degrees in psychology and the doctorate in, of all things, Political Science! How come he got into the hard science fiction club?

Clarification: Not all physicists hate everything squishy. Just the annoying ones.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, population genetics is one of the most mathematical parts of biology. It's not often biologists get to use complex analysis to prove important theorems.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I, too, had no idea. When I exclaimed that, Gale said "Seriously? What's wrong with you?"

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

He seriously doesn't understand Deep Time; probably because of his deep aversion to unbounded morally-challenging complexity in all things.

(I am thinking of that passage where Space Belisarius slaughters the Space Nika rioters at the Space soccer stadium,)

[resonant.livejournal.com]

As Sawyer pointed out in "Illegal Alien", the eye is one of the organs with the most obvious path to development, with benefits to the organism from photosensitive-patch-of-skin all the way through to its current form. And there are multiple different forms present in nature, showing multiple different developments of organs performing the same function.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

It's also, at least in humans, one of the best arguments against design since it contains a number of design flaws that would get any engineering student flunked. I mean, who would ever design a camera with wiring hanging between the lens and the film?

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

"God must be an urban designer; who else would put the playground between two sewers?"

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3169#comic

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I've always maintained that while the idea of intelligent design is clearly absurd, I might be able to get behind a theory of stupid design (see, for example, my scoliosis: that's just stupid--why would you make a spine do that?).

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

Of course there are holes in Darwin! Darwin was just starting a brand-new science, and he couldn't come up with everything! We've come a long way since then.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

The tell tale sign of the intelligent design loon: being obsessed by Darwin, rather than actually existing contemporary evolutionary biology (aka "biology").

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Well that's just natural. They assume ToE was intelligently designed from the start, discounting the possibility of it evolving along the way. Thus, they must attack the original version and the authority of the designer!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Scientific crackpots usually try to attack founding figures and historical experiments, as if that would cause the edifice of a science to crumble, rather than critiquing contemporary science in any coherent way. The anti-relativity people are always going on about mistakes in Einstein's arguments and flaws in the Michelson-Morley experiment, as if that would accomplish anything at this point.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Maybe it's because they have trouble distinguishing science from religion? After all, when critiquing Christianity, people usually go to the bible first...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Maybe partly that, but also an identification of the science with what they read in introductory texts or popular expositions, which often take a quasi-historical approach.

Also, a limited understanding that science is fundamentally a social process, rather than a giant deduction that some isolated person makes from first principles.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, anyone who uses the term "Darwinism" doesn't understand it.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

Kind of like using "Mohammedan" instead of "Muslim".

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I had to give up at that point... gosh, Darwin's theory might have some holes in it? NO! I'd better take another look at Lord Kelvin's thoughts on the age of the Earth too in that case. Surely nothing has changed since the 1850s?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Huh. Here I thought he was at least a science fiction writer. Guess I was wrong. Or maybe right now the Brain Eater is queasily reaching for the Pepto Bismal?

[(Anonymous)]

While I hold no brief for JEP, "Brain Eater" may not be the funniest term to use WRT a guy who's a brain cancer survivor.


Doug M.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

TV Tropes uses "filibuster freefall."

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the opposite would be. Does the opposite happen? Someone who was extreme mellowing out as they get older?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

George Wallace?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Sure it does. I can't think of particularly famous examples right now, though, especially among SF authors. FWIW, Vinge's talk last year had him saying he has new respect for large human populations and human abilities, compared to younger machine racism. He was enthusiastic about crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia or Duolingo, and leaning more to the groupmind Singularity path of Marooned in Realtime rather than the AI hard takeoff Singularity of uh the Blight? he never actually wrote that much in his fiction.

But then he was never that strident or vocal in the first place. Some hard anarchy stories and commentary like being open minded about private ownership of nukes, but not exactly a Pournelle.

I caught the tail end of a Pournelle talk. They, uh, talk very differently. P is loud and confident and didn't sound burdened with doubts; I think he was talking about the space program or Star Wars (SDI) and stuff. V stammers and threw up lots of neat ideas and I got an impression one could argue with him without wanting to shoot one of you.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Perhaps with some people there should be more emphasis on the "fiction" than the "science".

[pling.livejournal.com]

I am amused by the paragraph that implies he came up with the watchmaker analogy himself 30 years ago ... as far as I'm aware it pre-dates him let alone his 30 year old essay by the odd century or so.

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

Two centuries; Paley in 1802, in that formulation. Of course, in the more generalized form of the argument from design, its been around since before Thomas Aquinas.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Yup.

Also, one of the things refuted with great thoroughness by Darwin in Origin and the refutation is one of the parts of Origin that's held up.

You're not talking about assembling a watch out of random parts; you're talking about an existing, ongoing, assemblage of parts gradually accumulating the characteristics of a watch. (Which has been simulated, and which happens in surprisingly few generations, if we postulate reproducing springs...)

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

The argument from design, when used seriously these days, tends to be closely related to the Anthropic Principle and focusses on things like the fine-tuning of basic physical constants.

In biology, there's been so much work done both conceptually on local advantages accruing to minor improvements and in finding concrete evidence of intermediate forms that examples like the eye (having emerged several times in different contexts) are now better arguments for the operation of natural selection than for the presence of design.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Nick Bostrom's book on anthropic bias is available for free online:

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=book/table_of_contents

I very much like Bostrom's research agenda. It involves many issues science fiction authors try to address (usually much more hamfistedly.)

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Rarely has a single human being so efficiently encapsulated the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

+1000

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Pournelle describes how his broken bullshit detector works in the first sentence of that section:

I don’t agree with Fred on everything, but he raises a number of really interesting questions, he’s right a lot of the time, and he doesn’t swallow fads.

It's the hallmark of someone who evaluates ideas by rhetorical style and political intent, a style of thinking Pournelle has used for the last sixty years.

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.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

The brain tumour surely won't have helped will it?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

No, but he's been down this road well before the tumor.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

If a person wanted to attack biological science, evolution isn't where I suggest they start. Instead, origin of life (that is, getting from simple molecules to something sufficiently functional to undergo evolution by natural selection) is a much easier target. There's not yet a satisfactory theory of how this complexity barrier could be surmounted. The simplest known living cells (obtained by stripping down existing cells as much as possible so they still can live) contain about 4 billion atoms and hundreds of genes.

(Of course this doesn't mean OoL required supernatural intervention, only that science hasn't demonstrated a good solution to the problem.)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I still think, to borrow a phrase from upthread, deep time and LOTS of chemical sorting could account for that.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but the odds of getting something like life as we now know it, just be random combinations of molecules, are extremely low, so low that we wouldn't have expected it to happen anywhere in the observable universe. The exponential decline in probabilities as molecules get larger kills this approach pretty quickly.

Biologists should look for very low complexity "life", in my opinion. Billions of atoms is too much.

BTW, I saw an interesting graph plotting complexity of life vs. time. Complexity has been gradually increasing, but if you plot backwards, the intercept with the horizontal axis is about 10 billion years ago. This suggests that life actually predates Earth, and Earth was seeded with a simpler kind of life that then continued to evolve. This might be another explanation for the "Great Filter" of the Fermi problem: such transfers of life to newly formed planets may be necessary for evolution to continue, but are also very uncommon.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Biologists should look for very low complexity "life", in my opinion. Billions of atoms is too much.

OTOH, I would expect very low-complexity "life" to have been eaten by the more complex stuff as it comes into existence. Essentially, the conditions that were favorable to the development of protolife/less complex self-replicators have long since been changed beyond recognition by the presence of life here.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the odds of getting another working combination are also unimaginably low, and another, and another, and the set of all theoretical combinations of working molecules could -- we don't know -- sum to something very large. The existence of one, precisely specified, kind of life is a single data point, and you can't generalize unless you've got lots of datapoints, which in this case we have not got.

"The odds of my being hit by a car at this particular corner at this particular moment are staggeringly low!" Fine, but the odds of somebody being hit by a car at this corner seem to be about 20%, and the odds of your being hit by a car somewhere, at some point in your life, are quite substantial.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, that was Hoyle's preference. It might be, although I suspect that life, for various values there of, probably is pretty damn common . Intelligent tool using life, much, much less common.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Given that either life evolved essentially as soon as Earth cooled sufficiently to have liquid water, and there's at least arguable evidence that Mars had or has life, either panspermia is correct or life evolves quite rapidly (at least on a Deep Time scale). Of course, rapidly on a Deep Time scale basically means less than 100 million years. I'm also expecting the universe to be teaming with non-intelligent life.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The alternative explanation for the rapid origin of life on Earth is that the conditions for which OoL were possible only last a short time. So, if life is to originate at all, it must happen quickly.

If Mars has life, we can't rule out the possibility (the probability, actually) of contamination from the early Earth (or vice versa). There were lots of impacts in the early solar system, which would have sent lots of rocks into solar orbit to carry simple cells back and forth.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Please forgive me, but I am unreasonably amused by your remarkably apropos typo ("teaming" instead of "teeming"). All the universe's non-intelligent life teamed up against us ... quite a picture.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

We _didn't_ get life as we know it.

Life as we know it, as we notice, as our intuitions expect, is macroscopic eukaryotic multicellular bilaterally symmetric segmented metazoans. That's probably five big steps -- original replicators, original cells, step before eukaryotes where there's enough environmental specialization to get cells that can club together to form eukaryotes, eukaryotes, and then embryology so you can have a substantial organism -- from where life arose.

Even figuring out what the environment was like back then is tough; not much rock, few temperature proxies, etc. The idea of catalytic surfaces and then chemical sheets has been getting a bit of traction, at least at the level I can follow along at.

Also, measures of complexity are very, very tough, and defining complexity is tougher. It's very easy to produce something delusive when you do. (what's the complexity of a diplodocid sauropod? why is this less than that of a minke whale?)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

By "life as we know it" I mean any life. The simplest living cells we've found are staggeringly complex. Eukaryotes are more complex still.

Catalytic surfaces really don't address the meat of the problem, which is how one puts together a system in which the replication of information is accurate enough for natural selection to occur (where the information not to be eroded away by excessive random error.)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

What tandw said. That sort of system will look like food to modern life.

I don't think there's that much of a gap. Working from the top down, catalytic RNA has been known for over thirty years. Working from the bottom up, ribose forms in condensation reactions from formaldehyde; adenine forms in condensation reactions from hydrogen cyanide. The bottleneck step, to my mind, would be the formation of reaction conditions which favor the nucleoside linkage.

The pairing of replication with metabolism and membrane division are separate things, of course, but there are signs of early lock-in.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

That might work if you have pure ribose, and pure bases. I doubt such things can work at all in the more random glop formed by condensation reactions,without enzymes to catalyse precisely the ones you want.

The scam in origin-of-life research is to show you can make chemical X at some low concentration in some mixture with other stuff, and then start the next round of experiments with pure X purchased from a supply house.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Actually, not so much. There's a lot more possibility in chemical replication than what we see today, because modern life has converged on a highly efficient solution. You don't need exactly ribose -- DNA is conclusive evidence of that -- and the sugars that work are thermodynamically preferred in Butlerov-style synthesis. Even more obviously, you don't need exactly adenine. There are five big bases that are used in the current set-up, but there are dozens which have been identified as occurring.

There are also plausible natural circumstances which concentrate organic compounds with different properties, in processes roughly analogous to ore formation, or the separation procedures undergraduates perform in chemistry lab.

It's the specific problems -- nucleoside linkage, the origin of chirality, the coupling to phosphate energetics, etc -- that are the real pain in the ass. The "random glop" argument is a red herring.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd suggest linguistics, myself. We know even less about the origin of languages than we do about the origin of life.
Gareth Wilson

[avram]

Maybe Pournelle can take up Babelism:

Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning! Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language. We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE. I'll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian! It takes A LOT MORE FAITH to believe in atheistic linguisticism than the truth of Babelism.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

So the "Evolution in action" phrase came from Niven then?

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

"Think of The Brain Eater in action?"

[heron61.livejournal.com]

From various links and also what I read by and about him in the 1980s, the Brain Eater came very early for him. Not many people become fossilized brain-eaten reactionaries in their late 40s (or earlier), but he definitely managed that feat.

[(Anonymous)]

"Evolution in action" is microevolution. That's the bit that nearly all creationists accept.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I found that if you get them to name their objections, it's not evolution, ie descent with changes, that they object to but more natural selection can produce life as we know it.

(The particular Christian I'm trying to win over, and she will listen which seems to be unusual, has trouble with speciation and 'gaps in the fossil record.' I'm looking for good sources to convince her, starting from scratch, if anyone has ideas.)

It was also interesting to explain to them that 'life' does not, cannot, begin at conception. And the best they can come up with is a unique human life. Relying on DNA for the unique.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Is this person good with math? Maybe point her to the mathematical theory of population genetics, with its estimates of how rapidly advantageous changes can sweep through a population (much faster than a geological time scale.) From there, it's more a matter of wondering why species stay the same, rather than wondering how it is they can change.

[nebogipfel.livejournal.com]

Now this is a good point - so have we reached the point where even
wingnut pin ups have to embrace creatonsism ?

[lyle-hopwood.livejournal.com]

He's revisited the subject after reading his letterbag.

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!