I had no idea

[james_davis_nicoll]

As pointed out in email, JEP on evolution.

Comments

[wild_irises]

Neither did I.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[(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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

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

[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.

[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.)

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

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

[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!