What a minute. I am lost. Who is devaluing evolution? And when they are devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to come about?
If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this. Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of ? u?l? Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM To: FriAM <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed) EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift, if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1) foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α]. Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an assumed to be solid foundation. Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case. Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress." Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all, not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your own juices. >8^D How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance? [α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully falsifying) pilot wave theory. [β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other day: A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267 [δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols! On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote: > When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like > the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been > settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still > unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference. That is the > subset selected by survival. But I never hear them saying they wish their > work were more like string theory. I imagine that, if they knew what the > endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the > string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin > (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to > address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much > the same as all that, and they wish it were less so. On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote: > Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more > what you mean by it? > > * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-) > > > On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid > foundations* -- ☣ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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