So in practice, this means you will sneer at anyone disagreeing with an idea you consider “obvious”, ie clever.
Consider this quote:
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
That there is some idea that you think is fundamental, and as a result it is overwhelmingly likely that anyone who goes up against will end in defeat, does not mean you extend that privilege to all ideas or that you lock in your current sense of obviousness.
I wouldn’t put evolution at second law status, but it seems like it should be more shameful to propose ideas that fail on basic evolutionary principles.
And if you can prove mathematically that some idea goes against evolutionary principles—rather than making an informal argument of exactly the type that Swift seems to believe rules out homosexual behavior in other animals—this would be relevant.
Consider this quote:
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
That there is some idea that you think is fundamental, and as a result it is overwhelmingly likely that anyone who goes up against will end in defeat, does not mean you extend that privilege to all ideas or that you lock in your current sense of obviousness.
I wouldn’t put evolution at second law status, but it seems like it should be more shameful to propose ideas that fail on basic evolutionary principles.
And if you can prove mathematically that some idea goes against evolutionary principles—rather than making an informal argument of exactly the type that Swift seems to believe rules out homosexual behavior in other animals—this would be relevant.