I beg forgiveness but I am taking advantage of an aggressive mood after reading a few pages of the “evolution” track, to state my criticisms with some punch—as I think there is some worth to letting punch go.
First, I find the views expressed around here somewhat ethnocentric : the battle between evolutionism and creationism is an alien story to me, and evolutionist rallying cries I tend to perceive as a disagreeable form of representation of creationism—comparable, say, to how the typical aggressive tone of US rappers doesn’t translate to my distant ears as rebel or anti-establishment but as directly representative of generic US arrogance as expressed in finance or military matters for instance. Speaking of US military matters, an issue I have with the dominance of fitness coefficients over explanations of evolution, is that fitness coefficients refer to exactly the same abstraction that failed to be spotted while it meant observing as severely pathological the differential of mortality as a function of side in war at the moment victors made Broadway.
I mean, twenty some years ago, at the end of operation Desert Storm.
I beg forgiveness again, punch :)
What this means on the face of it is that US and allies harbor an extended school of scientific thought inspired by economics that finds good enough the huge simplification of believing in fitness coefficients when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the marvelously creative process of evolution, but not good enough when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the disgustingly destructive process of war. (Doublestandard!)
One obvious abstract feature of the most regular type of war is that it distributes casualties over sides, in the minimal case, two sides. This is formally the same thing as a locus with two alleles. The relative fitness coefficients express the skew in casualties depending on side or allele.
For the sake of completeness and courtesy, I’ll complement the above with an independent criticism tabooing the notion of criticizing military behavior.
The way population genetics results get threaded into your (I guess standard) exposition of evolution quite mixes levels when it starts with assuming differential fitness coefficients as if they were objective and stable quantities generally measurable in the wild. They aren’t. I do not deny that in extreme cases natural evolution processes are streamlined to the point that population genetics models become a fit and explain observed quirks of evolution, but in the general case if you tell me evolution needs be viewed as blind, slow and stupid becauseofwhatpopulationgeneticstellsusaboutit, my reaction is that this appears to be an artifact of investigating the prowesses of evolution only downstream and not upstream of those fitness coefficients that supernaturally enter your models just like Adam and Eve supernaturally learn morals from the forbidden fruit.
You obviously don’t know much about about the US and its politics, since roughly 50% of the American population agrees with you about the terribleness and destructiveness of war, and seek to eliminate it as quickly as possible. Part of the reason Obama’s ratings are so poor in the US at the moment is because he has not pulled the troops out of Iraq/Afghanistan quickly enough.
It would be worth spending some time in different parts of the US for a while, or even just reading news from multiple news agencies to get a better picture of the opinions of the American people. Pretty much all of the wars the US has ever been involved in have had this duplicitous nature. It’s not so much a double standard as it is multiple personalities.
Also, even after reading your post I have no idea what the US’s position on war has to do with this discussion on evolution. I don’t see why a discussion on evolution should necessarily contain within it any discussion on US military policy. Is there some reason we can’t discuss evolution without discussion modern military activities? If so, I don’t see it, and you didn’t really point it out to me.
Lastly, I don’t see how we can have a discussion that doesn’t involve population genetics, considering it is a critical component of modern evolutionary theory. It’s like saying we shouldn’t talk about space-time when discussing General Relativity. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I’m curious how a process that takes billions of iterations over millions of years to produce anything interesting can reasonably be considered anything but blind and slow. Trying new things at random is kinda the definition of blind in these situations (regardless of how efficient the selection mechansim may be), and taking three and a half billion years to great humans seems pretty slow, subjectively. What alternative process is it quicker and more insightful than? Certainly not a designer that did the job in 6 days (aka Intelligent Design/Creationism).
As for the ethnocentricity, ID is largely a problem in the US, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Other countries have done a pretty good job of figuring out how well evolution works, and that it is therefore probably correct. We still have 50% of the population here holding us back in that regard (evolution is winning anyway, though—it’s pretty hard to deny it).
I beg forgiveness but I am taking advantage of an aggressive mood after reading a few pages of the “evolution” track, to state my criticisms with some punch—as I think there is some worth to letting punch go.
First, I find the views expressed around here somewhat ethnocentric : the battle between evolutionism and creationism is an alien story to me, and evolutionist rallying cries I tend to perceive as a disagreeable form of representation of creationism—comparable, say, to how the typical aggressive tone of US rappers doesn’t translate to my distant ears as rebel or anti-establishment but as directly representative of generic US arrogance as expressed in finance or military matters for instance. Speaking of US military matters, an issue I have with the dominance of fitness coefficients over explanations of evolution, is that fitness coefficients refer to exactly the same abstraction that failed to be spotted while it meant observing as severely pathological the differential of mortality as a function of side in war at the moment victors made Broadway.
I mean, twenty some years ago, at the end of operation Desert Storm.
I beg forgiveness again, punch :)
What this means on the face of it is that US and allies harbor an extended school of scientific thought inspired by economics that finds good enough the huge simplification of believing in fitness coefficients when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the marvelously creative process of evolution, but not good enough when the purpose is to criticize (with an eye on usefully controlling) the disgustingly destructive process of war. (Double standard !)
One obvious abstract feature of the most regular type of war is that it distributes casualties over sides, in the minimal case, two sides. This is formally the same thing as a locus with two alleles. The relative fitness coefficients express the skew in casualties depending on side or allele.
For the sake of completeness and courtesy, I’ll complement the above with an independent criticism tabooing the notion of criticizing military behavior.
The way population genetics results get threaded into your (I guess standard) exposition of evolution quite mixes levels when it starts with assuming differential fitness coefficients as if they were objective and stable quantities generally measurable in the wild. They aren’t. I do not deny that in extreme cases natural evolution processes are streamlined to the point that population genetics models become a fit and explain observed quirks of evolution, but in the general case if you tell me evolution needs be viewed as blind, slow and stupid because of what population genetics tells us about it, my reaction is that this appears to be an artifact of investigating the prowesses of evolution only downstream and not upstream of those fitness coefficients that supernaturally enter your models just like Adam and Eve supernaturally learn morals from the forbidden fruit.
You obviously don’t know much about about the US and its politics, since roughly 50% of the American population agrees with you about the terribleness and destructiveness of war, and seek to eliminate it as quickly as possible. Part of the reason Obama’s ratings are so poor in the US at the moment is because he has not pulled the troops out of Iraq/Afghanistan quickly enough.
It would be worth spending some time in different parts of the US for a while, or even just reading news from multiple news agencies to get a better picture of the opinions of the American people. Pretty much all of the wars the US has ever been involved in have had this duplicitous nature. It’s not so much a double standard as it is multiple personalities.
Also, even after reading your post I have no idea what the US’s position on war has to do with this discussion on evolution. I don’t see why a discussion on evolution should necessarily contain within it any discussion on US military policy. Is there some reason we can’t discuss evolution without discussion modern military activities? If so, I don’t see it, and you didn’t really point it out to me.
Lastly, I don’t see how we can have a discussion that doesn’t involve population genetics, considering it is a critical component of modern evolutionary theory. It’s like saying we shouldn’t talk about space-time when discussing General Relativity. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I’m curious how a process that takes billions of iterations over millions of years to produce anything interesting can reasonably be considered anything but blind and slow. Trying new things at random is kinda the definition of blind in these situations (regardless of how efficient the selection mechansim may be), and taking three and a half billion years to great humans seems pretty slow, subjectively. What alternative process is it quicker and more insightful than? Certainly not a designer that did the job in 6 days (aka Intelligent Design/Creationism).
As for the ethnocentricity, ID is largely a problem in the US, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Other countries have done a pretty good job of figuring out how well evolution works, and that it is therefore probably correct. We still have 50% of the population here holding us back in that regard (evolution is winning anyway, though—it’s pretty hard to deny it).