I'll second and third other respondents in offering thanks for this wonderfully detailed and truly monumental explanation of something we probably thought we understood from our secondary education...as if! So, given your pledge of a follow-up, are you thinking of including something speculative on Cuvier's catastrophism, which seems to be staring us in the face via human-made warming/climate change? I just saw yesterday that temperatures at Argentina’s Esperanza base, situated in Hope Bay at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, reached a record 59.7 degrees Fahrenheit (15.4 degrees Celsius) on June 6, in what's the dead of winter there...!!
I may well get on to AGW after I'm done with evolution---there's still so much to do, though! It's just so damn depressing, especially with eejits running the show. (And 'eejit' is far too kind).
By now, anyone who won't acknowledge climate change is simply a willful denier and likely in collusion with the special interests who choose to continue business as usual...so, yes, eejit is far too kind. By no means, though, should you submit yourself to as depressing a topic as this, when your current series of posts is so uplifting for so many of us...thank you, again!
This whole issue of "anti-Darwinism" and "lies to children" brings into focus something so implicit in our day-to-day thinking that we are hardly aware of it.
Words, in our culture, become endowed with meaning, and people approaching a subject hardly ever come to that word in exactly the same way.
"Darwinian" has come to mean something much flatter than whatever Darwin actually thought.
It is the same in other spheres.
What is Energy? To William Blake "Energy is eternal delight". To later physicists, it is force, moving through a distance, the ability to do work.
This is why LLMs don't really think. They only make predictions based on word frequencies, and the words don't mean the same things in different contexts or from different perspectives.
I think you are too quick to dismiss religion, where a lot of our notions start. The problem of religion is that it is not validated in the same ways as science.
We should not use religion for the wrong things, nor LLMs. A lot of our collective lies in collective culture, which includes knowledge that resides in languages, and in our collective experience, including religion. The problem with these is that uncritical reliance on them leads to avoidable error.
Not understanding where you get the time, energy, and material for your output. Maybe you are young. I can barely manage a few Q answers and the comments plus frequent updates to the huge Classmates Profile. That and this complicated, busy life.
Regarding the subject; I may not be 'struck' but notice that much his Opus is written in First Person both singular and plural. And in a conversational style, UNLIKE research instruments today. Truly approachable. But I guess it had to be 'personal' because it was 'unknown territory'.
I actually consider picking up a copy. Reminded of J. Durante's iconic song about 'The Day I Read A Book'. Really CUTE/Clever.
Hurrah for saying 'continental drift'. When I was a lad, and a college student, and a proud draftee, and a young sour vet; no-one associated with the study of rocks would even whisper the term.
Should really have been called, "The least survival of the least fit." I think Wallace would have liked that better.
With our medical interventions, it would seem that human evolution has mostly stopped. Anyone born without fatal defects can pretty much live to reproduction age, whereas not too long ago, at least 20% of children died before age five.
Thank you. Life is amazing (and Darwin was amazing). Part of what's going on "under the covers" is that certain living beings get their energy from eating other living beings. It's a negative aspect of life, but there it is. And I'm slightly autistic, and so my logical thinking is stronger than my emotional thinking (compared to others). I think that's a new and good thing. Part of evolution.
Survival of the fittest? Surely it’s just the blinking obvious? If you have children, then there is a chance that you will have grandchildren. If you don’t, then there’s a 190% chance that you won’t.
My dear late friend always suggested that Spencer should have said "survival of the most fitted" because it's less likely to be misunderstood.
I'll second and third other respondents in offering thanks for this wonderfully detailed and truly monumental explanation of something we probably thought we understood from our secondary education...as if! So, given your pledge of a follow-up, are you thinking of including something speculative on Cuvier's catastrophism, which seems to be staring us in the face via human-made warming/climate change? I just saw yesterday that temperatures at Argentina’s Esperanza base, situated in Hope Bay at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, reached a record 59.7 degrees Fahrenheit (15.4 degrees Celsius) on June 6, in what's the dead of winter there...!!
I may well get on to AGW after I'm done with evolution---there's still so much to do, though! It's just so damn depressing, especially with eejits running the show. (And 'eejit' is far too kind).
That temperature is worrying. Perhaps Climate Experts have grossly underestimated what's to come? https://bsky.app/profile/climatecasino.net/post/3mo6pgk5tt22c
By now, anyone who won't acknowledge climate change is simply a willful denier and likely in collusion with the special interests who choose to continue business as usual...so, yes, eejit is far too kind. By no means, though, should you submit yourself to as depressing a topic as this, when your current series of posts is so uplifting for so many of us...thank you, again!
This whole issue of "anti-Darwinism" and "lies to children" brings into focus something so implicit in our day-to-day thinking that we are hardly aware of it.
Words, in our culture, become endowed with meaning, and people approaching a subject hardly ever come to that word in exactly the same way.
"Darwinian" has come to mean something much flatter than whatever Darwin actually thought.
It is the same in other spheres.
What is Energy? To William Blake "Energy is eternal delight". To later physicists, it is force, moving through a distance, the ability to do work.
This is why LLMs don't really think. They only make predictions based on word frequencies, and the words don't mean the same things in different contexts or from different perspectives.
I think you are too quick to dismiss religion, where a lot of our notions start. The problem of religion is that it is not validated in the same ways as science.
We should not use religion for the wrong things, nor LLMs. A lot of our collective lies in collective culture, which includes knowledge that resides in languages, and in our collective experience, including religion. The problem with these is that uncritical reliance on them leads to avoidable error.
Don't believe everything that you think.
A terrific summary.
Not understanding where you get the time, energy, and material for your output. Maybe you are young. I can barely manage a few Q answers and the comments plus frequent updates to the huge Classmates Profile. That and this complicated, busy life.
Regarding the subject; I may not be 'struck' but notice that much his Opus is written in First Person both singular and plural. And in a conversational style, UNLIKE research instruments today. Truly approachable. But I guess it had to be 'personal' because it was 'unknown territory'.
I actually consider picking up a copy. Reminded of J. Durante's iconic song about 'The Day I Read A Book'. Really CUTE/Clever.
Hurrah for saying 'continental drift'. When I was a lad, and a college student, and a proud draftee, and a young sour vet; no-one associated with the study of rocks would even whisper the term.
"Yep, ‘survival of the fittest’."
Should really have been called, "The least survival of the least fit." I think Wallace would have liked that better.
With our medical interventions, it would seem that human evolution has mostly stopped. Anyone born without fatal defects can pretty much live to reproduction age, whereas not too long ago, at least 20% of children died before age five.
Thank you. Life is amazing (and Darwin was amazing). Part of what's going on "under the covers" is that certain living beings get their energy from eating other living beings. It's a negative aspect of life, but there it is. And I'm slightly autistic, and so my logical thinking is stronger than my emotional thinking (compared to others). I think that's a new and good thing. Part of evolution.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/autism-and-vaccines
Survival of the fittest? Surely it’s just the blinking obvious? If you have children, then there is a chance that you will have grandchildren. If you don’t, then there’s a 190% chance that you won’t.