Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sun Apr 22 14:20:33 CDT 2012
I don't think that your description of evolution is correct. It is a process by which a species adapts, but those adaptations are by and large random changes. Some of them survive and procreate, others do not. "Survival of the fittest" has been co-opted by various political segments, mostly on the right wing, from Ayn Rand onwards, and misconstrued to mean fittest as in the sense of physical or even mental fitness, but that's not what it means, strictly speaking. It means survival in the face of sometimes cataclysmic changes such as an Ice Age, global warming, or the disappearance of species such as the shark and tuna, now decimated by over-fishing (90% of the world's tuna have been killed in the last 30 years, with who knows what consequences). If Stephen Jay Gould's model of Punctuated Equilibrium proves accurate, evolution is gradual but also punctuated by sudden and dramatic shifts, as evinced by the astonishing finds at the Burgess Shale. At the time those fossils were formed, there were 20 phyla on earth. Now there are only 5. A period of wild experimentation led mostly to literally dead ends, and a few survived, not because they wanted to or adapted in some intelligent fashion, but because their adaptations proved to be useful in the changing environment. As for the evolution of scientific thought, I agree with you. Occasionally the paradigm does shift dramatically, but most of the time it's a process of gradual refinement and refutation. A. On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Hans-Christian Andersen < hans.andersen at phulse.com> wrote: > > I guess you could say that, but I'd characterise it more like that > Einsteins theories were more of a refinement of Netwons, while M theory (or > more popularly known as string theory) is more like an attempt to describe > everything that we currently know and fusing/combining many different > branches of modern physics that have, up to this point, seemed impossible > (having a unified theory that describes the very small (ie. quantum physics > and subatomic forces) together with great but weak forces (such as gravity > and space time)). > > It's a lot more ambitious, at any rate. We know that Einstein is correct > and we know that the standard model keeps on delivering time and time > again, so the idea is to try to describe everything knowing what we > currently know. > > Hans > > >