This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy.... But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.
Trouble |
I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. A good case can be made that Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe wherever life may be found.
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic probability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
Legends | Mother | Reason | Scepticism |
People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, Evolution is only a theory. That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun -- it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence.
Evolution | Important | World | Understand |
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know.
Chance |
What needs to be said now, loud and clear, is the truth: that the theory of punctuated equilibrium lies firmly within the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It always did. It will take time to undo the damage wrought by overblown rhetoric, but it will be undone. The theory of punctuated equilibrium will come to be seen in proportion, as an interesting but minor wrinkle on the surface of neo-Darwinian theory.
We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mold, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death but it is certainly very small indeed. Nevertheless, however small the proportion fossilized, there are certain things about the fossil record that any evolutionist should expect to be true. We should be very surprised, for example, to find fossil humans appearing in the record before mammals are supposed to have evolved! If a single, well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million year-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is a sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Now we are in a position in physics that is different from any other time in history (it's always different!). We have a theory ... so why can't we test the theory right away to see if it's right or wrong? Because what we have to do is calculate the consequences of the theory to test it. This time, the difficulty is this first step.
Consequences | Difficulty | History | Position | Right | Time |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
It's a great game to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course.
The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a minor gloss on Darwinism, one which Darwin himself might well have approved if the issue had been discussed in his day. As a minor gloss, it does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity... the theory has been sold - oversold by some journalists - as if it were radically opposed to the views of Darwin and his successors.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Incidentally, psycho-analysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease - lots of different spirits etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit which comes into the air ; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease; on the other hand his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been checked carefully by experiment...
Disease | Knowledge | Man | Psychoanalysis | Spirit |
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is
The following four fundamental principles must be established at the core of economic theory if economics is to have any relevance in the future:
Economics | Principles | Following |
Richard Tarnas, fully Richard Theodore Tarnas
Enter now the theory of quantum mechanics to upend our ideas about the physical nature of the world. Physicists were discovering in their laboratories that the basic properties of atomic particles were being altered just by the simple act of measuring them. Soon after it was discovered that, in certain experimental arrangements, particles at the atomic level do not fully exist prior to being observed. The activity of conscious observation and measurement was actually bringing particles into full existence! This suggests that reality may not be pre-given and "objective," but rather that it is being...
Ideas | Nature | Observation | Reality |