Spearthrower wrote:If you cant avoid repeatedly repeating repetitions, then yeah, go for another iteration of your central equivocation - I mean, it's not like it's been explained to you dozens of times or anything.

The first thing to know about your subject of expertise.

What is evolution.... best answer.

According to charles darwin evolution is a process with a mechanism. That process explains biology and speciation.

Paul.

pfrankinstein wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:If you cant avoid repeatedly repeating repetitions, then yeah, go for another iteration of your central equivocation - I mean, it's not like it's been explained to you dozens of times or anything.

The first thing to know about your subject of expertise.

What is my subject of expertise, Paul? You keep telling me it's X, I keep telling you it's not X but Y, but you never seem able to process it.

pfrankinstein wrote:What is evolution.... best answer.

Any time you really want to know the answer to that question, all you need to do is read the dozens of answers already replied directly to your previous instances of asking that same question.

pfrankinstein wrote:According to charles darwin...

Terminally irrelevant as has been explained to you dozens of times over a dozen years.

pfrankinstein wrote:... evolution is a process with a mechanism.

This is actually a lie, Darwin never said this at all.

Rather, what actually happened is that back in RDF your initial suite of assertions regarding the topic of this thread were challenged for a number of reasons, one of them being the complete lack of mechanism that could result in what you claim.

As such, you've learned to parrot the term 'mechanism' without actually having a mechanism, and you try to steal Darwin's ideas and work as being an extension of your own, when the exact opposite is true. Darwin did indeed identify a mechanism by which speciation occurs, whereas you still don't have any such mechanism. One of the reasons Darwin's ideas succeeded and yours have absolutely not is that Darwin provided ample evidentiary support for his claims, whereas you've never offered a single instance that doesn't amount to something like 'Darwin said...'

pfrankinstein wrote:That process explains biology and speciation.

It doesn't explain 'biology' which is the study of life, but that doesn't really matter here when you may as well be confidently asserting that water is wet as if that somehow helps substantiate your claims.

It doesn't. It's a red herring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herri ... al_fallacy

As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the straw man, which involves a distortion of the other party's position,[4] the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic.[5] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a red herring may be intentional or unintentional; it is not necessarily a conscious intent to mislead.

thrower Terminally irrelevant as has been explained to you dozens of times over a dozen years. snip.

The innovator of the subject you hold and strangle so dear.
Charles Darwin described as terminally irrelevant.
You sir really have no clue.
Perhaps you have written yourself into a corner and lost objective impartiality.

Paul.

So how is the one process stuff different from just plain old pantheism?

More deist or daoist than pantheism I think.

pfrankinstein wrote:
And Darwin played music to worms.

Paul.

And I played music to woodchuck pups.
The ones I had on property in 2021 would dart back into their burrows when they see me but if I whistled a tune they would stop running and look at me, or even come back out of the burrow to look at me.

pfrankinstein wrote:The innovator of the subject you hold and strangle so dear.
Charles Darwin described as terminally irrelevant.
You sir really have no clue.
Perhaps you have written yourself into a corner and lost objective impartiality.

Your contrived fiction is fucking dopey Paul.

Anyone can type in "darwin" to the search bar of this thread and note that you have been told the same by a dozen people over a dozen years, and that you are functionally incapable of processing this fact.

At best, your wittering about what Darwin did or didn't say is a matter of History, not of anything relevant to modern Biology.

See, there's been this intervening 150 years of knowledge acquisition which - going by the fact that the only person you ever talk about is Darwin - suggests that what amounts to your 'knowledge' of the subject matter is restricted to being nigh on 2 centuries out of date.

In Biology, Darwin is a historical figure who first formalized the concept of E&NS, but as I've told you each time you start wittering about what Darwin definitely did not say despite your vacuous blagging, people were engaging in selective breeding since before recorded history, meaning that people had some elementary concept that traits could be retained through generations, even if they didn't know exactly how. Even Darwin didn't know how, and I've explained this to you already, so go and learn some stuff Paul instead of continuously regurgitating blags and bullshit.

Really, as well we all know having seen countless examples of it - this just amounts to you once again seeking to toss out distractions in order to evade addressing facts that demolish your prior blag. It's one blag after another.

That's actually all you do, Paul: blag and bullshit, blag and bullshit, blag and bullshit. And that's only when people can work through the interminable incoherence that passes for your 'thoughts'. And you think this exercise in ignorant ego is going to advance science? It's pure, unadulterated idiocy.

Go learn stuff, eh Paul? The amount of time you've wasted stroking yourself off in public could have resulted, by now, in you actually having a fucking scooby about the topic if you'd only applied yourself to learning instead of preening at strangers on the internet.

Another little example of posts from 12 years ago showing that Paul simply cannot learn. Anathema borne of ego.


http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post905786.html

twistor59 wrote:

Darkchilde wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:

Spearthrowers 2nd link wrote:Stellar evolution is not biological evolution, even though they rather unfairly share the same word!

The word 'evolution' has a Darwinian unambiguous meaning in science, that = descent modification selection. To describe stellar change as evolution is wrong, slovenly imo, that is unless one See's Darwin's mechanism and a process.

Paul.

Stellar evolution refers to the birth, life and death of a star. It has a definite meaning in astrophysics. A lot of astrophysics books are titled "stellar evolution".

The word evolution is not a word used exclusively in biology; evolution in general does not refer to the theory of evolution, but to anything that changes over time usually via specific processes.

The Oxford Dictionary has it as the theory of evolution as 1, and "the gradual development of something" as 2.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/evolution

True, physics uses the term "evolution" to mean any shit that changes with time. So for example, Newton's laws define the time evolution of classical systems from an initial state, Schroedinger's equation describes the time evolution of a quantum state from an initial value....

Evolution in the Darwinian sense has the extra ingredient of some mechanism for introducing variability and the ingredient of natural selection.

Both Twistor59 and Darkchilde being educated in fields relevant to the point they're making, both confirming what other people have said, and both contradicting your incessant blagging, Paul.

When people know you're blagging, you don't escape that by blagging more.

pfrankinstein wrote:
Charles Darwin described as terminally irrelevant.

You're confused about the contrast between historical significance and scientific significance.

Others in the nineteenth century noted the thermodynamic relationships of heat and work, but since they had no atomic theory to work with, they didn't come up with statistical mechanics. You know none of their names. Darwin's name is all you've managed to memorize.

Cito, I am disappointed. There was fertile ground there to riff a pun about how Paul doesn't even know Dirac's first name.

Spearthrower wrote:Cito, I am disappointed. There was fertile ground there to riff a pun about how Paul doesn't even know Dirac's first name.

Roast Dirac of Lambda! Mmmmmm! I've got a hunger, twisting my stomach into knots. Dinner comes with a salad state: lattice, anions, and (sorry) carets. Maybe I'll have a Heisenberger, too, but I'm uncertain about which toppings to choose. Maybe just picos. For dessert, some pion the side. Orbital be full after eating all that. Should be enough Fermi.

That's more like it! Crisis averted!

Cito di Pense wrote:

BWE wrote:https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science-4324ac0f951e

Here ya go. The case has been made over and over by countless people. Here is a reflection by a guy who I consider to be saying what I agree with. Saves me the trouble of thumb typing and you the trouble of understanding my tortured prose.

From that article, which is a marketing piece, and is talking down to me:

yes, it a marketing piece. And it is talking to an audience of academics and funders. This subject came up because you asked for an overview and I wasn't going to thumb type an overview. If you think it is talking down to you, that's only because you aren't aware of the context.

By the end of the workshop the participants agreed that while complexity is difficult to define, and that there can be no unified science of complexity, it is highly useful to devise models of a wide variety of systems and ask to what extent the ideas behind a model that describes complex behavior in one system might be applicable to understanding another system.

What the Santa Fe institute exists to foster is a multidisciplinary approach to complex systems. Since that is extraordinarily recent framework in scientific terms, it is not a surprise that there are nomenclature issues that are at the front of the field. I'm not sure you know why you are making these objections but on the off chance you do, can you tell me what your objections have to do with a different entirely nomenclature based issue that is nominally the subject of this thread? You don't need to know why some problems are not amenable to engineering and outcome based approaches. You don't even need to know that it is common in ecology, condensed matter physics, economics and sociology to be involved with this exact nomenclature and paradigm really, related issue, that it is an active debate across pretty much every discipline, and that we've come a long way since cybernetics. You don't need to know really anything about much to understand that there are always reasons to reframe things. That it allows for different questions, and that different questions are good things to be able to ask. Y'all seem to be vying for a priest's role in the religion of newtonian materialism. It's weird.

Yes, that is said over and over again, and people do ask and discover to what extent at first seemingly unrelated systems can be understood better together.

I'll just ask whether there are, in the enterprise of studying flocking behavior in birds as "emergent" from the standpoint that we can't study it from reductionist foundations, good reasons for its leading lights to speak of it differently to studying thermohaline convection as an "emergent" process by applying the Navier-Stokes (non-linear) PDEs? To what extent do we just end up with more babble about "linking seemingly unrelated phenomena" via "complexity" buzz talk.

Because Navier-Stokes are a lossy set of equations. They do not start with perfect data and they are nonlinear. They are subject to the butterfly effect. All that would be noninteresting if they didn't get used as a holy writ by internet forum atheists swinging their dicks as hard as they can to try to force other people to not just think, but believe the things they believe.

So, since it's kind of fascinating to watch you trip on your collective dicks, I'll just point out that what the Navier Stokes equations can do and what a religious belief in their spiritual truth seems to suggest they can do are wildly divergent. They are an incredibly useful engineering tool. Adaptive systems tend to break/collapse when you try to engineer them. The nomenclature issue that the Santa Fe institute is grappling with stems from this disconnect. The nomenclature of reductionism is the nomenclature of outcomes. That nomenclature has failed humanity dramatically through externalization, feedback, and counterintuitive behavior of complex systems. Imagining that Navier-Stokes is a guantlet to throw down is a clear indication that you are a bozo who has a privilege problem and sees force as a problem solving technique. Well, I am smarter than you. I can run faster than you. I can jump higher than you. And I can fuck better than you. Boo hoo. Go put you navier stokes woobie back in the engineering cabinet where it belongs. Math is great. The universe is not predictable. There are lots of tools for linearizing subsets of systems in order to increase local efficiency or predict short term behavior. Get a computer.

And figure out how to get that chip on shoulder that's blinding you fixed.

Much of the Pines article is basically shilling for SFI with dressed-up philosowibble about some imagined contest between reductionist physics and some other "New Kind of Science" as Steven Wolfram puts it. And Pines was an accomplished physicist who knew better.

Yes he was. So were Murray Gell-Man and Phillip Anderson, and Jack Cowan for that matter who started the institute to promote research in the topic. Your whining about how you don't like it that people disagree with you is a little hollow when you pull out navier-stokes as your tard crown amulet. It's not that your ignorance of the entire academic history of systems, emergence, and adaptation and for that matter was it you that couldn't understand that a fitness landscape is dynamic? It was one of you. This bubble you are in is toxic. You've defined the questions it is allowable to ask and have forbidden zones. That is also called religion. Jesus christ, you'd think just the realization that time and space are relative to an observer would be enough to make you realize how utterly provincial your ideas are. Maybe it's the church of atheism shtick has made you see creationists and woo in everything outside your tiny little bubble: out there be dragons.

I'm waiting for specifics from SFI that do not have to be dressed up in this sort of marketing. And that's without coming close to saying that SFI people somehow should not be doing the kind of stuff SFI people are doing, or that the people doing that work are not extremely capable and accomplished. They struggle to pin much relevance on the nitty-gritty details of what they do, and that's why we get so much Big Picture hullabaloo, like that marketing piece. Like any specialist institute, SFI is a gravy train for its permanent faculty, but one that does neat stuff (to put it in layman's terms).

I suppose deep neural nets are just a fad. Damn but you use your ignorance as a shield to protect you from thinking any new thought ever. That is the tip of a gigantic iceberg and that tip is probably the most important (in terms of impact) product of science in the history of our species. And it doesn't even exist for you as a thing because navier-stokes can't model it. Do you even know what the output of navier stokes is? You seem to have a vague idea of what might count as input.

Here's one for you, I think there is a good reason to think of fitness landscapes as a continuum marked by a series of phase changes where different kinds of complex processes begin to emerge and that life is viewable with exactly the same validity at multiple levels. I have what seem to me to be good reasons to think there is value to viewing changing environments that way. You on the other hand seem to feel that if those reasons don't fit your pathetic little reductionist boxes, they don't exist.

Here's a question that makes the ignorance black and white: Is Gaia real? It's a trick question designed to out idiots whose egos have eaten their brains so watch out.




You and your bend a spoon stupid shit. I mean, that is about as pathetic a metric to hold up as I can imagine. You cannot fathom that there could ever be any way to look at things other than the way you look at things. Either you can bend a spoon or you aren't valid. Great. It's fucking dumb.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not unusual. It's just dumb.

How do expect to ever be able to learn anything new if you only allow ideas that fit in your tiny ego shaped box? Dismissing entire fields of study includes dismissing the questions that led to them beginning.

Want to edit out that particular slur?

BWE wrote:Y'all seem to be vying for a priest's role in the religion of newtonian materialism.

You really are just another filosofeezer, aren't you? All you have is an ideological axe to grind.

BWE wrote:This subject came up because you asked for an overview and I wasn't going to thumb type an overview. If you think it is talking down to you, that's only because you aren't aware of the context.

This is what I asked:

Cito di Pense wrote:If it's a buzzword for a reason, make your case with a case; give me a basis to regard you as an authority. If you have trouble getting to specifics, there's probably a reason for that, too.

And you gave me a puff piece. That's not a basis to regard you as anything but a filosofeezer.

BWE wrote:They do not start with perfect data and they are nonlinear. They are subject to the butterfly effect.

Somebody who read James Gleick's book thirty years ago would be able to say that. Enough boilerplate, Mr. Filosofeezer.

BWE wrote:I think there is a good reason to think of fitness landscapes as a continuum marked by a series of phase changes where different kinds of complex processes begin to emerge and that life is viewable with exactly the same validity at multiple levels. I have what seem to me to be good reasons to think there is value to viewing changing environments that way. You on the other hand seem to feel that if those reasons don't fit your pathetic little reductionist boxes, they don't exist.

Did I say anything about hewing to some reductionist paradigm? No, you projected that into what I wrote because you have a silly political axe to grind. Meanwhile, bleeble-bleeble continuum marked by a series of bleeble-bleeble that bleeble multiple levels. And bleeble bleeble changing environments. Minus the specifics. Grind away, axe-man.

BWE wrote:
I suppose deep neural nets are just a fad. Damn but you use your ignorance as a shield to protect you from thinking any new thought ever. That is the tip of a gigantic iceberg and that tip is probably the most important (in terms of impact) product of science in the history of our species.

Promises, promises. Tell me what's been done, but especially, tell me what you've accomplished with them, or are you just another cheerleader in the blogosphere? Will it be the tip of a gigantic iceberg? It won't be nothing, but it won't be the most important tip in the history of our species that you can demonstrate. I'm not denying you your shot.

BWE wrote:You cannot fathom that there could ever be any way to look at things other than the way you look at things.

Because I won't genuflect at the feet of some puff piece, and more inflated promises? Do you accomplish anything, or are you just going to proselytize for something you've turned into a personal religion, trying to win hearts and minds? Link to some fucking technical article that shows work you think is important, or do you just assume I won't be able to read it?

BWE wrote:This bubble you are in is toxic. You've defined the questions it is allowable to ask and have forbidden zones. That is also called religion. Jesus christ, you'd think just the realization that time and space are relative to an observer would be enough to make you realize how utterly provincial your ideas are. Maybe it's the church of atheism shtick has made you see creationists and woo in everything outside your tiny little bubble: out there be dragons.

That isn't why I'm dismissing your bleeble-bleeble. If you know what you're talking about, you'll do better than emitting polemic. Do you sweet-fucking-know what you're talking about, enough to make the sorts of promises you're making? I don't think so. At best you'll have some abstruse little squiggle of specialist research that doesn't translate into making history, or else you'd be telling a more important audience about it, you know, like David Pines did. Tell someone else to fill their boots.

Double post

Cito di Pense wrote:

BWE wrote:Y'all seem to be vying for a priest's role in the religion of newtonian materialism.

You really are just another filosofeezer, aren't you? All you have is an ideological axe to grind.

That may seem fair and it may even be fair although it utterly misses the point. It is not me telling anyone else here what the approved dogma is. That is what I am objecting to and that is what you are doing.

BWE wrote:This subject came up because you asked for an overview and I wasn't going to thumb type an overview. If you think it is talking down to you, that's only because you aren't aware of the context.

This is what I asked:

Cito di Pense wrote:If it's a buzzword for a reason, make your case with a case; give me a basis to regard you as an authority. If you have trouble getting to specifics, there's probably a reason for that, too.

And you gave me a puff piece. That's not a basis to regard you as anything but a filosofeezer.

Well, I am not asking for anyone to take me as an authority. I study people and work with a broad cross section of disciplines. In the past I have done a fair amount of GIS work mostly involving population modeling as an intersect. I use a few very narrow machine learning tools involving topic modeling and sentiment analysis. I use STELLA systems modeling tools for a specific and also narrow set of circumstances. I have used some agent based models in R but would not consider myself particularly proficient other than knowing what it it used for and what I could do with it given a strong enough need. R is not a strong suit of mine. I have done a great deal of social network modeling using R packages but eventually switched to Pajek since my needs were quite limited and R is a constant learning curve.

I tend toward a systems approach because the questions I am asking lend themselves to a systems approach. If you care about community resilience and social capital in public institutions, especially city government, education and healthcare, I can answer quite a few questions with informed, though not dogmatic, opinions, as well as point you to lots of source material.

I can tell you that emergence adaptation and fitness landscapes are central to the questions I am interested in. I can tell you that previous frameworks for addressing those questions have led to quite well known problems which are now the central questions confronting the field I am in and that those same problems have analogs in pretty much every field so there is a trend toward cross-discipline work and the Santa Fe institute has been a very important part of that trend. The reason emergence is a buzzword is that it describes the central issue confronting anyone who is trying to understand adaptation and change in open systems which is almost everyone, as was stated in the "puff piece".

So there, now that we have dispensed with the authority issue, let's look at the puff piece:

When electrons or atoms or individuals or societies interact with one another or their environment, the collective behavior of the whole is different from that of its parts. We call this resulting behavior emergent. Emergence thus refers to collective phenomena or behaviors in complex adaptive systems that are not present in their individual parts.

This means that if we want to study adaptation where future system states in open nonlinear systems have qualities not present in current system states, navies stokes is useless. So, for that matter, is almost the entire rest of physics and math.

That presents a puzzle and justifies, imo, the work being done to find a nomenclature that allows researchers to generalize within that problem landscape.

Examples of emergent behavior are everywhere around us, from birds flocking, fireflies synchronizing, ants colonizing, fish schooling, individuals self-organizing into neighborhoods in cities – all with no leaders or central control – to the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies and stars and planets, the evolution of life on earth from its origins until now, the folding of proteins, the assembly of cells, the crystallization of atoms in a liquid, the superconductivity of electrons in some metals, the changing global climate, or the development of consciousness in an infant.

So, there is a series of examples of questions which have proven amenable to a systems framework. Neuroscience specifically almost entirely frames the field in emergent terms. I know this because a very good friend of mine is a neuroscientist and we have had long discussions about it. If you would like to read some of those, I can provide links.

Indeed, we live in an emergent universe in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any existing interesting scientific problem or study any social or economic behavior that is not emergent

Here is a strong claim. But the universality he describes would not water down the utility. Rather it would be a strong case for more work on the epistemology, the philosophy, of a systems paradigm.

If indeed, using a systems or emergence oriented paradigm does offer a better way to visualize the problem space and suggests new approaches to problems through that framework, and if those newly framed problem spaces do indeed give up new secrets and useful knowledge, then it is a justified buzzword, even though the nomenclature is still fluid.

And, surprise surprise, it does. Neuroscience, as one example, would erase the past maybe 20 or 30 years of gains were we to eject the framework. Deep neural nets, as I mentioned earlier, possibly and even probably the most profoundly transformative science in the history of humanity, would be out. Economics would be back at Milton Friedman and supply and demand equilibrium concepts, so 20+ years back. Social networks would be incomprehensible. I mean, as I said several posts back, your ignorance is not my problem. This "puff piece" does a pretty good job of outlining why emergence matters and what kinds of questions it can help us ask and answer.

Notice that I have not asked you what your authority to toss out navier stokes as some kind of meaningful objection is? It's because I don't care. How about explaining why it seems like a gotcha to you?

I am happy to discuss pretty much whatever with as little ego involved as possible, but your apparent need to be the gatekeeper on what questions are acceptable and what philosophy is legitimate is not very compelling to me.

BWE wrote:They do not start with perfect data and they are nonlinear. They are subject to the butterfly effect.

Somebody who read James Gleick's book thirty years ago would be able to say that. Enough boilerplate, Mr. Filosofeezer.

Why does the fact that it has been known for several decades discredit it?

BWE wrote:I think there is a good reason to think of fitness landscapes as a continuum marked by a series of phase changes where different kinds of complex processes begin to emerge and that life is viewable with exactly the same validity at multiple levels. I have what seem to me to be good reasons to think there is value to viewing changing environments that way. You on the other hand seem to feel that if those reasons don't fit your pathetic little reductionist boxes, they don't exist.

Did I say anything about hewing to some reductionist paradigm? No, you projected that into what I wrote because you have a silly political axe to grind. Meanwhile, bleeble-bleeble continuum marked by a series of bleeble-bleeble that bleeble multiple levels. And bleeble bleeble changing environments. Minus the specifics. Grind away, axe-man.

Why yes. Yes you did.

BWE wrote:
I suppose deep neural nets are just a fad. Damn but you use your ignorance as a shield to protect you from thinking any new thought ever. That is the tip of a gigantic iceberg and that tip is probably the most important (in terms of impact) product of science in the history of our species.

Promises, promises. Tell me what's been done, but especially, tell me what you've accomplished with them, or are you just another cheerleader in the blogosphere? Will it be the tip of a gigantic iceberg? It won't be nothing, but it won't be the most important tip in the history of our species that you can demonstrate. I'm not denying you your shot.

Wait, are you really asking me to tell you what is being done with deep neural nets? Just Google "AI". Controlling pretty much every dynamic resource, from power grids to oil pipelines, to deciding who gets bail and prison sentences, to writing content for public consumption across all media channels, to regulating activity across capital markets and banking, to basically every damn aspect of 21st century society. I mean, that's a remarkably ignorant ask. Especially since it's a) a major news topic, and b) so pervasive that almost every discipline in existence is being transformed by it.

BWE wrote:You cannot fathom that there could ever be any way to look at things other than the way you look at things.

Because I won't genuflect at the feet of some puff piece, and more inflated promises?

Who asked anyone to genuflect? But that is nice of you to provide such a concrete example of acting as a gatekeeper. I personally am heavily involved in using a systems framework and it is simply a fact that so are significant numbers of people across most disciplines. Some disciplines have almost exclusively made their recent gains within that framework, examples listed above.

But again, to circle back around, none of this is relevant to whether or not evolution can be usefully viewed as a continuum marked by emergence of pattern types. It can and it regularly is. Darwinian selection is a subset of adaptive evolution but it does generalize quite usefully to other kinds of adaptive processes and so, in the entirely subjective matter at hand, it is not wrong to say what Paul is saying. It is convoluted and has more emotion than structure most of the time, and lots of what he says in support is probably wrong when it even makes sense, but it is fair to say that emergence or some other idea closely associated works as a general framework within which evolution is the method a model follows.

Do you accomplish anything, or are you just going to proselytize for something you've turned into a personal religion, trying to win hearts and minds? Link to some fucking technical article that shows work you think is important, or do you just assume I won't be able to read it?

At this point, I assume you won't be able to read it.

BWE wrote:This bubble you are in is toxic. You've defined the questions it is allowable to ask and have forbidden zones. That is also called religion. Jesus christ, you'd think just the realization that time and space are relative to an observer would be enough to make you realize how utterly provincial your ideas are. Maybe it's the church of atheism shtick has made you see creationists and woo in everything outside your tiny little bubble: out there be dragons.

That isn't why I'm dismissing your bleeble-bleeble. If you know what you're talking about, you'll do better than emitting polemic. Do you sweet-fucking-know what you're talking about, enough to make the sorts of promises you're making? I don't think so. At best you'll have some abstruse little squiggle of specialist research that doesn't translate into making history, or else you'd be telling a more important audience about it, you know, like David Pines did. Tell someone else to fill their boots.

Lol. Again, you are asking me to clear your philosophy gates to achieve relevance. I'm not proselytizing. The work I do is classified as social science. I am not in the habit of trying to justify a discipline to those who've already prejudged it as illegitimate.

Just read a nodern neuroscience text.

Spearthrower wrote:Want to edit out that particular slur?

Thanks and yes

romansh wrote:

pfrankinstein wrote:
The mix up between NS AS and HS concerns me.

Does not worry me too much as the mix-up is all yours.

The categories between artificial and natural are definitional boundaries. When I find chalcanthite it is deemed natural, when I leach copper metal with sulphuric acid (and air) and evaporate the water to crystallize copper sulphate pentahydrate, is that somehow artificial?

It certainly seems to be a non useful distinction.

Paul, what does it gain us to make these distinctions?