Timeline for What is Darwin’s impact on modern thought?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Mar 22 at 16:36 | history | edited | Jo Wehler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 22 at 15:31 | comment | added | Jo Wehler | @TKol I read Everett's paper now. In comparison to Mayr he makes some proposals concerning lessons learned from the theory of evolution and putting them into praxis. While Mayr seems rather fundamental how to think with the new philosophical concepts. Thanks for the pointer. | |
| Mar 22 at 4:02 | history | edited | Jo Wehler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 21 at 23:01 | answer | added | TheMatrix Equation-balance | timeline score: -2 | |
| Mar 21 at 17:53 | comment | added | TKoL | Jo, here's something of interest to your question: geneseo.edu/~everett/…. | |
| Mar 21 at 17:48 | answer | added | TKoL | timeline score: 1 | |
| Mar 21 at 17:24 | history | edited | Jo Wehler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 21 at 3:56 | comment | added | g s | I have voted to close. Five questions for each of six topics is 29 questions too many for a SE question. I think many of the 30 would be interesting if posed separately. | |
| Mar 21 at 2:55 | answer | added | Hudjefa | timeline score: -2 | |
| Mar 21 at 2:28 | comment | converted from answer | TheMatrix Equation-balance | Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution hoover.org/research/… > "Darwin’s main problem, molecular biology, to which Meyer explains, > comparing it to digital world, that building a new biological function > is similar to building a new code, which Darwin could not understand > in his era. The cell represents very complex machinery, with > complexities increasing over time, which is difficult to explain by a > theory. Meyer further explains how difficult it is to know what a > | |
| Mar 21 at 0:01 | comment | added | Weather Vane | There is always a "father of..." as being the person in the right place at the right time to get the recognition. But ideas don't pop out of a vacuum: they are themselves an evolution. I read somewhere that Einstein did a deal with his wife: you'll get the money and I'll get the glory. | |
| Mar 20 at 23:57 | comment | added | Scott Rowe | @NotThatGuy humanity would come up with it eventually, and then it would be named after whoever had been prominent in that process. We like our heroes and villains. Imagine a musical group where we didn't know the names of the people? Might as well be AI at that point. | |
| Mar 20 at 23:35 | comment | added | Conifold | One thing that stands out to me is "physicalism". Mayr states that it was "dominant in 1859". But physicalism in the modern sense did not even come up until mid-20th century. He later explains that he means "ideology of classical physics", but a) that is not what "physicalism" means today, and b) he is wrong about 1859 too, vitalism was quite popular at the time, even among physicists, see hsm. If anything, "Darwin's thought" (whatever his personal judgment on it was) aided the rise of modern physicalism by promoting reduction to physical causes. | |
| Mar 20 at 23:08 | comment | added | user73173 | constituting a contribution to human thought, though at the same time it's unthinkable that many bold conjectures which we now recognize as constituting a part of mature scientific theories didn't exist. | |
| Mar 20 at 23:07 | comment | added | user73173 | If someone hadn't speculated, before Darwin, about evolution, even without much empirical evidence (which is very unprobable, exactly because such theory is inevitable), it's hard to imagine anyone coming up with such an explanation. Yet some historians of science who focus only on experimental sciences, like physics, forget about that when criticizing (like ex. Feyerabend does, albeit, I believe, for slightly different reasons) Galileo's, Kepler's etc. cosmological speculations (to show that the great scientists weren't so scientific afterall). I see such speculations as nevertheless | |
| Mar 20 at 22:58 | comment | added | user73173 | @NotThatGuy The superiority of Darwin's theory is that it explains how species emerge and has much empirical evidence to back it up. But many people considered various versions of evolutionary theory before Darwin, notably his grandfather (Erasmus Darwin). I think the inevitability, as you put it, of Darwin's theory can be said to be a great counterexample to Newton's insistence on non positing hypotheses in empirical science. Newton was, strictly speaking, talking about experimental philosophy, but some philosophers of science extend his results to other fields. | |
| Mar 20 at 22:27 | review | Close votes | |||
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| Mar 20 at 22:21 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | It's always odd to see someone framing evolution in terms of Darwin (usually it's creationists who do so, although Mayr is an evolutionary biologist). Yes, Darwin played a pivotal role in putting together the theory of evolution, but it was built on earlier work, and a whole lot of subsequent work supports it as well. It was accepted less because of Darwin's influence, and more because of the strength of the evidence supporting it. Not to understate Darwin's work and contribution, but it seems somewhat inevitable that humanity would come up with it eventually. | |
| Mar 20 at 21:24 | history | asked | Jo Wehler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |