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I think the terms of evolution are robust enough to survive outside the incubator that was the biological sciences for them. In fact I don't just thin...

Quillette has always been a trash rag, it's not at all surprising.

I tried to address this in my reply to Wayfarer earlier, but yes, it's important to think in terms of principles rather than fact here.

I'll stop you there! It doesn't have to be self-replication just replication (or reproduction). That's the thing with cellphones: they don't self-repl...

Keeping your elaboration of this question with fdrake in mind as well, evolutionary thinking can be useful in a few different ways: first, as fdrake s...

Hah, I'm glad you're so staunchly of the same mind - I think the idea that evolution is suprabiological is still not something that is part of the pop...

Cool.

As a necessary but not sufficient ingredient, yes. Refer to the OP.

I never said there was one. But I also never said that evolution is just 'modification' either. That too would be a mistake.

When woof woof fails, reptoid aliens are clearly the next step. And they speak of rhetoric.

They don't, clearly. There is no mechanism of heritability among populations of rocks. All I've argued is that evolution can be applicable to non-orga...

If and only if there is heritable variation (changes in a developmental system that is passed down to another generation). I'm not sure what you mean ...

In no scientific understanding of the term is evolution simply 'change'. Evolution is descent with modification among populations. That evolution is s...

No, or at least this kind of terminology is extremely awkward. First, natural selection happens to a population, and not single organisms: populations...

Heh, I threw that 'language as a technology' line in there as a provocation and wasn't sure if anyone would pick up on it, but the basic idea is that ...

It's not an assumption; it's entailed by the principles of evolution. I literally spelled them out for you - or rather numbered them out for you - to ...

True, but this is a matter of fact and not of principle. Were the robot revolution to occur and murder us all, the evolutionary principles would funct...

@"Agustino" brought to attention this line by David Hume, which I thought was really interesting: "But though this topic be specious and sublime, it w...

You're right. If 'woof woof' is the best you can do, I excuse myself.

This isn't worth engaging except to point out that it isn't.

And here's the one before that. Want to keep going?

Of what exactly? I simply disagreed that Peterson's divisiveness was all that surprising. He gets as good as he gives.

No, but then, if you think that caricature is the crux of the issue, then you have a very shallow read of his standing.

I don't think it's surprising at all. Peterson is just about the only person - with maybe the exception of Sam Harris - who stands as a well-recognise...

Oh I'm acid and vice and all things blithe, but I'm no public intellectual.

I think you're murderously wrong.

Yeah, nothing to do with the the 'murderous' quip at all.

Eh, just convention and linguistic fashion. Gnoseology in particular is a pretty archaic term that most people wouldn't use just on account of it bein...

:party: :clap: :fire:

Isn't language cool? Specious used to mean beautiful (as in 'having specular quality'), but is now used as a put-down meaning shallow or 'all appearan...

Priest, but paradigmatically also Wilfrid Sellars, who famously and beautifully called for a synoptic fusion of both the scientific and manifest 'imag...

Oh come, let's not plonk analytic philosophy into the muck and mire of scientism, even if some of its quarters have been guilty of peddling it. For th...

The 'living' status of viruses depends on one's definition of life (the issue being that viruses need to hijack the reproductive machinery of other or...

Not only is speciation real, we can make it happen in the lab.

Hemlock perhaps? Your questions are exemplary Socratic ones, after all (the bloke who founded, y'know, Western Philosophy).

No, I only respond to posts that are worth responding to.

Yes, keep going, soon enough you might actually have an inkling of how philosophy operates.

Uh, really, read the context. You're embarrassing yourself somewhat.

You really need to reread the context of my 'being on Psudeonym's side'. :)

Excellent questions! Much better than most of waffle most of this thread has so far been.

About terminology? Not particularly.

I don't have any stake in the distinction.

I don't think there are any strict, established or proscriptive distinctions between the two, although there are I think differences of emphasis: hist...

Ah, I see what you mean. I suppose what I 'don't like' about such diagrams is precisely that the abstract away the time element, and correlatively, th...

This also feeding into some of the Frei Otto's structure's that I posted in the Beautiful Structures Thread. You can see below how Otto translated his...

Also worth noting that the femur, with it's cross-hatched pattern of stresslines, was also (one of the) inspirations for the Eiffel tower, in what cou...

It's the head of a fairbairn crane:http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8675/16104962214_0e662d0948.jpg Also, thanks for the force diagrams but the most per...

Yeah it's pretty Hanoverrated. I did read this when it came out, I remember finding it inordinately cool.

Astrolabe: a catcher of heavenly bodies, literally 'taker of the stars'; used to measure the incline of celestial objects and help find one's way. Fro...

'String your words together carefully' (join them well). Wordsmithing. Like carpentry or woodsmithing.