Srap Tasmaner

This is true @"schopenhauer1". (I've decided I like it on the sidelines better, but I'm still watching the game.) I hadn't read back so I wondered if ...

Good point. That seems totally fair.

Which you would prefer evolutionary biologists not participate in. Cool.

Not in my bookstore. Be that as it may, why should he? What is Richard Dawkins allowed to write about? What sorts of things is he allowed to write abo...

https://youtu.be/JjnSdNF5v1g

Lovely. I'm going to start a thread in the Lounge for documentary recommendations, starting with this one.

Sounds cool and I will watch -- does the filmmaker explain in the film how he came to be doing this? If so, I'll see it, but if not I'd be curious.

Will watch. Ever see The Gods Must Be Crazy?

You do not have trouble describing a wavelength of, say, 650.1 nm -- look, I just did it too. You just don't have a non-numerical word for that and on...

Isn't this just the central dogma? Just because we call it a "dogma" doesn't mean there's any idolatry or superstition here. That whole quote from Tho...

I think if you asked the CEO of almost any firm, gun to their head, whether more data leads to better decisions, they would say no. They'd probably of...

I never have before, and I really appreciate your effort. It's a very odd thing all around. It walks and talks like a logical paradox to me, so that t...

Not me. It's been exhausting and I'm ready to let it settle for a while. I'm not sure my reactions are worth much because I haven't read the literatur...

I like this argument. I think if it were me I would choose not to, but I cannot muster a definite approval or disapproval for someone else. Is that od...

I do have one final thought I'd like to hear your thoughts on. The asymmetry of effects (conditions of possible harm to person if born, no one to be h...

I was going to say this is wildly off-topic, but in a way it's not because Quine was a major force for naturalism in analytic philosophy and he pretty...

But this is exactly my problem. An actual person could have any sort of life, but for your argument you need to talk about it this way: Is "immediate ...

You're probably right, but I suppose I'm imagining the beginning of a research program, or the realization that a new theoretical framework is needed....

This.

Don't know about your cat, but I heard somewhere a bit of the story of dogs that I found fascinating. It's a very old relationship. The theory was tha...

You've read a lot more of this stuff than I have, so I'd be curious what your view of the landscape is. Is something selected by natural selection? If...

I'm sorry, what? There are the end-of-life decisions of the terminally ill, which is a sound-mind answer of "no" to the question, "Do you want to cont...

What does that even mean though? Are we asking them at the end, "So, what'd you think? Worth it?" Should we survey them weekly? I don't think any of t...

My cockamamie ideas are not under discussion here. I think my oldest son almost hated his existence for a little while in the Spring. He's a musician ...

Thanks for looking this up and providing a link. It was excellent!

What are you even arguing? Are you seriously attributing to me, standing at the site of a car crash, the ability to correctly calculate the conditiona...

Suppose I keep him alive until paramedics arrive and they revive him, he looks at his crushed hands and says, "Oh God! Why didn't you just let me die!...

For taking any action at all of any kind that may ever effect anyone else in any way: 1. Do something: some chance of good effect (impossible to calcu...

Okay, let's look at the argument you've presented, leaving aside exegetical questions about Hume. First premise. Is it true that you cannot tell by lo...

Right. That business about physical particles, wow. It takes effort to talk genetics without the word "information" once coming into your mind. I star...

This sort of thing is amusing: Yeah, that's a list (and throw in Robert Trivers too) of names nearly forgotten these forty years later, names disgrace...

Oh well. I've finished the paper now and it's shockingly bad. I'm disappointed. pp. 451 - 454 at least graze the issue of the unit of selection, but m...

Since you don't seem to find anything logically suspect in non-existent entities, let's look at a related case. You arrive on the scene of a car wreck...

The title of the book is The Selfish Gene, not The Selfishness Gene; if you take the former to mean the latter, that's on you.

But you've changed your argument. Where is consent? We start with the intuition that I have a moral duty to respect the autonomy of others and take ac...

I think it might be reasonable to interpose something like a model and treat data only as state, something like that. Then you can imagine having inco...

I'm not checking, but I think of there being two different arguments: one is about whether we can genuinely infer causation by induction from (so far)...

Or yours. But I will grant you -- if only to make @"unenlightened"'s ears bleed -- that there was at the time a convergence of economics and evolution...

Not shown. Horseshit.

I don't think that's why he wrote any of those books. You could, you know, look at Dawkins in exactly the opposite way: the machinery that underpins l...

It would take a lot to convince me there's a "rape gene". I'm not sure that even makes sense.

I get how the logic works: you are only entitled to do something to someone with their consent; therefore not existing is functionally equivalent to w...

Respecting "what could be"? But that's not an individual, and they have no consent to give or withhold. At any rate, it turns out you don't need a ext...

The Gombe Chimpanzee War lasted nearly four years. People and other animals aren't just selfish or just cooperative and nobody worth listening to was ...

The dignity of a person who doesn't exist and cannot give or withhold consent?

By making sure that individual doesn't exist, what a court might call an "overly broad remedy". I'm sure you don't consider the argument against procr...

Eh. I read a bunch of his books years ago and was never tempted to reach this conclusion. YMMV.

Above my paygrade, but it looks to me like you're opposing a caricature of bad science with a caricature of good science. That said, I personally woul...

Absolutely. And that's why DNA takes center stage in the modern synthesis, not any of the other candidates. Darwin couldn't have known this, so that l...

Exactly my point, and well put. It might be possible to tell a "selfish protein" story in which DNA is how proteins reproduce themselves, or move up t...