From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Feb 19 2006 - 08:45:57 MST
Philip Goetz wrote:
>
> And THAT reminds me of pre-WWI Western thought, which believed exactly
> the same thing. Which is why they believed that humanity was aspiring
> to a peak of evolution foreordained by God. Which is a notion that
> Stephen J. Gould has spent a great deal of time fighting. (This post
> is not an endorsement of Stephen Gould.) But which also leads to your
> conclusion that evolution will converge.
I'm glad you don't endorse him. Gould's mathematics would suck if he
had any, and he is widely regarded as not only a fool but dishonest in
his presentation of evolutionary theory. The actual cheerleader in real
evolutionary biology against notions of inevitable convergence is George
Williams, who knows the math and has an excellent reputation among real
evolutionary theorists.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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