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To: Moominoid who wrote (31958)	4/20/2003 2:17:01 PM
From: LLCF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<On average they'll do worse though both in making progress and explaining what they're thinking. > What do you mean 'making progress'??? Don't you really mean that they are more likely to add to the 'scientific community'? And explaining what their thinking within the scientific paradigm of that time? DAK

To: Moominoid who wrote (31958)	4/20/2003 7:14:25 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

On average they'll do worse (non scientists) Here is a book reviewed in the NS. I have not read it yet. It seems to talk about similar stuff. i.e. Science is not aloof from other subjects, and is not "superior". I thought the review interesting until it started mentioning some words I don't understand. "Consilience" WTF does that mean? It wasn't in my dictionary and the internet came up with Edward Wilsons name too (whoever he is). Anyhow... "Consilience".. 2think.org Quote The controversy surrounds Wilson's belief that all human endeavor, from religious feeling to financial markets to fine arts, is ripe for explaining by hard science Comment by pb:- Baloney. How many milleniums is Wilson going to take to cover the subject material? Has he any idea how much Science that would take?? Science is an exhaustive system and an extremely slow, pedestrian way of doing or understanding things. Back to the review.. newscientist.com The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox THE common goal of human wisdom, achieved through the union of natural knowledge and creative art," says Stephen Jay Gould, is what unites the sciences with the humanities. The springboard for this, his last book, begins in the ancient world with a proverb about the fox and the hedgehog. The cunning of the fox lies in its ability to change its strategies again and again to achieve its goal - escaping from hunting dogs is the example - while the hedgehog has a single tactic: curl up and play dead. Flexibility or persistence seems to be the choice facing us all. Gould says that this is a false dichotomy. Knowledge and creativity are best served by combining both attributes. He discusses Isaac Newton and Roger Bacon, the false claim by some scientists that they pursue a superior form of knowledge, rather than part of the whole. He points out that all kinds of human wisdom stand on "a bedrock of nature's randomness". It is, perhaps, the quintessence of modernity that the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty itself. We have moved from the world of the steadfast fact to the world of probability. At the heart of physical sciences, for example, lie randomness and the juggling of probabilities. Darwin, says Gould, understood this: "evolution makes coordinated sense of a set of observations", as opposed to creationism where all is separate, "distinct and wondrous". For some, as Robert Graves put it in his poem In Broken Images, this is "a new confusion of his understanding", for others it's revelatory: "a new understanding of my confusion". And that revelation informs and frames the book, whether Gould is arguing about consilience with E. O. Wilson, or pointing out the dangers of reductionism. The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox is based upon the antique in another way. Gould has used passages from his collection of antiquarian books to illustrate his argument