Congratulations on a remarkable post. Not that I agree with everything, but I will need to read it several times. Is there some way to keep it accessible long-term?

I found this obituary of Hubby. He retired in 1985 at age 53 and died at age 64, both of which suggest health problems. Perhaps that's why he didn't publish after 1975.

Thanks for the information I requested, and some excellent thoughts.

When I called you a skeptic, it was in the "skeptics society" and "skeptics magazine" sense, not the philosophical sense. I'm much closer to being a skeptic in the philosophical sense, and am always walking the tightrope to avoid falling off as a result (but I think its worth it).

I think that the main point of contention between us is that you would like to hold together the rotting scientific enterprise for long enough for it to get us to singularity and make new rationalist enterprizes possible. I would also like that to be done, but since I don't think a single person can make a major contribution to doing that, I think I can add more utility by trying to muster resources and build a new scientific enterprize on a small scale "just in case". Part of my motivation is due to my conclusion, based on the early history of science, that diminishing marginal returns to increased resources in science are so crticial in this enterprise that a few billion dollars of seed capital or less is enough to build a viable long-term entity.

When I called you a skeptic, it was in the "skeptics society" and "skeptics magazine" sense, not the philosophical sense.

ah, sorry, i speak of michael blowhard and not you. and yes, you are correct that i hope that science lasts long enough to make it to the singularity (that is, to generate the singularity). i did not add that point because frankly i think that stepped over the line in terms of materialist messianism :)

I second David B.'s remarks above.

On the neutral theory, even though I am not qualified to comment, my impression is the discovery mid-century that the overwhelming majority of mutations that take place in any species have no functional significance, took center stage because Fisher's and Wright's ideas had been mined for all they were worth at that point in time, and thus were no longer “the thing” pending the day when far greater functional genomic knowledge would become available. But now that the latter constraint has been removed, the neutral theory seems far less interesting (apart from issues of molecular evolution and the construction of phylogenic trees, which, of course, will always be interesting as long as we want to know who was ancestor to whom). So, as I understand it, we can expect to see renewed interest in both classical and balancing genetic phenomena (as in identifying the genes that influence intelligence, for example, and how these trade-off against less desirable side-effects of the same a la Greg Cochran). The only new kid on the block, as far as I can tell, is the eponym of this blog, namely, countless issues of gene expression as they relate to all the "junk" that abounds throughout the genome. Not exactly sure how the new kid relates to the classical and balancing paradigms however; somebody please enlighten me.

One further comment: I think it is probably a mistake for razib to think of science as the virtuous maiden and capitalism as the whore, unless you think there's no merit in the whore's paying the maiden's rent. I would argue that science and capitalism are correlative social phenomenon -- or, rather, that together with democracy, they are part of a tri-relative complex which can exist either all together or not at all.

As for how to keep these three balls in the air over any significant historical interval, our best hope, at least in my tortured judgment, is by keeping alive the memory in our collective conciousness (via public education) of the terrible price that was paid by our forbears to get them launched in the first place, and of the hell-hole of under-development that awaits us if, God help us, we ever let them fall to the ground. The fear of damnation, if not for ourselves, then certainly for our children and grandchildren, can be a powerful motivating force. I therefore urge all you good souls who love science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake to be fruitful and multiply! You'll find it's a lot of fun in its own right.

my impression is the discovery mid-century that the overwhelming majority of mutations that take place in any species have no functional significance

we need to be careful here. remember that drosophila and humans have lots of "junk DNA," but e. coli does not. the argument for substitutions (that is, the change from monomorphism A to B) holds, but the one for mutations being neutral is not totally linked, depending on how many neutral fitness nonsynonomous changes one assumes can occur on a codon. someone who knows more molecular genetics can enlighten me, but it seems that the generalization about substitution rates being dependent on mutation rate is invariant because even on coding sequences the majority of substitutions are neutral via syynonymous changes, though most mutations are deleterious and purified since they occur on nonynonymous bases. the argument for preponderant neutral mutations can be made if most of the genome consists of pseudogenes, but these are more common in some organisms than in others.

[thanks from the compliment steve, but it is a bit embarrassing, so i removed the text :) ]

Impressive post Razib!

My thought was simply, first, "What lessons can we learn?"

I think the primary lesson is that there has to be some fitness advantage to membership in your "religion". I think that there has always been a fitness advantage to being Jewish, which has offset its obvious disadvantages, that continues to this day. One obvious source of fitness advantage comes from science's alliance with engineering, and the fact that people will pay engineers to make things that people want.

BTW I have a somewhat orthogonal response to this post here.

I know this is a minor point within your discussion, but in answer to your question:

What exactly is non-gradual on evolutionary timescales? To be precise, if you took a quantitative character (i.e., height) and plotted it against number of generations since time t, what distinguishes gradual change vs. non-gradual? Is there a particular first derivative that needs to be detected at some point in the function to cross the threshold of gradualism?

I'd argue that a large change in the second derivative of the measurement over time would be more indicative of a "non-gradual" change than any particular number in the first derivative.

I'd argue that a large change in the second derivative of the measurement over time would be more indicative of a "non-gradual" change than any particular number in the first derivative.

elaborate. if the 2nd deriv is + is that non-gradual? i am skeptical it would remain positive for long...that is part of PE obviously, there is a 'jerk' and then stasis....

I don't get it. Maybe it’s beyond me, but I read the post twice, and its main points seem to be things that we already know:

1) New science builds on and sometimes displaces old science, which can be a useful or, like Gould's theories on race, a fraud.

2) Scientists are biased.

3) It is difficult to transmit scientific ideas to the general public because much is lost in the communication.

4) Science is like religion in many ways (Well, that is a new and interesting analogy to me.)

Is the point that science, a relative newcomer among competing world views, needs to mimic some characteristics of religion in order to survive because it is, in some fundamental ways, like a religion - significantly in the way that it interacts with the hardwiring of the human brain?

Is the point that science, a relative newcomer among competing world views, needs to mimic some characteristics of religion in order to survive because it is, in some fundamental ways, like a religion - significantly in the way that it interacts with the hardwiring of the human brain?

too specific. here are the points

1) science is constrained by cognitive biases on the individual scale.

2) science has only been generated once (or twice) during the course of human history.

3) the analogy with religion tells us that systems tend to degrade over time as cultures change.

4) but unlike science religion seems to be a unviersal and easily retrieved motif of the human mind (also, the capacity for science seems to be constrained to a far smaller proportion of the human race).

5) this makes it important that we be more cognizant of ways that we can preserve scientific culture for as long as possible.

and of course the basics of what i outlined above aren't new, but if you came to this blog for new discoveries you will almost always come away disappointed. if you do science yourself you probably know all the general points, but i think a lot of people who don't do science don't really internalize these points too well (the fallacy of pointing to wrong science in the past as invalidating present science is the most idiotic but common tendency).

Thanks, that clears some things up.

Personally, when I am intrigued by an article about some new scientific discovery, I sometimes feel like I am having a spiritual experience. That sounds corny, but when I am understanding something new about the physical world, I feel a very positive emotion that I might call enlightenment. I feel like I am coming a tiny step closer to unlocking some transcendent, universal, timeless mystery about the significance of life. If you can make other people, especially laypeople pick up on this feeling when they are young, this may be the best way to ensure that science endures.

Basically, encourage science to take the place of religion in humanity's mental mystery module.

If you can make other people, especially laypeople pick up on this feeling when they are young, this may be the best way to ensure that science endures.

i don't know. i think this is the tickling-the-god-shaped-hole that sagan talked about, and i don't think science can live by emotion alone. unfortunately, most human beings don't have any real interest in the rigorous abstracted esoterica which science truly is.

"Unfortunately, most human beings don't have any real interest in the rigorous abstracted esoterica which science truly is."

That's true. But there are plenty of fields of study outside of science that, when undertaken correctly, are rife with rigorous abstracted esoterica. Smart people frequently choose those fields not because they can't do science, but because they don't see much of an emotional reward in working an equation or understanding / developing a scientific theory - they get these rewards in the study of humanities, history, etc. I think that could change if we had more wonderment-packed science classes taught by enthusiastic teachers at, say, the junior high school level.

they get these rewards in the study of humanities, history, etc.

i think humans have cognitive biases to be interested in stuff that relates to our own species. i know many science people who have been attracted to history or a humanities. i know fewer non-science who have expressed such an attraction in the reverse.

"i think humans have cognitive biases to be interested in stuff that relates to our own species."

The field of genetics, for example, is a science that strongly relates to our own species. That relation may not be as apparent as it is in history, but youngsters could be made to see it with good guidance.

funny, i know some dudes that spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way that their evolutionary genetics work could be made to be relevant to humans to get their hands on NIH $$$ :)

Razib, you should keep all these rants of yours, edit them thoroughly, and arrange them in some kind of meaningful way. The resulting product might be worth doing something with--at the very least, posting as a long essay with linked pages.

dq, if you must know, i make regular backups of the site, so all my "rants" are saved...and if my harddrive meltdowns, i can prolly retrieve them from webarchives.

Luke Lea, you wrote:

"One further comment: I think it is probably a mistake for razib to think of science as the virtuous maiden and capitalism as the whore, unless you think there's no merit in the whore's paying the maiden's rent. I would argue that science and capitalism are correlative social phenomenon -- or, rather, that together with democracy, they are part of a tri-relative complex which can exist either all together or not at all.

As for how to keep these three balls in the air over any significant historical interval, our best hope, at least in my tortured judgment, is by keeping alive the memory in our collective conciousness (via public education) of the terrible price that was paid by our forbears to get them launched in the first place, and of the hell-hole of under-development that awaits us if, God help us, we ever let them fall to the ground."

In the first place, democracy has existed without either science or capitalism, in the city of Athens, to name one among many of the cities of Greece.

Second, although systematic capitalism requires science to grow to the bloated proportions which it possesses today, something similar has existed for quite some time to render peoples dissolute, docile, and easier to tyrannize. When Cyrus conquered Lydia, he planned to kill all the Lydians. The Lydian king, Croesus, dissuaded Cyrus. He told him to compel the Lydians to hold public markets; this would make them effeminate and no threat to him. Within a generation, the great Lydia was a nation of shopkeepers; few remember the name of that nation.

Science does seem to be a properly modern innovation, but the wisdom of cultivating a discipline that serves indiffirently as the means to any end whatsoever with the illibarality (that is, vulgarity, ignorance, and vice) inculcated by democracy and capitalism is a project that has been frequently and prudently questioned.

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