Andrew

On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.

On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:18:54 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:


Uh-uh. This isn't "some current controversy", this has been burbling
along since Darwin's time. Darwin himself was aware of the problem of
the animals of the Cambrian Radiation having no ancestors in the fossil
record. You understand, Darwin didn't want to publish, don't you; he was
forced to publish by someone else coming up with the same theory of
evolution. The big reason Darwin wasn't ready to publish was the problem
with the Pre-Cambrian, the missing fossils. Darwin admitted in his book
that there were no antecedent fossils and that he hoped they would be
found by digging deeper. Quite literally from Darwin's own time, there
was serious discontent in the palaeontology community with the holes in
Darwin's theory, and it didn't stand long before it was replaced by
neb-darwinism, which is the version which larger and larger numbers of
developmental biologists are now saying isn't the answer either.

Shrug, science is a process.

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 11:02:20 PM UTC+2, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 12:08:11 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

So you can either believe that the impossible happened or that there was intelligent design behind it.

I totally agree! And the intelligent designer is the Hindu god Ganesha, who sort of looks like a Trilobite, if a Trilobite were a human-elephant hybrid. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/54/22...b54aed3427.jpg

I actually think we were designed by a committee, and the temp-guy who came on at the last minute did Australia. That place is filled with natures out-takes, most of them poisonous. The temp-guy sketched out a duck-billed platypus on the back of a napkin as a joke and then sent it down to production on the day he was fired as a FU to the big boss. "Meh, put it in Australia" -- God.

-- Jay Beattie.

;-) thanks for the laugh Jay. There are actual people that believe everyting is created by some sort of higher power? In that case he or she made a lot of mistakes. I'm out of this discussion.

Lou

On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 4:39:29 AM UTC+1, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.

Sure there were, since you're dumb enough to try and put words in my mouth. The first Protein A and the first Protein B were all alone in infinite space timelessly encompassing the nothingness of --what?

Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.

I'm giddy with excitement. Who or what is this "giddens" that you think wrote a history of the world?

And show us where I said that "giddens wrote the history of the world".

Andre Jute
This worthless little man is so anxious to prove me wrong, he's sputtering insensately.

On 8/10/2019 10:39 PM, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...438?matches=65

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 10:31:46 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/10/2019 4:18 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 5:45:45 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Uh-uh. This isn't "some current controversy", this has been burbling along since Darwin's time. Darwin himself was aware of the problem of the animals of the Cambrian Radiation having no ancestors in the fossil record. You understand, Darwin didn't want to publish, don't you; he was forced to publish by someone else coming up with the same theory of evolution. The big reason Darwin wasn't ready to publish was the problem with the Pre-Cambrian, the missing fossils. Darwin admitted in his book that there were no antecedent fossils and that he hoped they would be found by digging deeper. Quite literally from Darwin's own time, there was serious discontent in the palaeontology community with the holes in Darwin's theory, and it didn't stand long before it was replaced by neb-darwinism, which is the version which larger and larger numbers of developmental biologists are now saying isn't the answer either. BTW, nothing to do with religion, whatever you read in the paper or on the net or
TV -- those clowns just can't get anything right. These scientists are being driven to intelligent design in the most profoundly non-religious sense imaginable because none of the other theories can demonstrate the causa vera of the sudden arrival of so many large and complex animals in the Cambrian apparently whole and all at once.

You should keep up to date, Jay, not for the sake of being current on evolution theory, but because this is a true revolution in science, happening before your eyes. It's been growing like a boil, starting with Darwin himself, and now it has come to a head, and the whole profession is in turmoil and in a slow burst. See also my posts to Tom.

Andre Jute
I've seen whole professions and disciplines under stress before, but nothing like this


Simple.
Jay's right, He touched Earth with his noodly appendage:

https://i1.wp.com/godofindia.com/wp-.../ganesh-45.jpg

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Douglas Adams, the English sic-fi writer would have liked that. "Ah, man is but the snot of the celestial elephant," I can just hear him saying.*

Andre Jute
*For the railroad minds here, let me specify up front that he never said it, I invented it, and actually I expect people of goodwill and wit of their own to understand that without explanation.

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:21:12 PM UTC+1, Andre Jute wrote:
At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far...

Andre Jute
Now let us praise famous men -- Ecclesiastes on Steve Jobs, inventor of the iPad

Hokkaaay, I've now finished Darwin's Doubt by Stephen Meyer. He makes a really good case for Intelligent Design, but it isn't actually as good as his demolition job on all the other theories, some of which were hopeless from the beginning, with the state of knowledge at their initiation already in advance of the theory. What you come away with is the overwhelming belief that Meyers, on to a good case, has bottled out by being too fair on failed theories. Because of his perfectly scientific reluctance to say something overly positive which may later be disproven, he leaves you not with his conviction that Intelligent Design is the only worthwhile theory, or even primus inter pares, but that it is one of a panoply of possible solutions. In addition, he doesn't really have an answer for Richard Dawkins' question, "Who designed the Intelligent Designer?" Of course, Dawkins, when you take him back far enough, doesn't have an answer to "Who lit the match for the Big Bang?"

This is the second branch of palaeontology that I've come across where the science is visibly frustrating and in which there will be an outburst sooner or later, as there was in dendrochronology (tree ring interpretation), a once-obscure branch of palaeontology, when the global warming hoax and scandal arose.

Meyer's book is recommended as a brilliant overview of an important and complicated field, and a fine example of scientific fairness, which is not always reciprocated to him.

Andre Jute
Over and out

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:14:12 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 2:18:56 PM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 5:45:45 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Uh-uh. This isn't "some current controversy", this has been burbling along since Darwin's time. Darwin himself was aware of the problem of the animals of the Cambrian Radiation having no ancestors in the fossil record. You understand, Darwin didn't want to publish, don't you; he was forced to publish by someone else coming up with the same theory of evolution. The big reason Darwin wasn't ready to publish was the problem with the Pre-Cambrian, the missing fossils. Darwin admitted in his book that there were no antecedent fossils and that he hoped they would be found by digging deeper. Quite literally from Darwin's own time, there was serious discontent in the palaeontology community with the holes in Darwin's theory, and it didn't stand long before it was replaced by neb-darwinism, which is the version which larger and larger numbers of developmental biologists are now saying isn't the answer either. BTW, nothing to do with religion, whatever you read in the paper or on the net or TV -- those clowns just can't get anything right. These scientists are being driven to intelligent design in the most profoundly non-religious sense imaginable because none of the other theories can demonstrate the causa vera of the sudden arrival of so many large and complex animals in the Cambrian apparently whole and all at once.

You should keep up to date, Jay, not for the sake of being current on evolution theory, but because this is a true revolution in science, happening before your eyes. It's been growing like a boil, starting with Darwin himself, and now it has come to a head, and the whole profession is in turmoil and in a slow burst. See also my posts to Tom.

Andre Jute
I've seen whole professions and disciplines under stress before, but nothing like this

And many disagree. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annal...-darwins-doubt https://www.nationalreview.com/magaz...-nature-works/ From the National Review, no less.

This isn't a revolution in science. It's just argument based on existing scientific works created by others. It is a retrospective review spun as support for ID which, BTW, could be true. I'm not saying it isn't, and in fact, my money is on ancient alien H1Bs. Clearly, the guy who designed the Trilobite had a sense of humor and kind of a 1930s art deco design aesthetic..

-- Jay Beattie.

I gave you the numbers - mutations would have to occur thousands per second.. And yet since the time of Darwin not a single new species has arisen. Or you can agree with others that the minute change in an insect species causes a new species and we're just not smart enough to have realized that in 200 years. Or that the arising of a new shaped bird beak is a change in species. But of course you would have to have an idea of how DNA works which is rather a large subject.

You'd have to know that a gene can be displaced in the DNA, produce the same protein and yet inactivate other genes simply by its location.

So rather than a miracle happening, you'll insist that a miracle happened. What you are doing by simply denying the Christian explanation is accepting a totally preposterous unsupportable one in its stead. That certainly doesn't bother me in the least since you are the one willing to close your eyes.. Completely aside from life, the things that make live possible are so entirely complex that it boggles the mind of a mathematician used to large numbers. The moon locks the Earth into a 24 hour rotational period. Without this the Earth's temperatures would be too extreme for life to exist. The Milankovitch Cycles in the Earth's orbit around the Sun is necessary to maintain that do not become so temperature specific that simple weather conditions drive them into extinction.

There is absolutely no answer as to where all of the energy and matter that compose the universe came. No real scientist believes that a "Big Bang" occurred but the leading theory now is that the universe is steady state - that it always existed and always will.

If science not only cannot answer the most basic questions what gives you the slightest idea that ANY idea isn't just as good?

That gives me the distinct impression that you've never worked in science nor even around scientists.

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 10:48:39 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 11:02:20 PM UTC+2, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 12:08:11 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

So you can either believe that the impossible happened or that there was intelligent design behind it.

I totally agree! And the intelligent designer is the Hindu god Ganesha, who sort of looks like a Trilobite, if a Trilobite were a human-elephant hybrid. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/54/22...b54aed3427.jpg

I actually think we were designed by a committee, and the temp-guy who came on at the last minute did Australia. That place is filled with natures out-takes, most of them poisonous. The temp-guy sketched out a duck-billed platypus on the back of a napkin as a joke and then sent it down to production on the day he was fired as a FU to the big boss. "Meh, put it in Australia" -- God.

-- Jay Beattie.

;-) thanks for the laugh Jay. There are actual people that believe everyting is created by some sort of higher power? In that case he or she made a lot of mistakes. I'm out of this discussion.

Lou

You were never IN this discussion.