Dis 'n Dat with Freeman Dyson

[Insp. Clue!So?]

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2...son/print.html

Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson

Climate change is nothing to worry about, says the eminent
physicist. Let's celebrate genetic engineering and our ability to design a new world of plants and creatures.

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri

Sep. 29, 2007 | In his new collection of essays, "A Many-Colored Glass," renowned physicist Freeman Dyson turns his thoughts to do-it-yourself biotech and breeding one's own pet lizard, the fallacies of global warming science, science fiction (with a tip of the hat to recently departed Madeleine L'Engle) and the importance of biology to the future of religion. To Dyson, a deeper understanding of the
human brain means a better understanding of theology and perhaps more tolerance for those with different beliefs.

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I think he's more or less right about how we'll adapt in the coming years. His comments on religion strike me as cowardly otoh.

[IronUnkind]

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His comments on religion strike me as cowardly otoh.

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Typically it is considered brave to disagree with one's peers.

[Metric]

God I love this guy.

[AWoodside]

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God I love this guy.

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I thought almost everything he said was great. The only part I took issue with was his disdain for Richard Dawkins. It's interesting that he talked about how Dawkins is wrong about internally consistent scientists necessarily being atheists, and then casually mentions that he himself doesn't really believe in anything in the next question. I think Dawkins gets a bit of a bad rap from a lot of scientists that have been more or less conditioned to have knee-jerk PC reactions to these types of questions. I'm not a scientist myself but I did study physics for awhile at an institution of some repute, and I have quite a few friends who are scientists. I've never met a good scientist that wasn't for the most part an atheist in the Dawkin's sense of the word. Some were extremely compartmentalized and admitted to entertaining religion irrationally for purely aesthetic/personal psychological reasons, and some subscribed to a kind of vague and very weak deism. However, growing up in rural Oklahoma, pretty much the buckle of the bible belt, I have never ever ever met a competent scientist that was anywhere close to what I would consider a "religious person".

Whether or not Dawkins is hurting science by discouraging would-be scientists from entering the fray is an open question and I don't really have an opinion on that. I just think Dyson is wrong about how easy it is to be a good scientist and religious at the same time. If he probed the people he's referencing more deeply I think he'd find that they aren't really as religious as he things, or they're severely psychologically compartmentalized when it comes to their religious beliefs.

[hexag1]

I thought that Dawkins nailed Dyson pretty well in this exchange:

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/life_index.html#dd

[Metric]

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I thought that Dawkins nailed Dyson pretty well in this exchange:

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/life_index.html#dd

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Having no formal education in evolution, I was struck by this quote of Dyson: "Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size."

I had never heard of this "inverse square root" law before. However, it occurs to me that this is probably quite a general principle. Does this explain, for example, why long-term monopolies are extremely unlikely in a truly free market?

[pzhon]

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Having no formal education in evolution, I was struck by this quote of Dyson: "Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size."

I had never heard of this "inverse square root" law before. However, it occurs to me that this is probably quite a general principle.

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There may be a sense in which it is a general pronciple, but it is one of many general principles, since different evolutionary effects operate at different rates depending on the population size, some varying directly with the population size, and some inversely, and some having no dependence on population size.

The occurence of radical mutations/deviations (e.g., hopeful monsters) varies directly with the population. When a niche can be filled through a quantum leap, it may take less time for a large population to produce individuals who make that leap than a small population.

When another local optimum can be reached through several steps, a smaller population may tend to get there faster, since it is easier for a small population to take a backwards step, e.g., for a mildly deleterious gene to get lucky and eliminate a more favorable one.

I suspect that Dyson looked at some models where some inverse squareroot law was dominant, but I doubt this model is as widely applicable as would be needed to justify his statement. Even when a population is large, reproduction may occur mainly in subpopulations whose numbers can crash, providing opportunities for small-population evolution.

A deep thinker may be able to teach a lot, even when he is wrong. Trivial thoughts are worth little even when right.

[MaxWeiss]

Why?

[luckyme]

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I was struck by this quote of Dyson: "Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations.

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"speciation EVENT" and "new species APPEAR" pretty well did it for me. It's a poor framework to be looking at evolution from, and I'm being kind because he's old and it's not a field he's studied.

( I'm skipping over "big steps" and "once established", etc)

luckyme

[IronUnkind]

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I'm being kind because he's old and it's not a field he's studied.

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I'm sure Dyson would appreciate (and not laugh at) your intellectual pity.