wdog

Hello all,

I have been over at arn.org in a debate on the second law with a creationist (over there I'm warsteiner). I am doing it to learn how this debating works more than anything. Anyway another poster put up some stuff from a guy named Stanley Salthe
(http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/), or do your own search, it pops right up. I am busy forming my own opinion but i was wondering if anybody here has looked at his stuff. Some specific questions i have are:

1) He says that he does qualitative biology, being a physicist I just can't imagine qualitative physics. Does anybody have any comments on that.

2) He didn't post any peer reviewed publications on his website, but he did post a number of non peer reviewed works. Since I'm not in bio, or philosophy of science, I'm not sure if this is a red flag. What do you think?

3) Is there anything on the web that gives an outside review of his work?

thanks for any help

Coragyps

A quick look at his webpage suggests that Salthe is philosophically unhappy with natural selection, but his thesis seems to be that NS alone is insufficient to explain all the evolutionary phenomena we see, not that NS doesn't work. I'll try to read a little further tonight: he looks enough like I always imagined myself in my Mikhael Bakunin fan club days that he couldn't be all bad.

CodeMason

I offer a short critical examination of his points against natural section raised here: <a href="http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/anacri.99.08.html" target="_blank">http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/anacri.99.08.html</a>

1. He claims that scientists accept it just because it fits in with the capitalist society we have created. He is thus claiming that scientists are ignorant buffoons, incapable of making any observations that don't fit in with current sociopolitical orthodoxy. We should remind the author that some of the greatest single achievments in science have come from those who challanged such (think Galileo).
2. He seems to claim that it being a argument based on fitness, it itself become more fit against competing paradigms. This is ludicrous. The only selection pressure in the scientist's mind is how well it conforms to evidence, and how well it makes predictions.
3. The author claims it is a "theory of anything". That is, in its classical form, it can be used to describe basically any physical relationship. This claim is bizarre, natural selection only describes for things which have meaning in context with their environment. For example, natural selection on circles of different circumfrences is nonsense, none have any more or less relationship with their environment, however a particular arrangement of LEGO's has meaning as it can influence external forces and external forces can influence it. (Or something. )
4. Its role in society has nothing to do with how true or untrue it is.
5. Whether or not it has perceived implications in society for some form of eugenics has nothing to do with how true or untrue it is. Social Darwinism, is of course, a blatant misuse of the theory.
6. He discusses some conceived problems with "randomness", in natural selection. Now is it just me, or is randomness a part of the other half of evolution? He says that some combination of nucleotides will be more stable than some other, this is untrue. He says that evolution is pointless (it is supposed to be!) and that natural selection is a "just-so" claim, when in fact it is axiomatic. He brings up different opinions mechanisms of evolution, such as those included in the modern syntheses. However all of these perceived "additions" to Darwinism are actually just what logically arise from natural selection and mutation themselves, and are not really additions at all.
7. He says evolution (and I thought this was strictly about natural selection?) incorporates no theory of origins. Where have we heard this before? The author claims that evolution is inadequate because it is simply "editing, not writing". But what is wrong with this? Starting with "A", some random self-replicant generated in a primordial soup, we can form "B". And then "Br". And then "Bo". And so on, until we get "Bob likes icecream." Pure randomness is sufficient to explain ultimate origins, "editing" is sufficient to explain the rest.
8. He claims that since evolution only works "one part at a time" saying something like "evolution from scales to feathers" is meaningless. But he neglects to note that this is an emergent observation of each of these single steps.
9. "Evolution fails to map more than one change in a phenotypic trait over a given period of time." There has been a very long time for each trait to evolve individually on the geologically timescale, so I don't see how this is a problem, but consider three traits. Vision, speed, strength. Say an animal gains more ability for vision, but loses out in speed and strength? It would all depend on the value of the improved vision and how it weighs up against the negative value of the loss of speed and strength. Assigning arbitrary values here, say the vision improvement is worth 3 survival points, and the loss of speed and strength both add up to -2 survival points. Therefore, the organism would still have a survival value of 1 over others in the population.
9. He says that genetics only show the differences between types, or something equally strange. He claims there are traits that are not DNA inheritable. I seriously don't know what he was smoking when he wrote this article.
10. He thinks that Darwinism doesn't explain convergent evolution. However he doesn't understand that populations with similar selection pressures will tend to evolve similar traits.

I'm sorry for this half-assed reply. I honestly didn't understand a word this guy was saying, in all likelyhood, not much of it made any sense at all. Also I'm extremely sleep deprived at the moment so that explains my typos/spelling errors. Perhaps if I edit this message at a later date to correct my gross mistakes, it will undergo descent with modification.

wdog

You all are confirming a picture that is beginning to form in my mind. I plead ignorant on a lot of the bio, but whenever someone finds a scientific theory "morally vicious" (natural selection) and "congenial to capitalism" my quack meter starts to go off. I am trying to dissect his thermodynamics, but the problem is he seems to invent some things along the way. I'll let you all know what I eventually conclude. The poster that seems to like this guy goes by 'mturner' and I think I have seen him in here some times.

I appreciate your comments

[ January 12, 2002: Message edited by: Optics Guy ]</p>

Cthulhu (2)

Oh, I remember mturner. Good luck.