This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Counterfactual: the theory of evolution is one of the most successful scientific theories, yet it contains no equations; nor numbers. It is rather a framework of ideas in which observations can be made sense of.
I tend to agree with you that numbers are inessential in a scientific theory, and that Darwin's theory is a good example of this. But your critics also have a point that some nice math has been added to the theory since Darwin's time. (Not enough of a point to justify downvoting you, though, IMHO).
As a smaller scale example of a non-numerical scientific theory, consider the theory that the historical branching order of the Great Ape family tree is "First orangutan, then gorilla, then man, leaving the two species of chimp." That is a meaningful... (read more)
The theory of evolution was discredited around, IIRC, 1900, because the math didn't work out, because people didn't know genes were discrete, and thought they were analog. It was resurrected after people learned genes were discrete, and found the math worked.
(I haven't looked at this math myself, so I could be wrong.)
3Richard_Kennaway
Price's Equation? Fisher's fundamental theorem? Hardy-Weinberg law?
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.