<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div style="RIGHT: auto"><SPAN style="RIGHT: auto">I'm not a scholar of Aristotle, but I don't recall him rejecting experiment in his work. I also don't think any thinker at his time was consciously putting forth the experimental method. Didn't that really have to wait until the Late Middle Ages?</SPAN></div>
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<div style="RIGHT: auto"><SPAN style="RIGHT: auto">And whilst I don't want to defend Aristotle (or any thinker) too much, I'm guessing that were he shown some experiments or observations proving his ideas wrong in some of these areas, he probably would've changed his mind. (I get this from reading his works and noticing that he basically tried to incorporate rather than dismiss data. Of course, I've not read all his works and few of them closely, so this is just my impression from reading them in English translation.<VAR id=yui-ie-cursor></VAR>)</SPAN></div>
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<div style="RIGHT: auto"><SPAN style="RIGHT: auto">Regards,</SPAN></div>
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<div style="RIGHT: auto"><SPAN style="RIGHT: auto">Dan</SPAN></div>
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<DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: #ccc 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; LINE-HEIGHT: 0; MARGIN: 5px 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; HEIGHT: 0px; FONT-SIZE: 0px; BORDER-TOP: #ccc 1px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: #ccc 1px solid; PADDING-TOP: 0px" class=hr contentEditable=false readonly="true"></DIV><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> Damien Broderick <thespike@satx.rr.com><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Wednesday, July 27, 2011 1:53 PM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: [ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design.<BR></FONT><BR>On 7/27/2011 12:26 PM, john clark wrote:<BR><BR>> And if Aristotle had been just a tad smarter he could have come up with<BR>> the Theory of Evolution more than 2 thousand years before Darwin, he had<BR>> everything
he needed to do so but genius.<BR><BR>Slick funny line, John, but really very badly wrong. What Aristotle didn't have was 300 years of closely observed and theorized empirical science behind him, itself informed (horrors!) by a monotheistic paradigm that encouraged scientists to assume as their reductionist default that the multiple worlds of empirical experience at many levels were basically *unified* and *lawful*. And what he didn't even know he needed to struggle against was an aristocratic certainty that close observation was worthless, experiment the domain of slaves and artisans, etc. We know this not only by reading the history of science and how it developed, but because of the "amazing" coincidence that both Darwin and Wallace came up with the same discovery at the same time--two instantaneous bursts of astonishing genius beyond the capacity, in your version, of the greatest minds from 2200 years earlier. "It's (also) the Zeitgeist,
Stupid."<BR><BR>Damien Broderick</DIV></DIV></div></body></html>