[ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design.

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/27/2011 12:26 PM, john clark wrote:

> And if Aristotle had been just a tad smarter he could have come up with
> the Theory of Evolution more than 2 thousand years before Darwin, he had
> everything he needed to do so but genius.

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."

Damien Broderick