[ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design.

[john clark]

On Wed, 7/27/11, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
"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*."
But Pythagoras lived almost 2 hundred years before Aristotle and he thought the laws of the universe were unified and lawful, he thought numbers ruled the world and were behind everything. It's true that the ancient Greeks weren't big on observations and didn't make a lot of them, but Aristotle wouldn't have needed a lot to derive the theory of Evolution, just the observation that offspring were similar to but not identical to their parents. With the correct application of logic from that starting point he could have done it.  

And speaking of what might have been, Archimedes came very close to inventing Calculus and beating Newton to the punch by 1900 years. There is no way Newton could have found General Relativity because that needs a mathematical tool box that was not complete until the mid 19'th century; BUT Newton could have found Special Relativity because that only needed Algebra, we could have had it and known that E=mc^2 in 1705 instead of 1905.

 John K Clark 

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