Just another example of a otherwise-respectable (though not by me) economist spouting nonsense. I thought you guys might find it interesting, and it seemed short for a top-level post.

Steven Landsburg has a new book out and a blog for it. In a post about arguments for/against God, he says this:

the most complex thing I’m aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.

If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life.

So how many whoppers is that? Let's see: the max-compressed encoding of the human genome is insufficient data to describe the working of human life. The natural numbers and operations thereon are extremely simple because it takes very little to describe how they work. This complexity is not the same as the complexity of a specific model implemented with the natural numbers.

His description of it as emerging all at once is just confused: yes, people use natural numbers to describe nature, but this is not the same as saying that the modeling usefulness emerged all at once, which is the sense in which he was originally using the term.

What's scary is he supposedly teaches more math than economics.

Disclosure: Landsburg's wife banned me from econlog.econlib.org a few years ago.