alyssavance comments on Rationality Quotes November 2009 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:36PM

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Comment author: alyssavance 02 December 2009 03:11:46AM 1 point [-]

A complete tree of descent (all life from a common ancestor) was Charles Darwin's thinking, but the idea of a tree of descent was not. See, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon for 18th-century thinking on the subject.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 02 December 2009 04:09:55AM 0 points [-]

Maybe I shouldn't have called it an innovation: the main point was to dispute that the tree of life was "widely known and accepted."