Rationality Quotes August 2011

dvasya

Here's the new quotes thread, for all those quotes you were going to post.

Rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's the new quotes thread, for all those quotes you were going to post.

Rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

This may be fatally sophomoric, but I really don't understand what is so particularly hard to understand about the theory of evolution. Differentiation, Inheritance, Mutation, and Fitness produce a feedback loop of increasing Fitness. The particulars of it's implementation on Earth are far more complicated, but the underlying theory is beautiful in it's elegance and simplicity.

See, there you're just confirming the original quote.

13lessdazed15y

I think that often people believe other things that crowd out the true explanation, so in practice it isn't applied correctly to real-world phenomena. Then, perhaps they try to reintegrate everything under a unifying theory of "evolution". Anthropomorphism, promiscuous teleology, not understanding the level of selection, absolutist ideas about fitness, belief in a certain philosophical type of progress, etc. are culprits. After all the misconceptions are added, the only work left for evolution is to provide a label for the jumble!

4MatthewBaker15y

If i asked the question "why did humans form a hibernative monophasic sleep cycle? most people would say because at night we slept in caves and shelter to escape the dark and we evolved to sleep that way" even though that's not the case with out genes at all. People often attribute things that are entirely behavioral to evolutionary reasons and that's what i think the quotes trying to illustrate. Baby's start out sleeping Polyphasically but soon adapt a natural night/day cycle due to the humans around them (mirror neurons, reinforcement, lighting). Now i dont know if this proposed experiment would-be very feasible or ethical but most people discount it because they "understand" evolution.