Comment author: Phil_Goetz 03 June 2008 03:10:00AM 0 points [-]

If you want to appreciate the inferential distances here, think of how odd all this would sound without the Einstein sequence. Then think of how odd the Einstein sequence would have sounded without the many-worlds sequence...

The Einstein sequence is a unique identifying number attached to an astronomical observation from the Einstein observatory.

If you mean something different, you should explain.

Comment author: Phil_Goetz 18 March 2008 02:08:00PM 0 points [-]

If you take a population of organisms, and you divide it arbitrarily into 2 groups, and you show the 2 groups to God and ask, "Which one of these groups is, on average, more fit?", and God tells you, then you have been given 1 bit of information.

But if you take a population of organisms, and ask God to divide it into 2 groups, one consisting of organisms of above-average fitness, and one consisting of organisms of below-average fitness, that gives you a lot more than 1 bit. It takes n lg(n) bits to sort the population; then you subtract out the information needed to sort each half, so you gain n lg(n) - 2(n/2)lg(n/2) = n[lg(n) - lg(n/2)]
= nlg(2) = n bits.

If you do tournament selection, you have n/2 tournaments, each of which gives you 1 bit, so you get n/2 bits per generation.

Comment author: Phil_Goetz 23 December 2007 09:08:00PM 6 points [-]

EO Wilson has a section in his autobiography, /Naturalist/, on what Gould and Lewontin did after the publication of Wilson's /Sociobiology/. They formed a study group, which met every week to criticize Sociobiology, then after a few months, published their results.

The kicker is that they held their meetings about a 30-second walk from Wilson's office in Harvard - but never told him about them.

This proves to me that science and truth never were their primary concern.

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