Re: [asa] Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics - Passive Voice correction

Just an added point. Dave Wallace's post shows how the use of evolutionary assumptions (i.e. what he calls an "analogy for biological evolution") exploits the passive voice. In fact, I count 9 times passive voice is used in his short message, aside from the mysterious 'something exists/occurs' verbs. Apparently the absence of human agency in computer programming and constitution writing has reached astonishing proportions!!!
   
  Please take this with a grain of salt Dave. :) But I've noticed a common tendency in evolutionistic language to use passive voice. Have you ever wondered why that is?
   
  Gregory

Dave Wallace <wmdavid.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
  "evolve really is used as a synonym for change"

While I agree that evolve is sometimes/often used as a synonym for
change I think that a better definition involves a process with the
following characteristics:

1. something exists and functions. Often initially, but not
necessarily, in a very rudimentary fashion

2. mostly relatively small changes/mutations to the existing entity
occur (note that the effect of small changes may well be massive and
possibly fatal and that numerous changes can occur almost simultaneously
in some instances)

3. some fitness goal/specification... exists that validates the changes
made in step 2

Steps 2 and 3 occur repeatedly

For example I would argue that a constitution (in some countries) evolves:

1. Someone possibly plural, writes the constitution

2. Amendments occur and interpretations are made

3. Society evaluates how well the constitution is serving them and new
amendments/interpretations are made.

A second example is the complex programs called compilers that I
designed and wrote before I retired:

1.The compiler initially functions by running a very simple program
usually referred to as "Hello World", which simply prints out a message
saying "Hello World", although very often simpler test cases are used
initially.

2. Small changes occur day by day, week by week by the development teams
and are integrated into the shared code base.

3. The compiler is tested on a regular basis to see if it conforms to
its specification. Frequently massive nightly/weekly/monthly test runs
occur against industry test cases or test cases written from the
specification. A mature product typically has many tens of thousands of
individual test cases some trivial and some that execute for hours and days.

About 24 to 36 months later a shippable product results and typically
the process is repeated for future releases but with a shorter time
scale. Sometimes after a decade or two the original code base is
determined to be at the end of its useful lifetime and a wholly or
partially new code base is created, usually after much gnashing of teeth
by management and senior designers as the costs can easily be in the
millions of dollars. I think of this as analogous to species extinction.

Sure the definition given above is not a perfect analogy for biological
evolution but it fits pretty well.

Dave W (ASA member)

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Received on Mon May 19 16:57:43 2008