Re: [asa] Education, Medicine, and Evolution

Dave,

Your clarification is valuable and useful. It is good that we not be rash with our terms. But what I've discovered in my grad studies this past two years is that there are very few instances where serious published works do not say what they mean.

PvM may come back to me for misrepresentation Mayr as he defines "chance" and "necessity" at the beginning of that section as, respectively, "contingency" and "adaption". But the rub lies with his use of the term Necessity against Chance & Contingency. Mayr in fact later treats Necessity in the metaphysical sense that any good theologian or philosopher does as he sets up the conflict of "accidents" and "deterministic movement".

---- Original Message ----

From: D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
Date: Mon Jun 02 2008 - 14:17:47 EDT
I think this needs clarification. First, "paradox" is used in two senses.
The damaging one is where the requirements of a claim produce a
contradiction. The more common one is a situation where there appears to
be a conflict, but there is a resolution, as, for example, between
determinism and free will. Chance and necessity may merely involve
necessary conditions so complex that we cannot predict the effect.
Indeed, we commonly think of "the cause" as the precipitating condition:
Flipping the switch causes the light to go on. But there are an
indefinitely large set of necessary conditions besides the switch
position.
<snip>

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Received on Mon Jun 2 17:15:56 2008