Lethean
Posts: 292 Joined: Jan. 2014
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Quote (KevinB @ Mar. 04 2014,12:40) | I see that our friend Cornelius has posted over at UD under the title "Here’s Darwin’s Solution for Convergent Evolution: Like Two Inventors “Independently Hit on the Very Same Invention”
Is he going to reference his marsupial wolf picture as supporting evidence? |
I prefer to have my tard filtered by the brave souls who are certainly better equipped to snip and rebut, so I won't be offering UD my clickys. (and thank you for that) Would it be too outlandish to guess that Hunter is denigrating that idea and using it to prop up the designer is reusing His designs aka common design hypothesis?
In any case, I'm reminded of an excellent article I read a few years ago by Malcolm Gladwell concerning, among other things related to invention and discovery, the topic of independent discovery. In it he pulled together information from a number of historians of science and it's a really great read and for what it's worth I highly recommend it. Here's a snippet ~
Quote | They found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:
The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington. |
Full Article
Wikipedia has an article as well, Multiple discovery. I like the section on "Civility," it being a hobby horse term over at UD.
Quote | In another classic case of multiple discovery, the two discoverers showed more civility. By June 1858 Charles Darwin had completed over two-thirds of his On the Origin of Species when he received a startling letter from a naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, 13 years his junior, with whom he had corresponded. The letter summarized Wallace's theory of natural selection, with conclusions identical to Darwin's own. Darwin turned for advice to his friend Charles Lyell, the foremost geologist of the day. Lyell proposed that Darwin and Wallace prepare a joint communication to the scientific community. Darwin being preoccupied with his mortally ill youngest son, Lyell enlisted Darwin's closest friend, Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, and together on 1 July 1858 they presented to the Linnean Society a joint paper that brought together Wallace's abstract with extracts from Darwin's earlier, 1844 essay on the subject. The paper was also published that year in the Society's journal. Neither the public reading of the joint paper nor its publication attracted the least interest; but Wallace, "admirably free from envy or jealousy," had been content to remain in Darwin's shadow. |
There was some news very recently of two researchers independently coming up with essentially the same test for some disease. Sadly I can't for the life of me recall what it was though.
Of course I'm probably missing Hunter's point anyway. I assume Hunter isn't denying that doesn't happen and will go on how that doesn't square with "blind undirected processes" yadda yadda. This was more about sharing that article by Gladwell I thought the regulars here would find interesting.
-------------- "So I'm a pretty unusual guy and it's not stupidity that has gotten me where I am. It's brilliance."
"My brain is one of the very few independent thinking brains that you've ever met. And that's a thing of wonder to you and since you don't understand it you criticize it."
~Dave Hawkins~
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