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Please tell me if I am wrong or incorrect here but... How come someone like Hawking can make statements like this when he is not a evolutionary biologist? And

Please tell me if I am wrong or incorrect here but... How come someone like Hawking can make statements like this when he is not a evolutionary biologist? And how come people will take him seriously when he hasn't gained the ethos.

tspiteri 17y ago
Can it be because he is not talking about evolutionary biology? He is taking a wider view of human evolution.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  To me, it is more of a metaphor stretched past its breaking point. Is reading books really just an extension of the process of biological evolution? To me, it seems a very different kind of thing, and conflating it with biological evolution confuses more than it clarifies.
tnai 17y ago
Argument from authority? Hawking's seems quite muddled but not all his remarks are entirely "out there" (see Pagel's "Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator", for example).
fnid 17y ago
I don't think you have to be an evolutionary biologist to understand it or find patterns in evolution across timescales. Hawking is a brilliant man and I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff outside physics.