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It seems that the "heretical" parts are milder than I was expecting, though still outside the mainstream. On evolution, he says that Darwin got it right "up to
by reidacdc 8y ago
It seems that the "heretical" parts are milder than I was expecting, though still outside the mainstream.
On evolution, he says that Darwin got it right "up to a point", and asserts that selection is only an effective mechanism if you have large populations, but that small populations are often key turning points, and for small populations, "random drift" is more important. It's said to have some explanatory power in addressing why there is a variety of e.g. beetle species inhabiting a given ecological niche, instead of a single super-optimized beetle species. He's got a couple of authors he likes on this point.
On climate change, his position here is that since we don't understand how the ice ages started or stopped, then we don't really understand climate. Further, he says if we planted "all the wasteland over the globe" with trees, it'd be enough of a carbon sink to absorb the increased atmospheric content.
I am not really equipped to defend either the scientific mainstream or Dyson's views, but hopefully this is a useful summary.
- emilga 8y ago> why there is a variety of e.g. beetle species inhabiting a given ecological niche, instead of a single super-optimized beetle species. Are there really two or more beetle species occupying the same ecological niche, though? It would violate the competitive exclusion principle [0], and a quick google search doesn't return any results. (Also, the articles doesn't specifically mention niches.) I thought the large variety of niches, each of which requires different kinds of specialization, is why there's such a diversity of beetles. (Different niches requiring different types of camouflage, different jaw-shapes, different digestive enzymes, different temperature tolerances, etc.) It doesn't really make sense to expect a single "super-optimized" beetle, if, for examples, being able to eat food A and food B requires fundamentally different jaw-shapes. Of course, random mutations in the genome is what makes different phenotypes possible in the first place, but (according to my layman's understanding of biology) this is already acknowledged. And Dyson's example about a Peacock's feathers is famously explained by sexual selection. I really like Dyson's talk about living through four revolutions, though. [1] (Space Technology, Nuclear Energy, Genomics, and the Computer Revolution.) He's a super interesting guy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle#Experimental_basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq4p2qbE684