3 ms·

Of course. It was the phys.org post which invoked Sagan's quote, and I was merely reusing it for rhetorical effect.

• mr_luc 13y ago
  Yeah - but there is a real distinction between theory and hypothesis, which that guy is probably acutely aware of. (Cmd-F on one page of his site shows the word hypothesis used 17 times). Reading a bit more, it seems like he's got expertise in a corner of science that could be relevant to what the article calls 'morphological change': "As the increasing apparent, magnificant, speed with which morphological change can occur continues to present itself for us to comprehend, the standard theory of random mutation followed by slow environmental selection, seems to stall. In my own opinion, female choice ... , but other mechanisms of mutation ... , now need to be considered anew. The role of hybridization in driving morphological change, as McCarthy has observed time and time again, particularly in his studies of avian species ... , may be the most powerful mechanism of all." Okay, so if the "speed of change" problem is a pretty wide-open question without a lot of firm answers, and if this guy has staked out a claim in the problem space ... my reaction is basically "good on ya'!" Go play god with interspecies breeding and come back in 5 years with an update. :)
• mistercow 13y ago
  >Sagan's quote Minor nitpick, but while Sagan popularized the saying, it probably originates with Laplace's "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness" (which is itself a rephrasing). This makes sense in historical context; the quote comes from 1814, two years after Laplace published the most well-known formulation of Bayes' theorem, which is exactly what the saying embodies.