ok@edai.UUCP (Richard O'Keefe) (03/17/84)
...
I have found the recent discussion about net.bio distressing. What
triggered it was a straightforward proposal to kill the group on the
grounds that it wasn't being used. There have been two "defences". One
is the claim that no-one is using it because no-one knows quite what
it's for. Well, there's always been a way of handling that. Assume
it's relevant to *your* special interest and *use it*. As a step towards
this:
Does anyone know any public domain programs for doing
interesting things with DNA sequences? (E.g. scanning
for particular patterns, comparing two sequences,
displaying them, ...) FORTRAN or PASCAL would be
preferred. Both linear and circular sequences should
of course be handled.
That's for someone who isn't on the net, and it's not in net.bio because
I think that newsgroup doesn't cross the Atlantic.
The other "defence" is the one I found distressing. A torrent of
hatred was directed against "creationists", claiming that "real"
biologists weren't using net.bio because creationists were fouling it.
Now this clearly isn't compatible with the argument that net.bio should
be killed because there is nothing in it!
Mathematicians don't froth at the mouth about people who claim to
have proven Fermat's theorem. They laugh at them, ignore them, say
"don't bother me, I have work to do", and some of them patiently explain
what's wrong with the proof. Yet every year sees a new crop of
circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, and cube-duplicators. Physicists
react the same way to people who "prove" that Einstein was wrong.
Astronomers don't hate Flat Earthers, and only claimed that Velikovsky
was wrong, not that he was disgustingly subhuman.
So what's different about Biology?
The creationists I know personally fall into two groups. One group
is the ones whose defence for their position is religious. The other
group is composed of MATHEMATICIANS. One of them, for example, is head
of a reputable statistics department and author of a couple of well
thought of statistics textbooks. It seems to me that the theory of
evolution NEEDS dialogue with such critics. I've lost count of the
number of times I've seen pseudo-statistical arguments presented by
evolutionists, such as the claim that there is a "learning to learn"
phenomenon, once life has reached a certain level of organisation
evolution progresses more rapidly. Now at the moment, that is just a
matter of FAITH. I've never seen a mathematical defence of it (and yes,
I DO read J. Theoret. Biol.). Without the challenge of the second group
of creationists I doubt whether there will ever be such a defence. Some
interesting work has been done on "local" consequences of variation (and
that is compatible with the creationist viewpoint!), so it is surprising
that the defence of the foundations is still just verbal. If anyone HAS
got a mathematical defence of the "evolving the ability to evolve" idea,
please let me know.
Then perhaps we could move the discussion into net.math. (:-)