Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The "Economic Naturalist" series are actually the least annoying pop-econ books by a long way
... an economist writes:
This, from Dawkins, would be fair enough if he and his daughter had been hiking in Snowdonia, or across some tundra somewhere. But the "English Countryside" (Oxfordshire, I suppose?) is pretty much as man made as a landscape can get. If there is a wild flower growing there, it is growing because somebody has made a more or less conscious decision not to put weedkiller on it or plough it into a field. Particularly if it is "by the wayside", ie next to a road, or in a hedgerow (a hedgerow also being an entirely man made environment).
See also; the "intelligent design" of dogs. There was once an ur-dog, wolflike ancestor, and the process by which that ur-dog has Paris Hilton's handbag poodle as a descendant did, in a strict sense, operate by environmental selection on random genetic variation. But if some burst of radiation were to obliterate humanity and leave dogs, then the alien invasion which followed it would have a very odd theory of the development of dogs if it didn't posit an intelligent designer.
Actually, most of the stuff that people dislike about "Richard Dawkins in the 1990s" is attributable to Dennett.
this item posted by the management 11/15/2011 10:27:00 AM
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