H-D isn't what it used to be according to Stephen ben Yeshua

Mr. Jack,If you'll read post 8 carefully, you'll see that I say that I got the idea that farts are associated with demons leaving from an Abshalom post. But, demons being both malignant and impossible to detect with our senses, like natural gas, the idea that God would put a foul odor with them so we would know when they are leaving, appealed to me. I mean, it's what we do with natural gas! I still think it's an intriquing idea, but, in the H-D process, it has yet to make any testable predictions, and so remains fairly implausible. But if it is ever found out to be true, I'd want to make sure that Abshalom gets full credit.Don't believe M. when he calls me a creationist, by the way. The only thing worse than an evolutionist, I always say, is a creationist. I'm a truthist. I have followed the maturation of the ideas begun by Popper called Hypothetico-deductive scientific method, through Lakatose and Polanyi's contributions, up to Urbach's work. I don't believe, as M. accuses me, that science can prove anything. Truthism is the belief that truth exists, and that objective methodology can be discovered which brings one closer and closer to it. As things now stand, the best on-going definition of truth in my experience is from Einstein. Ideas whose predictions are borne out by experience.Creationists couldn't come up with an idea as neat as God associating demons with farts, so we would have a better idea of what's going on. (And, of course, expressing His opinion of the demons!)Stephen

Percy,I will try to answer some of your questions about the scientific work for which I am best known,First, when I was doing this work, I was indeed an evolutionist, ending my book (1972) with a ringing, to me, affirmation that man was just another animal, evolved and to be understood by the same standards we apply to other animals. But, seeds of doubt had been placed in my mind at Princeton, where the population ecologists were, at least, putting evolution on a back burner. As I have posted elsewhere, I saw Henry Horn's door with the sign, "The Origin of Specious by the Selection of Natural Means" and thought that he was having doubts. They also were very much into Tolkein, some sort of theist, I think.There were two problems: first, evolution was an awkward tool for studying the distribution and abundance of species, which seemed worth knowing about. second, evolution was not falsifiable. Nobody could think of a study that, if it got certain results, said that evolution was untrue. We hadn't gotten into strong inference yet, although I had read Tricker's summary of the Bayesian method for evaluating "scientific speculation." But, Popper was popular. I think, eventually, Popper excused evolution from falsifiability. But, it seemed so damned tautological! Oh, also Velikovsky was at Princeton then, affirming a lot of Biblical stuff, and being right in so many predictions.Anyway, doing my "Physics Envy" that Horn accused me of having, I took the derivation of the ideal gas law from a course in P-Chem, and applied it to solving the territorial behavior problem that had been around since the 20's, since Howard's small book was published. I thought of the territorial birds as ideally behaving gas particles, distributing themselves according to evolutionary pressures, and came up with an Ideal Free Distribution. I had to make, (as I was taught in P-Chem) untrue assumptions (birds make perfect choices, and have no cost to movement between habitats---compare with "gas molecules have no mass or volume".), but the result was an interesting null-hypothesis or baseline to compare what we actually saw with. I introduced some different evolutionary pressures (an Allee effect) and aggressive territorial behavior, to get other predictions. I then studied two different birds, the Field Sparrows, with territorial behavior that appeared to only signal density, and Dickcissels, with aggresive territorial behavior. They both did what they were supposed to do. The dickcissel, it turns out, also did some of the things that Allee type curves generated. I spend the next ten years showing that, indeed, this was also a part of their ecology.The territorial behavior study got started when I read a book by David Lack, who argued that birds don't defend territories as Howard had claimed, and Ardry was implying. It made me really angry, and I set out to prove Lack wrong. I worked really hard to show that even Field Sparrows were defending their territories, but the data just wouldn't confirm the predictions from that idea. My bayesian discipline tempered my subjective goals, and the appeal that territorial defense had to me, and made me change my mind. But I had more fun with the Dickcissel, where the males do defend their territories. In the end, I had to say that Lack was right in some cases, but so was Howard!Meanwhile, Jesus Freaks in my 1970 classes at K-State were hounding me and others regarding evolution and creation. Remember student radicals were burning buildings then, so we listened. The questions raised at Princeton were re-raised. My H-D studies were working great, so I told the JF's that I would put their ideas to a true science test. They were throwing Kuhn at me, at well, claiming that I and the rest of the scientific community were just playing out a political con. I wanted to be, and to prove to them that I was, a truth seeking scientist, not one of those that Kuhn discusses, and that MacArthur and Horn had warned me were out there.Meanwhile, typical sixties social changes were making my family life and marriage miserable, inciting me to explore all sorts of alternatives.So, I ended up doing prayer experiments, with both plants and personal issues. These worked amazingly well. When it seemed likely that this Jehovah person was really out there, I made an effort to get an interview, and ask Him about evolution. This succeeded, and He said that evolution had many true points to make about the way He created and maintained biological diversity, but was basically wrong. Most selection was artificial, not natural, and most genetic changes were engineered, not random mutations. He said that there was a lot that I couldn't understand yet, but that if I stuck around, He'd enjoy helping me learn.I'll look into inclusive fitness distribtion, and respond later.Stephen

Percy,I briefly checked on Morris' paper, on Inclusive Fitness. We used to try to assess Hamilton's IF ideas by studying alarm notes in the birds we netted. We noted that birds that traveled in family groups tended to give alarm notes, more than birds that appeared to be in flocks of strangers. As if they were warning their kin. Don't know where that theory is now. Have to ask Rohwer at the Burke Museum at Seattle. But, IF is a plausible idea, and will give false positives to the ideal despotic tests. That is, certain species will appear to be defending their territories, but will only be manifesting sacrificial moves that enhance the genome. The two can be separated by introducing defense related variables, such as territory size, or cover, which makes territorial defense less practical. As the density-success correlation is dependent on these variables, that confirms that it is based on territorial aggression.Thanks for the tip. It's an interesting study that I missed.Stephen