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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 8:05pmSanction this postReply
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Roger,

What makes Overman's book worthy of your attention? Or anyone's?


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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 8:29pmSanction this postReply
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It is a book of influence - and however erroneous, neferious influence..

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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 10:13pmSanction this postReply
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Adam Reed wrote:
What makes Overman's book worthy of your attention? Or anyone's?

I originally was intrigued from a mathematical standpoint, in that he raised the subject of the occurrence of Fibonacci sequences in nature. However, what made it worth my while to analyze and critique, was that it afforded me a chance to express a number of Objectivist points in response to a contemporary writer, rather than just a strawman opponent. These people really do exist, and they need to be answered. You don't need to read it, no one on this list needs to read it. But it ought to encourage you to know that one of us read it and answered it, that the battle is being fought, that pseudo-intellectual glosses on superstitition do not get off scot-free.

Robert Malcolm commented:
It is a book of influence - and however erroneous, nefarious influence..
Exactly.

REB


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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 10:18pmSanction this postReply
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Glad someone's fighting the good fight! :)

"We scrub bubbles so you don't have to!"

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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 10:39pmSanction this postReply
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It's amazing to me that Overman could think the Fibonacci sequence was somehow evidence of an intelligent guide to creation. It doesn't exactly take godlike levels of genius to find the next entry in a sequence by summing its last two known integers.

Fibonacci himself conceived of the sequence by imagining a population of breeding rabbits, a perfectly natural phenomenon and one that (as far as I can tell) is not guided by the hand of some all-knowing creator. And given the structure of the sequence itself, it makes perfect sense that it would show up in many parts of nature. As mathematical patterns go, it hardly carries the same mystery as, say, the golden ratio.

Edited for a horribly redundant word choice ....

(Edited by Andrew Bissell on 11/11, 11:03pm)


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Friday, November 11, 2005 - 10:51pmSanction this postReply
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Andrew: "And given the nature of the sequence itself, it makes perfect sense that it would show up in many parts of nature."

You know, that makes me think of something...Promoters of ID point to recurring forms in nature, such as the spiral in galaxies, snail shells, and whirpools, or the binary nature of plants and people, as "the fingerprint of God"...You'd think that if there were a conscious creator behind it all, there'd be MORE variation,not less, right? One could say that these are ideal forms, which is why man returns to basic forms even in the most complex structures, but why would an omniscienct creator be subject to having to use the same forms over and over?

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Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 6:46amSanction this postReply
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Well, Joe - to take the Devil's point - perhaps it would be because of interest in seeing all the variables [or variations, if you will] which could be gained from those few...;-)
(Edited by robert malcom on 11/12, 6:48am)


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