Earlier this year we lost Jessica Walter and Helen McCrory.

Talk about a one-two punch.

RIP Bryan St. Pere (drummer of Hum). Can't believe it.

Dreadfully sad news about Bryan. My condolences to those of you who knew him. He sounds like an awesome guy.

Owen wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:13 pm RIP Bryan St. Pere (drummer of Hum). Can't believe it.

Sorry to hear this. I wasn't a massive fan, but I really love Downward Is Heavenward.

Came here to say RIP Dick Lewontin (who is definitely not my namesake). Now would be a good time, for many reasons, to revisit this remarkable book:

Isadore Nabi wrote: Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:22 pm RIP Dick Lewontin

Sad to seem him go.

I think Steve Jones (who did a post-doc with Lewontin, or something like that) had it right when he wrote:

Lewontin excited me about science more than anybody else has ever done. He did the same for lots of people. If you trace the family tree of evolutionary biologists in the world, a suspiciously large number of them lead straight back to him. He has been pivotal in the subject.

He's sometimes a pernicious influence, though, in the sense that Marx or St. Augustine were. They may both have been wrong, but life would have been a lot less interesting if they hadn't been around.

(https://www.edge.org/conversation/steve ... -diversity)

A_Man_Who_Tries wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 11:50 pm McAfee was just.... I had a lengthy email exchange with him some years back and mental doesn't come close.

From what I've read about him he seemed like a very strange man, indeed. Enough material for a future biopic there, I reckon. Who'd play him is anyone's guess - maybe Johnny Depp could have pulled it off before he went off the rails himself. Or maybe being off the rails himself would make him a natural for the part.

It would really need to be a series, although they're doing The Mastermind already, and that makes McAfee's story almost pedestrian.

biscuitdough wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 10:07 am John Lawton, ex Uriah Heep and Lucifer's Friend.

That's a bummer. I love the first Lucifer's Friend record.

pldms wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 8:08 am I think Steve Jones (who did a post-doc with Lewontin, or something like that) had it right when he wrote:

Lewontin excited me about science more than anybody else has ever done. He did the same for lots of people. If you trace the family tree of evolutionary biologists in the world, a suspiciously large number of them lead straight back to him. He has been pivotal in the subject.

He's sometimes a pernicious influence, though, in the sense that Marx or St. Augustine were. They may both have been wrong, but life would have been a lot less interesting if they hadn't been around.

(https://www.edge.org/conversation/steve ... -diversity)

I'm a little slow on the draw here, but this was an interesting read. I agree w/ Jones that some degree of reductionism is necessary to make any progress, and it's true that what Lewontin and fellow travelers like Levins and Gould were often doing was a much-needed corrective to the "physics envy" tendencies prevalent in evolution and ecology at the time. (That said, though, they were just as apt to critique needless and unhelpful complexification.)

Where I disagree is that, spandrels notwithstanding, anti-reductionist systems thinking has also opened up productive new avenues. I'm an ecologist, and Lewontin's 1969 Brookhaven Symposium paper on "The meaning of stability" basically prefigured a huge swath of the most fruitful research programs -- alternative stable states, resilience, yadda yadda -- that are also among the most relevant in this age of ecological breakdown. Others like Buzz Holling were getting there around the same time, but Lewontin was the first to formulate a fully modern application of nonlinear dynamical systems theory to populations, communities and ecosystems. And dude wasn't even an ecologist, at least not in the sense that Janis Antonovics would have identified when he (perhaps apocryphally) asked everyone in the audience at a talk who had a Swiss army knife on them to hold it aloft.

So I wouldn't call Lewontin's spandrelisms wrong per se, but I do appreciate that quote for echoing The Dialectical Biologist's dedication: "To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time, but who got it right where it counted."

(Oh, and Dawkins still sucks.)