This thread tends to confuse provability with true, a distinction that Godel clarified. Godel's result applies to any interesting formal system, of which logic is one, The result is that in any interesting formal system, some things are unproveable but we believe them to be true and some things are proveable and their negation is proveable also. So it is hard to make the further claim that any formal system can be true.
The continuum hypothesis, due to Cantor, has been shown, partly by Godel, to be consistent with the usual axioms, but not proveable. The continuum hypothesis is that the power set of the integers is equal to the number of points on a line. Godel spend his last years searching for the axiom to add to the standard axioms, such that the continuum hypothesis would be proveable.
Godel was a Platoist and considered intuition to be necessary to mathematics, and his theorem is generally considered to prove this. One should be cautious in that intutition is a technical terms, and is a generalization of Kantian intuition.
Here is my ideosyncric take. Timaeous by Plato lays down the claim generally called the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. In case of contradiction, there is an axiom that can be added to resolve the contradiction. Godel says in effect, it is good there is such an axiom, since you have to add it. And the process of adding it involves creativity. Take this with a grain of salt, but Timaeous was a favorite of Godel.
Regarding the limits of Godel's proof, it does not necessarily apply to infinitely large axiom sets. So perhaps God has an infinite axiom set, in contradiction to the usual claim that God does not use axioms.
I do not think I am right-wing, but assuming that people are often suggestible to their detriment seems like a good bet. Whole industries are based on this assumption. The US military, which is probably predominately right wing, has had a historical concern with the following statistic: during world war II, 40% of the soldiers in their first combat did not fire their weapon. This is after some training designed, to among other things, desensitize the troops to killing. One of the US military's new tools to deal with this problem is... video games. Indeed, I have read claims that some of the names in video games got their start working on such projects on military contracts.
So, on the level of scientific evidence, the above is just suggestive. But I would bet $10 that the military has some studies that show video games work for them in desensitizing troops to killing. But I suspect they do not freely publish such studies.
I'm the odd man out. I figure the ozone hole due to CFC is unproven, but as of a few days ago, I decided that this year I will believe in global warning due to greenhouse gases.
I will try to be informative. A fairly recent change in science is computer models. Here we immeadiately have the computer said so, so it must be right phenomena and the garbage in garbage out phenomena warring with each other. The resolution is partly that a computer model is validated by being able to predict the past. Then we think it can predict the future. In the global warnming theories, the computer models have not been validated. EXCEPT: this May's Nature is supposed to have an article describing the validation of two models. I even think slashdot covered this. So I expect to be convinced this year.
On ozone depletion models, there are probably many problems. I mention a garbage in phenomena: The ground level UV readings were cooked.
The parent has it right in that fusion research has been limited by funding and the funding is designed so fusion is an option about 2050, not before.
Fusion has been an engineering problem for years, not primarily a scientific problem. It is still an engineering problem, as with respect to the reactor walls. And even if was scientific, good engineers have gone beyond the science regularly, and then let science catch up.
Useful to recall, we could have had a net power production fusion reactor in 1950s, the old theta pinch models. Too long to be economical, I still used to tick off the slime people by referencing it, back when people would say fusion power was impossible.
It applies as a cite to the general welfare as a reason for "a" government to be in business. Many state constitutions have similar provisions. Here we had a state statue to prevent a municipality from doing wifi utilities. Suppose wifi is an example of supporting the general welfare, particularly where corporations will not. One theory, which I subscribe to, is that a government's legitimency is based on the government acting in the interests of the general welfare. In this light, and under the previous assumption, the state statue is illegitament.
The enumerated powers argument is a bit theoretical. I suspect you also reject the New Deal:-)
The government is supposed to go into certain businesses. This is a playback of the 1920's public vs private power issues. Then power was being marketed as something for rich people. Later under Roosevelt, the government enabled even rural people to have electricity.
In Tacoma, WA, the municipality has a public power utility and it added broadband cable, over the opposition of comcast, then at&t. The private sector all the sudden started doing capital investments that they were not going to be doing otherwise.
Government not supposed to be in business is pretty simplistic. You know the constitution provides in the preamble for the general welfare. Nobody much seriously claims public stock companies consider the general welfare. Some people like to espouse the Satanist doctrine that from the private greed comes the common good, but this seems to fail often.
Looking at your sig, I am inclined to vent a bit on the patent system issue, and where it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Patents last less than 20 years. They are backed by the deadly force of the US government. This is the same deadly force that killed 300,000 Iraqi children. And continuous to kill them. In the grand scheme of things, most of the slashdot crowd will still be around when the patents expire. So let the sleezy corporations patent all the obvious stuff and twenty years down the road it will not be an issue for the stuff they are patenting today. The kids howerver are dead.
The world IMO is chaotically unruly. The patent mess and the dead kids are part of the same problem in this view. People are just not very reasonable. Unless you have more deadly force available than the government, there is not an easy solution to either of the cited problems. However, reality breaking into peoples lives has a tendency to make people a little saner. Encouraging sanity is however a troublesome endeavor. You could however start by finding a sig that makes people thougtful, as opposed to them responding emotionally to sound bites.
Sort of a strange reply to a paraphrase of Marx. But looking at your definition of capitialism, I guess you would not call Capitialist the financial activities of Soros, for example, currency speculation. Maybe you are defining capitialism as exclusively concerned with the *physical* economy. Since the financial capitialist tends to loot the physical economy, you may be on to something of a positive redefinition of capitialism. But for nominalism's sake, what shall we call Soros?
Professionalism is the praxis of logical positivism. Logical positivism has rather limited virtues. I think the so-called professionalism of journalism is part of the problem we have in this country. Professionalism in other fields is also a problem, for instance, the expert with the briefcase coming in and doing urban renewal.
In journalism, professionalism seems to have as a practice giving the approved two sides to every question. I guess I am non-standard. I tend to have a different opinion than the approved two sides. For instance, while I think Bush is an already realized disaster, I only had hopes that Kerry would grow in stature in the job sufficiency to deal competently with the coming crisii.
In the slashdot context, people probably have some negative experiences about the "professional" consultant.
Good science has the property that it increases man's efficient power over the universe. For instance, potential population density, which you might observe through your senses is higher than that of apes. This sort of sense reference is different than the sense-certainity you reference, in that it concentrates on the paradoxes sense-certainity serves up. That is why good science is not really a sense-certainity game. And it has the property that it is efficient with respect to the actual reality.
But I have the idea the unfortunate Bush victory has embolden some of the fundies to spout off. Bush's heartland is the old confederacy. Sort of GOP and slave-holder values, err, share-holder values. Back in the 20's there was a big religious revival in the south. The KKK's intinerate preachers were all over the Northwest. We had the Scopes monkey trial, which brings up this history lesson. And by 1931 the fundies were history. What happened? The depression. People got hungry and this increased their relative sanity. So as you watch the Bush wars and the Bush economy take us down in a spiral of poverty, remember this too shall pass, and so shall the fundies.
Actually, there is merit in your idea. The idea of codification of laws, as opposed to a hodgepodge at random, is a fairly recent reform. Nineteen century. John Stuart Mills was an advocate. A markup language might impose addtional structure, to the benefit of clarity and consistency.
Right now the clarity and consistency that we get is due to kinda of clerks that take the political output and clean it up. This has a long tradition and I think of Jefferson writing the actual verbaige of the Constitution. Administrative agencies, being legislative in one of their functions, have a little office that does this with the administrative code.
I sometimes advocate that all laws be written in COBOL, not lisp. Think of the benefits. More tech jobs for old techies. Machine executable. And with development cycles what they are, less laws. Maybe we could also retire some of the worse politicians, since they cannot say anything that would make sense to a computer. Might eliminate some lawyers from office too. But maybe lisp would be better.
Come on, the co2 level a hundred years ago was solidly less than fifty years ago, but few claim that there was an antropogenic temperature increase in the early half of the twenthieth century. Oops, I am wrong. There was an antropogenic temperature change at about the turn of the century because people were switching to steam ships and this "caused" a change in temperature.
The real junk science issue is that the villian will not release his raw data so it can be done right, which makes a reasonable person think he fudged it on purpose. Certainly he is covering up.
I think the other computer models as applied to the greenhouse effect are junk science too. Not just because people plug them, but because they have yet to get a convincingly validated model, but the newspaper headlines do not reflect this.
Still, the co2 increase is real and substantial. So lets build lots of nucs.
Your argument is convincing, except when you look at how BLS calculates inflation. And many of its other numbers. My "suspicion" I referenced was that inflation is underestimated and the way it is cooked is relevant to your argument. In a way, it supports your argument if you look at it cross eyed. (And BLS needs glasses)
I googled bls hedonic and got this
which seems to explain what is going on. People should read it and remember it the next time they get a cost of living adjustment.
I think the parent poster will find it interesting as well. The thrust of his argument, that it is more expensive to live now than it was, even accounting for "official" inflation, is a correct argument. And it is fully true that this disportionately affects lower income people.
I googled and found an inflation calculator and for what is worth a $5800 cost in 1985 is equivalent to a 2003 $10000 cost, sort of close to $11K. Might be fun to play with, but I also claim the government figures this is based on are suspect, but that is a different rant.
My conclusion is that parent poster is underestimating the effects of inflation.
Oh, that is too hard on the boss. My risk to life was just the ordinary freeway risk. Please remember that the volcano is probably like a 100 miles away. We sometime have clear skys out here so you could see it from a distance. And I think his rant was going to the idea that I should have called the vice president who lives near the office and have him take care of it.
We called him "old alligator shoes". I sort of liked him. He was pure in his excessiveness.
I think you are blowing smoke on the nuclear power plant being potentially affected. As you say, there were a few hundred square miles affected. Take the square root of that and compare to your 50 miles away. And you are worrying about "shock", whatever that is. I guess you mean earthquakes, but these are even at the eruption mainly a local affair. You also compared it to many hydrogen bombs. My memory of press stories was it was compared to an atomic bomb, not many fusion bombs. The comparision needs to be considered also on total energy released vs length of time released.
So I conjecture you are a anti-nuclear alarmist.
I live in Seattle and could see the eruption. I have a small IT story from this occasion. I saw the plume and immeadiately left my new wife and kid over their protests and drove to the shop and shut down the computers, particular the disk drives. These were the old winchester models. I was the EDP supervisor. The issue was if the plume blew north, the the grit would get in the disk drives and wreck them.
When next at work, the boss wanted to chew me out for not properly taking care of assets that were signed out to me as supervisor. I was pleased to cut him short.
This guy is a skinnarian. Probably wanted the patent so he could better peddle psuedo-science for fun and profit. But Skinner did do well at describing the behavior of machines, as opposed to humans, so there is a certain twisty logic here. In fact, a lot of AI still is fundamentally consistent with Skinner.
Most all the postings on this story are making the assumptions prevalent to the last forty years. Yet if the topic is evolution of economic systems, then a broader view is called for. People should include the data points of FDR, Lincoln, and Hamilton. I would think that even the youngsters among you might have a clue that the New Deal had different intentions for corporate behavior than we have been inculcated to expect.
With respect to the Soviet Union, the simple minded are calling it an economic failure without noting the paradox that the military sector was successful and relatively efficient, while the civilian sector was the pits. A good explanation for the paradox, from someone who predicted the date of the collapse five years out, is that the Soviet Union did not have what we would call entrepenurial small privately owned corporations to invent better ways of doing things. In this view, US capitialism is a danger to itself, and not least because of the dominate role of large public corporations.
A capitialist state that discrimates against speculation will do better for us. Note that Malaysia's relative quick recovery from the "Asian flu" as compared to those neighbors who followed the IMF prescriptions give us a current data point.
And without a data point, I claim that descrimination against publicly traded corporations would be a good idea. One of the things this does is keep the scale of the corporations down, and thus tend to keep them out of political power.
What is wrong with the reference to the Euler controversey? On fundamental issues, you have to go to primary sources anyway. And any of your math friends will have a gloss on this. Some assembly required.
I never said evolution is not a nicely pragmatic and successful theory. I said I did not have much use for it in a throwaway as I went on to a criticism from outside its boundaries. But I note an appeal to pragmatism in your response and I do reject that appeal.
The thing that caught my eye was in a parent post where it seemed to me you were saying the standard theory is in fact discontinuous in the detail, and thus not different than punctuated equilibrium for instance. I think that sort of position could usefully be informed by some of the great debates in mathematics. I think here of Newton vs Leibnitz and the controversies surrounding Euler.
I personally do not have a lot of use for evolution, but I know a little about mathematics. The grand systhesis is traditionally describable by a continuous function, and Gould implicitly argues for a discontinuous function. Your point seems to be that at a small enough time scale, traditional approaches are also discontinous. I think that begs the rather far-reaching systemic bias toward continuous functions in the grand systhesis and elsewhere.
I will troll a bit and say that if the creationist were to leave out the Bible and their delusional personal gods, then they might be able to come up with a decent argument on evolution having a direction, which argument would be against Darwin. But Gould would maybe fit better to their argument.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed
This thread tends to confuse provability with true, a distinction that Godel clarified. Godel's result applies to any interesting formal system, of which logic is one, The result is that in any interesting formal system, some things are unproveable but we believe them to be true and some things are proveable and their negation is proveable also. So it is hard to make the further claim that any formal system can be true.
The continuum hypothesis, due to Cantor, has been shown, partly by Godel, to be consistent with the usual axioms, but not proveable. The continuum hypothesis is that the power set of the integers is equal to the number of points on a line. Godel spend his last years searching for the axiom to add to the standard axioms, such that the continuum hypothesis would be proveable.
Godel was a Platoist and considered intuition to be necessary to mathematics, and his theorem is generally considered to prove this. One should be cautious in that intutition is a technical terms, and is a generalization of Kantian intuition.
Here is my ideosyncric take. Timaeous by Plato lays down the claim generally called the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis. In case of contradiction, there is an axiom that can be added to resolve the contradiction. Godel says in effect, it is good there is such an axiom, since you have to add it. And the process of adding it involves creativity. Take this with a grain of salt, but Timaeous was a favorite of Godel.
Regarding the limits of Godel's proof, it does not necessarily apply to infinitely large axiom sets. So perhaps God has an infinite axiom set, in contradiction to the usual claim that God does not use axioms.
I do not think I am right-wing, but assuming that people are often suggestible to their detriment seems like a good bet. Whole industries are based on this assumption. The US military, which is probably predominately right wing, has had a historical concern with the following statistic: during world war II, 40% of the soldiers in their first combat did not fire their weapon. This is after some training designed, to among other things, desensitize the troops to killing. One of the US military's new tools to deal with this problem is ... video games. Indeed, I have read claims that some of the names in video games got their start working on such projects on military contracts.
So, on the level of scientific evidence, the above is just suggestive. But I would bet $10 that the military has some studies that show video games work for them in desensitizing troops to killing. But I suspect they do not freely publish such studies.
I'm the odd man out. I figure the ozone hole due to CFC is unproven, but as of a few days ago, I decided that this year I will believe in global warning due to greenhouse gases.
I will try to be informative. A fairly recent change in science is computer models. Here we immeadiately have the computer said so, so it must be right phenomena and the garbage in garbage out phenomena warring with each other. The resolution is partly that a computer model is validated by being able to predict the past. Then we think it can predict the future. In the global warnming theories, the computer models have not been validated. EXCEPT: this May's Nature is supposed to have an article describing the validation of two models. I even think slashdot covered this. So I expect to be convinced this year.
On ozone depletion models, there are probably many problems. I mention a garbage in phenomena: The ground level UV readings were cooked.
The parent has it right in that fusion research has been limited by funding and the funding is designed so fusion is an option about 2050, not before.
Fusion has been an engineering problem for years, not primarily a scientific problem. It is still an engineering problem, as with respect to the reactor walls. And even if was scientific, good engineers have gone beyond the science regularly, and then let science catch up.
Useful to recall, we could have had a net power production fusion reactor in 1950s, the old theta pinch models. Too long to be economical, I still used to tick off the slime people by referencing it, back when people would say fusion power was impossible.
It applies as a cite to the general welfare as a reason for "a" government to be in business. Many state constitutions have similar provisions. Here we had a state statue to prevent a municipality from doing wifi utilities. Suppose wifi is an example of supporting the general welfare, particularly where corporations will not. One theory, which I subscribe to, is that a government's legitimency is based on the government acting in the interests of the general welfare. In this light, and under the previous assumption, the state statue is illegitament.
:-)
The enumerated powers argument is a bit theoretical. I suspect you also reject the New Deal
The government is supposed to go into certain businesses. This is a playback of the 1920's public vs private power issues. Then power was being marketed as something for rich people. Later under Roosevelt, the government enabled even rural people to have electricity.
In Tacoma, WA, the municipality has a public power utility and it added broadband cable, over the opposition of comcast, then at&t. The private sector all the sudden started doing capital investments that they were not going to be doing otherwise.
Government not supposed to be in business is pretty simplistic. You know the constitution provides in the preamble for the general welfare. Nobody much seriously claims public stock companies consider the general welfare. Some people like to espouse the Satanist doctrine that from the private greed comes the common good, but this seems to fail often.
Looking at your sig, I am inclined to vent a bit on the patent system issue, and where it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Patents last less than 20 years. They are backed by the deadly force of the US government. This is the same deadly force that killed 300,000 Iraqi children. And continuous to kill them. In the grand scheme of things, most of the slashdot crowd will still be around when the patents expire. So let the sleezy corporations patent all the obvious stuff and twenty years down the road it will not be an issue for the stuff they are patenting today. The kids howerver are dead.
The world IMO is chaotically unruly. The patent mess and the dead kids are part of the same problem in this view. People are just not very reasonable. Unless you have more deadly force available than the government, there is not an easy solution to either of the cited problems. However, reality breaking into peoples lives has a tendency to make people a little saner. Encouraging sanity is however a troublesome endeavor. You could however start by finding a sig that makes people thougtful, as opposed to them responding emotionally to sound bites.
Sort of a strange reply to a paraphrase of Marx. But looking at your definition of capitialism, I guess you would not call Capitialist the financial activities of Soros, for example, currency speculation. Maybe you are defining capitialism as exclusively concerned with the *physical* economy. Since the financial capitialist tends to loot the physical economy, you may be on to something of a positive redefinition of capitialism. But for nominalism's sake, what shall we call Soros?
Professionalism is the praxis of logical positivism. Logical positivism has rather limited virtues. I think the so-called professionalism of journalism is part of the problem we have in this country. Professionalism in other fields is also a problem, for instance, the expert with the briefcase coming in and doing urban renewal.
In journalism, professionalism seems to have as a practice giving the approved two sides to every question. I guess I am non-standard. I tend to have a different opinion than the approved two sides. For instance, while I think Bush is an already realized disaster, I only had hopes that Kerry would grow in stature in the job sufficiency to deal competently with the coming crisii.
In the slashdot context, people probably have some negative experiences about the "professional" consultant.
Good science has the property that it increases man's efficient power over the universe. For instance, potential population density, which you might observe through your senses is higher than that of apes. This sort of sense reference is different than the sense-certainity you reference, in that it concentrates on the paradoxes sense-certainity serves up. That is why good science is not really a sense-certainity game. And it has the property that it is efficient with respect to the actual reality.
But I have the idea the unfortunate Bush victory has embolden some of the fundies to spout off. Bush's heartland is the old confederacy. Sort of GOP and slave-holder values, err, share-holder values. Back in the 20's there was a big religious revival in the south. The KKK's intinerate preachers were all over the Northwest. We had the Scopes monkey trial, which brings up this history lesson. And by 1931 the fundies were history. What happened? The depression. People got hungry and this increased their relative sanity. So as you watch the Bush wars and the Bush economy take us down in a spiral of poverty, remember this too shall pass, and so shall the fundies.
Actually, there is merit in your idea. The idea of codification of laws, as opposed to a hodgepodge at random, is a fairly recent reform. Nineteen century. John Stuart Mills was an advocate. A markup language might impose addtional structure, to the benefit of clarity and consistency.
Right now the clarity and consistency that we get is due to kinda of clerks that take the political output and clean it up. This has a long tradition and I think of Jefferson writing the actual verbaige of the Constitution. Administrative agencies, being legislative in one of their functions, have a little office that does this with the administrative code.
I wonder what the politics would be of a python law. Probably pushed by a bunch of hippies. But the anarchists would tag buildings with perl.
I sometimes advocate that all laws be written in COBOL, not lisp. Think of the benefits. More tech jobs for old techies. Machine executable. And with development cycles what they are, less laws. Maybe we could also retire some of the worse politicians, since they cannot say anything that would make sense to a computer. Might eliminate some lawyers from office too. But maybe lisp would be better.
Come on, the co2 level a hundred years ago was solidly less than fifty years ago, but few claim that there was an antropogenic temperature increase in the early half of the twenthieth century. Oops, I am wrong. There was an antropogenic temperature change at about the turn of the century because people were switching to steam ships and this "caused" a change in temperature.
The real junk science issue is that the villian will not release his raw data so it can be done right, which makes a reasonable person think he fudged it on purpose. Certainly he is covering up.
I think the other computer models as applied to the greenhouse effect are junk science too. Not just because people plug them, but because they have yet to get a convincingly validated model, but the newspaper headlines do not reflect this.
Still, the co2 increase is real and substantial. So lets build lots of nucs.
I googled bls hedonic and got this which seems to explain what is going on. People should read it and remember it the next time they get a cost of living adjustment.
I think the parent poster will find it interesting as well. The thrust of his argument, that it is more expensive to live now than it was, even accounting for "official" inflation, is a correct argument. And it is fully true that this disportionately affects lower income people.
I have some doubt that Bush is sane enough to be a liar. I think he had a fantasy world in his head.
Here is a different election prediction: it will be a landside victory, but I do not know who wins.
My conclusion is that parent poster is underestimating the effects of inflation.
Oh, that is too hard on the boss. My risk to life was just the ordinary freeway risk. Please remember that the volcano is probably like a 100 miles away. We sometime have clear skys out here so you could see it from a distance. And I think his rant was going to the idea that I should have called the vice president who lives near the office and have him take care of it.
We called him "old alligator shoes". I sort of liked him. He was pure in his excessiveness.
So I conjecture you are a anti-nuclear alarmist.
I live in Seattle and could see the eruption. I have a small IT story from this occasion. I saw the plume and immeadiately left my new wife and kid over their protests and drove to the shop and shut down the computers, particular the disk drives. These were the old winchester models. I was the EDP supervisor. The issue was if the plume blew north, the the grit would get in the disk drives and wreck them.
When next at work, the boss wanted to chew me out for not properly taking care of assets that were signed out to me as supervisor. I was pleased to cut him short.
This guy is a skinnarian. Probably wanted the patent so he could better peddle psuedo-science for fun and profit. But Skinner did do well at describing the behavior of machines, as opposed to humans, so there is a certain twisty logic here. In fact, a lot of AI still is fundamentally consistent with Skinner.
Most all the postings on this story are making the assumptions prevalent to the last forty years. Yet if the topic is evolution of economic systems, then a broader view is called for. People should include the data points of FDR, Lincoln, and Hamilton. I would think that even the youngsters among you might have a clue that the New Deal had different intentions for corporate behavior than we have been inculcated to expect.
With respect to the Soviet Union, the simple minded are calling it an economic failure without noting the paradox that the military sector was successful and relatively efficient, while the civilian sector was the pits. A good explanation for the paradox, from someone who predicted the date of the collapse five years out, is that the Soviet Union did not have what we would call entrepenurial small privately owned corporations to invent better ways of doing things. In this view, US capitialism is a danger to itself, and not least because of the dominate role of large public corporations.
A capitialist state that discrimates against speculation will do better for us. Note that Malaysia's relative quick recovery from the "Asian flu" as compared to those neighbors who followed the IMF prescriptions give us a current data point.
And without a data point, I claim that descrimination against publicly traded corporations would be a good idea. One of the things this does is keep the scale of the corporations down, and thus tend to keep them out of political power.
ah, where is my clue bat.
What is wrong with the reference to the Euler controversey? On fundamental issues, you have to go to primary sources anyway. And any of your math friends will have a gloss on this. Some assembly required.
I never said evolution is not a nicely pragmatic and successful theory. I said I did not have much use for it in a throwaway as I went on to a criticism from outside its boundaries. But I note an appeal to pragmatism in your response and I do reject that appeal.
The thing that caught my eye was in a parent post where it seemed to me you were saying the standard theory is in fact discontinuous in the detail, and thus not different than punctuated equilibrium for instance. I think that sort of position could usefully be informed by some of the great debates in mathematics. I think here of Newton vs Leibnitz and the controversies surrounding Euler.
I personally do not have a lot of use for evolution, but I know a little about mathematics. The grand systhesis is traditionally describable by a continuous function, and Gould implicitly argues for a discontinuous function. Your point seems to be that at a small enough time scale, traditional approaches are also discontinous. I think that begs the rather far-reaching systemic bias toward continuous functions in the grand systhesis and elsewhere.
I will troll a bit and say that if the creationist were to leave out the Bible and their delusional personal gods, then they might be able to come up with a decent argument on evolution having a direction, which argument would be against Darwin. But Gould would maybe fit better to their argument.