Terence Tao: belief

Transcript context

…This brings up a topic I’ve been very curious about. You mentioned Darwin’s theory of evolution. There’s this book, The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick, which covers a lot of this era of history we’re talking about. He has this interesting observation in there. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Principia Mathematica was published in 1687. So The Origin of Species comes out two centuries after Principia. Conceptually, it seems like Darwin’s theory is simpler. There’s a contemporaneous biologist to Darwin, Thomas Huxley, who reads The Origin of Species and he says, “How stupid not to have thought of that.” Nobody ever says that about Principia, chiding themselves for not having beaten Newton to gravity. So there’s a question of why did it take longer? It seems like a big part of the reason is what you were saying. The evidence for natural selection is overwhelming in a certain sense, but it’s cumulative and retrospective, whereas Newton can just say, “Here are my equations. Let me see the moon’s orbital period and its distance, and if it lines up, then we’ve made progress.” Lucretius actually had this idea that species adapted to their environment in the first century BC but nobody really talks about it until Darwin because Lucretius couldn’t run some experiment and force people to pay attention. I wonder if we’ll in retrospect end up seeing much more progress in domains which have this kind of tight data loop where you can verify them quite easily, even though they’re conceptually much more difficult. I think one aspect of science is that it’s not just creating a new theory and validating it, but communicating it to others. Darwin was an amazing science communicator. He wrote in English, in natural language. I’m speaking like a— No Lean.…

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