Talk:Mediocrity principle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Criticisms

This section is given far too much prominence. Zazaban 01:55, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Boosted?

The introductory paragraph says:

The mediocrity principle is further boosted by:
  • Fossil evidence supported by genetics concluding that all humans have a common ancestor about 100,000 years ago and that they share a common ancestor with chimpanzees about six million years ago. Therefore humans are part of the biosphere, not above it or unique to it.
  • Humans share about 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have actually undergone more genetic change than humans[1].
  • The answering of Schrödinger's question What is Life? through the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the reduction of life to organic chemistry, negating the vitalism of previous centuries.
  • Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" suggests that consciousness is simply the function of the brain.
  • When the Human Genome Project released its findings in 2003, it was discovered that the human genome only has 24,000 genes. As recently as the 1990s, humans were considered so complex as to have about 300,000 genes.
  • Evolutionary psychology is discovering the limits to human rationality, biological psychology exposes the material nature of cognition and moral sense with fMRI scans, economic and political studies find regularities in the behaviors of large groups of humans.

These are not supporting evidences at all, since they have nothing specific to do with the mediocrity principal, and apply just as equally to its alternative hypothesis, the Rare_Earth_hypothesis. The following is the only point currently listed that has any credence in distinguishing this theory from any other:

  • Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is a lot larger than humans first thought and James Hutton discovered the Earth is a lot older. The Hubble Deep Field is a long exposure of thousands of galaxies, making it one of the best pictorial representations of the principle of mediocrity.

129.139.1.68 14:49, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

It looks like someone's gone to a lot of trouble to tinker with the opening, but still there's nothing really logical about what's there now - how does the picture of the Earth taken from the outskirts of the solar system add to the argument that the Earth is somehow just an ordinary planet like, presumably, thousands or millions or whatever out there. Now if you had a picture of an Earth-like (assuming of course that Earth-like planets are needed for intelligent life - I'm not even sure that Earth provides a meaningful example of such) planet orbiting some other star or better yet pictures of a hundred or a thousand Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, then you've got something of an argument. Unfortunately, no such empirical information exists - while I wouldn't be surprised to find intelligent life out there somewhere, I don't think we know enough to make even educated guesses.

jmdeur 15:30 24 April 2008 (UTC)