Post Category → Science

Jumping Off Point!

Jumping Off Point!

This is the first post for The Musophyst.  Hello and welcome.  I’ve coined the term Musophyst as an aggregation of my primary interests – Music, philosophy, science, and technology.  Each of these areas of interest encompass a wide range of topics.  Regarding music, I will delve into issues of music composition, performance, recording, and appreciation.   Much comes under the rubric of philosophy, but my specific interests lie in cognitive philosophy and universal Darwinism.  The science aspect will include many topics from physics to neuroscience to cosmology.  And finally I will include posts about the technology that pervades our lives, as well as my detailed take on hardware and software design and architecture issues as a professional in that arena for more than three decades.

Photo credit: "lapolab" / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Darwin Misunderstood

Darwin Misunderstood

Darwin’s theory of evolution may well be the most important scientific breakthrough of all time. It describes how a simple iterative process applied over long periods can lead to results of staggering complexity.  The ramifications of this are only now, over a century and a half after Darwin’s seminal work, beginning to be fully appreciated.  The far-reaching implications of the theory are now categorized under the rubric of Universal Darwinism, a topic I will return to many times in these pages.

For the moment, I want to concentrate on what I believe are common, even pervasive, misunderstandings about how biological evolution works. Continue reading →