Hey Dave and Rog,
DMB
To paraphrase the author, static patterns don't change and improve all by
themselves. It takes a living being. Scientists are the ones who ask the
question, construct the experiment, conduct the tests, gathers the data,
draws the conclusions and publishes the results. You wanna leave them out of
it? Its true that intellectual patterns have an existence and a "life" all
their own in somesense, but to pretend scientists are anything less than
essential is preposterous.
RICK
Leave them out? By no means. An intellectual marketplace without
scientists would be like a financial marketplace without stock brokers. The
brokers are the handmaidens of the market. They make the calls, place the
orders, arrange the deals, evaluate the stocks, etc. But make no mistake,
the competition that everyone watches at the NYSE isn't between the brokers,
it's between the stocks. Similarly, while scientists are essential to the
intellectual marketplace, the competition which makes the analogy is between
the ideas. To fail to see this is to mistake the 'marketplace of ideas' for
a description of the scientific profession, rather than the scientific
endeavor.
rick
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