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To: Taliesan

But to be fair, the good professor has a Ph.D. in biology -- the short bus of science.


69 posted on 08/30/2006 10:58:48 AM PDT by AmishDude (`[N]on-state actors' can project force around the world more easily than Canada". -- Mark Steyn)
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To: AmishDude

Hey, I have a B.S. in Zoology and it wasn't a soft science (then - UCLA Class 1969).

They taught me a great tool which these fools have either never learned or forgotten.

Occam's Razor.

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (Guilhelmi Ockam and Guillermi de ockam in Latin [1]). Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories.

Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness):

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,

which translates to:

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor


84 posted on 08/30/2006 12:51:02 PM PDT by tomswiftjr (Remember Pearl Harbor)
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