No, that's not the offense, js1138. When I said that Doc's argument struck me as mindless, I meant exactly that. I thought it was irrational.
Doc seems to suggest that the failure of Soviet agriculture was due to Stalin's poor choice of a scientist. I gather Doc thinks that if Stalin had just gone with Darwin instead of Lysenko, Soviet agriculture would have thrived. [Maybe Lysenko would have, too. But he alas was also purged by Stalin....]
Which is, of course, totally bogus on the historical record. Soviet agriculture failed because Stalin decided to destroy the Kulaks, a small-propertied class of farmers (rather like those imagined in Thomas Jefferson's reveries], titled to land by ancestral birthright, from whose produce the Russian people had historically been able to feed itself more or less. Certainly the Kulaks and their families and communities had a certain independence from the common trend.
So Stalin wiped them out by the scores of millions. And then collectivized their lands. Marxist Planning was to substitute for long perduring, deep human connections with the soil, its own theory of rational agricultural planning and production -- all of which made possible by the destruction of every human community within its sway, and a way of life and livelihood to boot.
But hey! these are merely the eggs one has to break to make an omelette, you know. [No wonder Soviet agriculture failed....]
To the best of my knowledge (such as it is), up to its last gasp, the USSR was a net importer of the most basic foodstuffs, such as wheat.
If Stalin wanted a scientist to help him with such tedious business as feeding his people, then I don't see where Darwin would have been of much help. Stalin would have done better to (a) leave the Kulaks alone; and (b) check out the hybridization work first conducted by Mendel. But he was no "intellectual"; and I digress.
Had the Levises, Lewontins, and Chomsky's of our world lived during the Stalin era, I feel reasonably certain that they would sooner or later have been "purged," each and all of them. And any other suchlike ingrates.
js1138, I really liked this:
Underlying randomness noes not preclude emerging order.
To me it seems the single most fascinating prospect of science as it emerges today is the reconciliation of the perspectives of the microworld of quantum theory, the macroworld of Newtonian mechanics, and their common context in Einsteinian relativity theory and beyond.
And I also really liked this:
We do not know if there is a scale at which natural selection might appear to be the workings of a mind.
No, we don't. But that's what we're looking for.
Note that Stalin (and Lenin before him) could have used either Witte's or Stolypin's reforms. Either would have produced enough food to avoid the starvation of Kulaks. See Crankshaw's "Shadow of the Winter Palace" for some history.
I can believe that biologists - and particularly evolutionary biologists – didn’t much care about complexity (please refer to the definitions at post 875.)
But mathematicians care a great deal about such things. Evolution makes no sense unless the observed complexity of living organisms can be explained.
As Marcel-Paul Schützenberger described, the biologists themselves opened the door to potentially fatal scrutiny of the theory when they invited the mathematicians to the table.
The participation of mathemeticians in the overall assessment of evolutionary thought has been encouraged by the biologists themselves, if only because they presented such an irresistible target. Richard Dawkins, for example, has been fatally attracted to arguments that would appear to hinge on concepts drawn from mathematics and from the computer sciences, the technical stuff imposed on innocent readers with all of his comic authority. Mathematicians are, in any case, epistemological zealots. It is normal for them to bring their critical scruples to the foundations of other disciplines. And finally, it is worth observing that the great turbid wave of cybernetics has carried mathematicians from their normal mid-ocean haunts to the far shores of evolutionary biology. There up ahead, Rene Thom and Ilya Prigogine may be observed paddling sedately toward dry land, members of the Santa Fe Institute thrashing in their wake. Stuart Kauffman is among them. An interesting case, a physician half in love with mathematical logic, burdened now and forever by having received a Papal Kiss from Murray Gell-Mann. This ecumenical movement has endeavored to apply the concepts of mathematics to the fundamental problems of evolution -- the interpretation of functional complexity, for example.