>Lennart Nilsson wrote:
>
>We use mathematics as a meta-language, just like you kan describe what is
>said in latin by using italian. That does not make italian
>logically/evolutionary prior to latin of course.
But in this case we are using mathematics to describe actual events in the
real world, specifically the way gene frequencies change over time in
response to natural selection. Surely these events were obeying the same
mathematical laws even before we could describe them as doing so using
whatever specific mathematical symbols we use to represent these laws, in
just the same way that "the earth is round" is a statement describing a fact
that was true before we came up with the words "earth", "round", etc. In
other words, it's the specific mathematical symbols we use to represent
mathematical truths that are analogous to italian or some other human
language, but they represent truths that have been true all along, just like
the earth has been round all along even before humans came up with the
language to describe it (or don't you believe it makes sense to say that?)
Jesse
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Received on Sun Jul 09 2006 - 13:36:00 PDT