Quote from: Horizons on February 20, 2012, 02:46 pmAh, much clearer. Thanks. :) It's an interesting idea you're expounding, and worth deeper research in my opinion. It reminds me of Alan Sokal's opinion on how the academic left tends to view science in general. Have you by any chance read his books Intellectual Impostures (co-authored with Jean Bricmont, titled "Fashionable Nonsense" in the USA edition) or Beyond the Hoax? Methinks you'd like them.I think yours is a bit of a broad generalization (and I was particularly troubled by the phrase "Too many [crossovers] for it to be a coincidence", which describes a pernicious type of faulty reasoning that leads many people to hold irrational beliefs on religion and pseudoscience based on imagined patterns), but I do agree with your conclusions for the most part. The parallels between the ideologies of political extremism (not just communism, but fascism as well) and religion are plain as daylight - it's not a fluke that Historians will frequently use words like "cult", "worship" and even "deification" when describing how the images of people like Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Oliveira Salazar and Josef Stalin were treated by their followers - an equally obvious sign is the Luciferization of "enemies of the State" like Leon Trotski (Personally, I think that Trotski and the Serpent of Eden were the good guys in their respective stories, but mine is a minority view).That said, I think it's more accurate to say that they stem from the same cause as religion than that they stem from religion itself. The willingness to be a part of something larger than life, to give in to an entity greater than yourself who understands you and is looking out for you - that's the deep motivation that leads a person to put someone else - real or imagined - on a pedestal and attribute to them special knowledge, wisdom and powers. This, I think, is an inherent human tendency which precedes and causes religion. Maoism was a religion like any other, except for a single difference: it made no claims about the afterlife.The parallels between evolution by natural selection and selection in a market economy are indeed quite obvious. However, I don't think you're right in equating them and claiming that "Evolution Theory is a much more broad concept than just biology". No, it isn't. Darwin's Theory of Evolution, in its original form - and the more current models based on it but updated to keep up with newer findings like the DNA molecule - is simply a theory of life and heredity. Can the same principles be applied to other areas? Yes. But small markets have also been successfully described, to an extent, by equations taken from fluid mechanics. That doesn't entitle anyone to claim that "Brownian motion theory is a much more broad concept than just physics". Complex systems will usually (not always) behave in forms analogous (but rarely identical) to the simpler systems on which they are based - and market agents, as it happens, are either humans or groups of humans, so it's unsurprising that social Darwinism works very well as a descriptive system. But that's a separate theory based on Darwinian evolution and Malthusian market theory - not an intrinsic part of DE itself.Generalizations and simplifications are extremely useful, but one must be careful not to take them too far. Markets are complex organisms, and our understanding of them is extremely limited. Even weather predictions are consistently more accurate than market predictions. Therefore, any categorical statement made about how they actually work, based on our current information and understanding, is much more likely to be wrong than right, and should be taken with several grains of salt. Even if it seems to make perfect sense and is logically self-consistent, that's no guarantee that it's an accurate description of reality.No, I haven't yet read Sokal's work, but I intend to at some point, his ideas interest me. It's on the to-do list. ;)Yes, it is correct to be wary of over generalization (or reductionism from the opposite direction). I can appreciate that completely, it is rare that I do not err in one direction or the other, it's human nature to go to extremes. Still, generalization and reductionism are critical techniques of cognition for anybody to master, no matter who/what they are.I find your 3rd paragraph especially interesting, because it concurs with my view of the world precisely. While I do not think highly of religion as an intellectual force for the better in today's world, Dawkins is completely wrong to think religion is the cause of the world's problems, it goes much much deeper than that. Religion, was necessary for us to get to the next level, even if it served as an impediment to science much later. Nonetheless, our finest scientists in history were religious, the trend to secularism is a recent one and I am an atheist, so you can take it I'm not biased in favor of Christianity!Dawkin's work is wonderful, shot through with insights of startling genius (memes! He indirectly invented lolcats!), but his passion gets the better of him sometimes in seeing the bigger picture. In particular he is highly politically and economically naive. Still a great scientist nonetheless, which is why I recommend people read his earlier works such as The Selfish Gene before seeing him entirely in the light of his current battles with religion. Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is a biological theory. However there is such a thing as Universal Darwinism. If we were talking in the lingo fantasy books, I might call this the Dark Magic! Because it is highly unsettling to nearly everybody. Essentially it's artificial breeding or weeding out of human beings. One of the consequences of Universal Darwinism was Eugenics, the project of the Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands of their own civilians (not jews, just people who didn't quite fit into society, never seems to quite get the same press).Nonetheless, Eugenics has saved the lives of millions. Vaccines. Contraceptives. These are Eugenics in practice everyday. Still has a bad reputation, so many people prefer not to call it by its real name.My point is that Universal Darwinism doesn't require biological evolution. Memes are not biological. Economics is not biological, unless you mean in the same sense that all biology is technically chemistry, which in turn is technically physics. You just require a replicator, natural selection, time and an environment to have evolution. You say that is not biological evolution. You're right, but in a way that does not really matter if it enables us to have a fuller understanding of something else. Doesn't have to be a direct analogy if we can reliably predict the consequences of the system. Of course, the devil is in the details, there are always caveats.I would say that saying Brownian Motion is more general than physics is absurd. But there is something about Brownian Motion that explains something else. It means to me that there is a more general theory that fully explains both Brownian Motion and Randomness in Markets, as of yet undiscovered. Because to be able to make accurate predication by knowing something else is a bit of a coincidence!Quote"Even if it seems to make perfect sense and is logically self-consistent, that's no guarantee that it's an accurate description of reality."Hear hear! Couldn't say it better.Side Note: that market predictions are even less accurate than the weather is a very interesting subject I have studied for a long time, sometimes called the efficient market hypothesis, random walk theory or Louis Bachlier's Theory of Speculation (something I imagine you've already heard of since you mention Brownian Motion and markets). It'd be interesting to discuss it sometime, since it will directly affect our activities on the Silk Road in the future, but that's a topic for another day since it would derail an already derailed thread!It's a pity we can't meet face to face to talk about these things, but that's the bargain we make with anonymity.