Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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talking about and the problem is that none of that is really parsing traits in evolutionary history in accordance with whether they're contingent or whether they're replicable um and so basically i mean and and so then the big question i guess you know sort of heading into these discussions of contingency is like well why exactly would we think that the copernican
principle approach breaks down when it comes to biology, like what's going on there?
What's different about the evolutionary process and so forth, right?
So there are some general things that are a big problem, like for example, the observer selection bias, right?
So if we're gonna even be sitting around talking about
the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
We obviously came from a planet with terrestrial intelligence evolved, so we know it's consistent with the laws of physics, but that doesn't tell us anything about how common it is, right?
But then the problem is this.
In physics, you have all of these contentful laws, laws that you have to go out and discover, and then it allows you to make predictions.
In biology, there are arguably no or very few universal laws.
And so just to give you like one example of this, right?
I mean, it's not even, this is not a peripheral example.
This is a central one.
The principle of natural selection, okay?
That's about the closest thing to a law that we get in biology, okay?
It's very basic.
There are different ways of formulating it.
It might be like, wherever you have variation that's causally connected to survival and reproduction, you will tend to get evolution by natural selection.
Or you might say, well, we could formulate it in something like, if A is better adapted than B in environment E, then A will out-reproduce B. The problem with all of this, and this is why there have been decades of debates in philosophy of biology about what kind of laws these are or whether they're laws,
they're very different than laws of physics that have specific contents.
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