Your Word of the Day, if you're a Merriam-Webster subscriber, is "panglossian". It's a good one, one that has a rich history for evolutionary biologists dating back to the influential 1979 publication by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin with one of the great titles ever - "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme." Dr. Pangloss was a character in Voltaire's Candide who claimed that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." His excessively optimistic view of life made him a perfect foil for Gould and Lewontin's rebuke of the assumption that we should expect organisms to be optimally adapted. As for the spandrels... Well, that's one of them up above. If you want to know where they fit into the picture, you'll have to read the paper.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Vocab
Your Word of the Day, if you're a Merriam-Webster subscriber, is "panglossian". It's a good one, one that has a rich history for evolutionary biologists dating back to the influential 1979 publication by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin with one of the great titles ever - "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme." Dr. Pangloss was a character in Voltaire's Candide who claimed that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." His excessively optimistic view of life made him a perfect foil for Gould and Lewontin's rebuke of the assumption that we should expect organisms to be optimally adapted. As for the spandrels... Well, that's one of them up above. If you want to know where they fit into the picture, you'll have to read the paper.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment