Talk:Marcel-Paul Schützenberger

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Please note that to fully evaluate this biography, a strong working knowledge of academic-style French is strongly suggested. -- QTJ 21:03, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 07:23, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Praising as "bete noire"?
I'm confused nonetheless praising it as one of his "bête-noires" alongside his thinking on artificial intelligence; how can something be "praised" as a bête-noire??? The source doesn't quite use this kind of wording. I'm not French enough to know if this is correct usage, but it seems strange to me. Merzul (talk) 18:30, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Has there been any response to his mathematical attacks on evolution?
Surely people have by now done some mathematical modelling of these matters. I'm not suggesting that he needs to be completely refuted on his biography, but his criticism must have lead to some rigorous models being developed and in the end the theory of evolution still stands to this day, so clearly people must have done the math and responded to his work. This should be mentioned, I think. Merzul (talk) 18:35, 5 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, this section needs to be balanced with the facts (showing Schützenberger's misunderstandings) because it violates WP:UNDUE. This has to do with the 1966 Wistar Institute symposium which is discussed by Nature, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Ronald L. Numbers (Darwinism comes to America page 163), and The Panda's Thumb (blog) as a faux-criticism of evolution by people who don't understand the subject. C56C (talk) 18:11, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Merzul, I think the real issue is that the critique was based on false premises, and was basically wrong. Creationists selectively quote the conclusion of Schützenberger's paper, but there were evidently rejoinders to it. The problem is that the symposium was held 43 years ago, and the proceedings are pretty much unavailable. Daniel R. Brooks of U Toronto had the following posted on The Panda's Thumb website:


 * "If one actually reads the conference transcript, one realizes that what really happened was that approximately two befuddled math/computer science people, Murray Eden and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, were schooled in basic population genetics & evolutionary theory by the likes of Ernst Mayr and Sewall Wright. It makes hilarious reading... The central misunderstandings from the mathematician side involved, as always, the same old dumb “but it’s impossible/extremely improbable for these sequences to come together all at once by random chance!” argument, which ignores (as always) the elemental point that evolutionary theory is the exact opposite of all-at-once-by-chance assembly."


 * The same could be said in reverse, that biologists do not understand the mathematics they pretend to manipulate. When mathematicians say "all at once by chance" they only talk about the randomness of the assembly of the genes involved, not the survival of the individual carrying those genes (which indeed doesn't happen by chance). The neo-darwinist model entails a random assembly of genes prior anything else (including birth, growth, etc.). It is at this level that these critics have a problem with the neo-darwinism theory. Many biologists talk about random mutation but do not understand what random means. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.54.85.179 (talk) 06:16, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Would it be possible to link to that as a critique of Schützenberger's position?--Digthepast (talk) 17:26, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Unbalanced
I had a quick read of Foata's writing and only the negative points are cited in this wiki article making it quite unbalanced. Tijfo098 (talk) 20:35, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

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