Last year Rivin invited the author of a paper on the variability hypothesis to submit his work to NYJM. To understand what is going on requires an introduction to Igor Rivin, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and, of relevance in this mathematics matter, an editor of the New York Journal of Mathematics (NYJM). Just go and read the Tao and Gowers blogs and the hundreds of comments they have accrued over the past few days. Imagine the hubris of mathematicians spewing incoherent theories about sexual selection when they literally don’t know anything about human genetics or evolutionary biology, and haven’t read any of the relevant scientific literature about the subject they are rambling about. With that in mind consider the level of ignorance of someone who does not even understand the notion of common ancestor in evolutionary biology, and who presumes that biologists have been idle and have learned nothing during the last 150 years. one doesn’t know what a derivative is, one won’t be able to contribute meaningfully to modern research in analysis. What is certain is that if one doesn’t understand the first thing about Weierstrass’ construction, e.g. Not only does this construction remain valid today as it was back then, but lots of mathematics has been developed in its wake. Weierstrass had constructed a function that is uniformly continuous on the real line, but not differentiable on any interval: The result was just as counterintuitive for mathematics as Darwin’s theory of evolution was for biology. In mathematics, just a year later in 1872, Karl Weierstrass published what at the time was considered another monstrosity, one that threw the entire mathematics community into disarray. This person’s understanding of the theory of evolution is where the Victorian public was at in England ca. “It’s also ironic that what causes so much controversy is not humans having descended from apes, which since Darwin people sort-of managed to swallow, but rather the relatively minor issue of differences between the sexes.” For example, in a comment on Timothy Gowers’ blog, Gabriel Nivasch, a lecturer at Ariel University writes The number of inane comments is astonishing. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to focus on the scientific discourse in these elite math blogs. If you scroll to the bottom of the blog posts you’ll see hundreds of comments, many written by eminent mathematicians who are engaged in pseudoscientific speculation littered with sexist tropes.
It turns out that mathematicians such as Timothy Gowers and Terence Tao are hosting discussions about evolutionary biology (see On the recently removed paper from the New York Journal of Mathematics, Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed, Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper) because some mathematician wrote a paper titled “ An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis“, and an ensuing publication kerfuffle has the mathematics community up in arms. Sir Timothy Gowers is blogging about evolutionary biology?
IGOR PRO IF WITH LESS THAN AND GREATERTHAN SERIES
Then, last week, I remembered them when reading a series of blog posts and associated commentary on evolutionary biology by some of the most distinguished mathematicians in the world.ġ. No result has ever emerged from “Project Einstein”, and I’d pretty much forgotten about the ego-driven inquiries I had received years ago. As far as I know their DNA now languishes in one of Jonathan Rothberg’s freezers. The phenotype was ill-defined and in any case the study would be underpowered (only 400 “geniuses” were solicited), but I believe many of them sent in their samples. I counseled my colleagues not to participate in this ill-advised genome-wide association study. After replying to my colleague I received an inquiry from another professor in the department, and then another and another… All were clearly flattered that they were selected for their “brightest mind”, and curious to understand the genetic secret of their brilliance. Six years ago I received an email from a colleague in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley asking me whether he should participate in a study that involved “collecting DNA from the brightest minds in the fields of theoretical physics and mathematics.” I later learned that the codename for the study was “ Project Einstein“, an initiative of entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg with the goal of finding the genetic basis for “math genius”.
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