Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin, whose research is on the properties of matter that make life possible, issued the following warning to scientists about the dangers of this kind of thinking: Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that it has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great
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