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[_Coggins7]

You can't decimate an analogy.

And why not, if its a poor one?

[_Chap]

You can't decimate an analogy.

And why not, if its a poor one?

'Decimation' was originally a punishment inflicted on a group of soldiers in the Roman army when they had been guilty, as a unit, of a major breach of discipline. One soldier in every ten was selected by lot, and executed. Thus the offending group was reduced in number by 10%.

Today, people who do not know the etymology of the word but recognize that it comes from the Latin 'decem' = 'ten' often use it to mean that a number of countable objects (usually people) has been reduced by a factor of 10. Thus they say a unit has been 'decimated' when it has suffered 90% casualties, whereas of course 10% would have been enough.

But even when used in this way the word still refers to a reduction in number of a collection of countable objects. You seem to be looking for a pretentious substitute for 'invalidate' (which is certainly something one might reasonably claim to have done to an analogy). But 'decimate' is certainly not it.

[_Coggins7]

Well Chap, my young quibbler over infinitesimal minutiae, I meant it in its normative, colloquial sense of simply to "destroy" in a very thorough manner. Etymology is a very interesting study, but impractical in attempting to carry on a discussion in which exacting precision over the historicity of each word would make actual debate well nigh impossible.

Don't you think?

[_Chap]

Well Chap, my young quibbler over infinitesimal minutiae, I meant it in its normative, colloquial sense of simply to "destroy" in a very thorough manner. Etymology is a very interesting study, but impractical in attempting to carry on a discussion in which exacting precision over the historicity of each word would make actual debate well nigh impossible.

Don't you think?

No I don't.

I have spent many years correcting undergraduate essays, and seen many misuses of many words. I have never yet seen anybody misuse 'decimate' to mean 'destroy' in relation to an abstract thing like an analogy. 'Decimate', even in its modern misuse as 'reduce by a factor of 10' is a useful word with a well-defined range of use by educated speakers of English, and it would be a pity to have its sense blunted by people like you who like to use big pretentious sounding words where ordinary words would do.

As I said, do what you like to ideas. But don't destroy words. Others may wish to use them after you are done with them.

[_Chap]

Well Chap, my young quibbler over infinitesimal minutiae, I meant it in its normative, colloquial sense of simply to "destroy" in a very thorough manner. Etymology is a very interesting study, but impractical in attempting to carry on a discussion in which exacting precision over the historicity of each word would make actual debate well nigh impossible.

Don't you think?

PS: your use of 'normative' in the text above betrays the fact that you think it means the same thing as 'normal' - clearly the root of the confusion about 'marriage in the normative sense' discussed above. It doesn't.

Why didn't you just say 'normal'? Because, I suspect, you think that longer words make your posts sound more 'intellectual'. And hence you end up failing to express what you meant. Doesn't that matter to you?

[_EAllusion]

The review of the Dawkins book = lame.

Elsewhere5 Dawkins puts a similar spin on the old monkey-at-the-typewriter argument by insisting that a monkey could type out a line from Shakespeare in fairly short order: each time the monkey accidentally hits a correct character it gets locked in, while all the incorrect characters are immediately erased. Thus the monkey, completely unaware of what it is accomplishing, never has to start over from scratch—the process itself is self-improving. It retains correct characters, discards those that are incorrect, and, after sufficient iterations, produces a fully coherent sentence.

But for a monkey to do this, its typewriter would have to be programmed, and who or what is the programmer? Dawkins assigns that role to natural selection. So on the one hand natural selection is blind and mindless, and on the other it is teleological. This is a contradiction that goes back to Darwin's personification of natural selection

Lol.

The facile monkey analogy has been long decimated by other competent critics, including Michael Denten, David Foster, Fred Hoyle, and a number of others (indeed, it was the inconceivable mathematical improbabilities associated with such claims, and the existence of the cosmic constants etc. that provoked Eddington, Whitehead, and Jeans to conserve evolutionary theory but abandon it as a self contained explanation of ultimate origins. The universe is a great thought, as Jeans said, not a great machine.

First, "monkeys and typewriters" is just a cute example for a formal statistical principle about infinite chances and probablity. Second, Dawkins analogy isn't what Hoyle et. al. are responding to. Indeed, an infnite amount of monkies typing on typewriters producing a sonnet of shakespeare is a strawman analogy for evolution (or abiogenesis), which is what Dawkins was pointing out. Third, I'm laughing at the final line in that quote, which displays profound ignorance. Can you explain why?