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The quarterback gets three downs, and the batter three strikes, before they go back to the bench. Some nepotism directs healthier mothers to invest in more and healthier offspring, and sicker ones conversely, long enough to demonstrate which is really which. Males passing the test carry the signs to prove it. Females choose them to spread the antidote gene to the whole population. Losing genes and losing parasites retreat until their time comes again. Summary This chapter trades my wannabe economist hat for my wannabe biologist one. Herbert Spencer called those fields the same at bottom. I never read Spencer, and know him mostly from Bertrand Russell’s books on the history of philosophy. Spencer rates a subchapter there. Yet he was an autodidact with less training in either field than mine. He even had less training in philosophy than mine. He was a philosopher all the same, by Russell’s tough standards, and knew that logic comes first. Data eventually prove their worth when it’s time to test. The data I’ve found fits net generation theory more or less. What I really have on, all the while, is my wannabe philosopher hat. Popperians make no sense. Are we supposed to find that a rose is not a rose? Or that all reasoning from definition is as transparent as that example? Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem ended a search that took some pretty bright minds three centuries. My best guess would be that Popperians confuse the concepts of logic and question-begging. They are opposite. Logic (reasoning from definition) means taking out no more than you put in. Truism or tautology usually means obvious examples of the same, but sometimes includes subtle ones too. Question-begging means taking out what you never put in’. 9 Circularity is question-begging which claims to take out as inference what it put in as assumption. Assumption that Socrates is a man and that all men are mortal does not confirm that Socrates is a man. It confirms that Socrates is mortal if assumptions are sound. Chapter 7 Petty’s Idea 2/3/16 28 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011087