Yes, they aren’t all as good as Pepperberg’s. Geoffrey Carr is also clearly talking about issues well outside his expertise. The history of spontaneous generation is much more complicated than he describes it. The narrative of everything hinging on Pasteur is often repeated but historically inaccurate. In the case of Ritchie I think he’s trying to say that the incorrect idea was that of art historians believing that Einstein and Minkowski influenced cubism?
Yeah; I’d actually call that a pretty interesting mistake, especially because it’s so ridiculous—I don’t see how it could happen unless you basically just ignored the actual art and the history in favor of some half-baked notion of “the fourth dimension is time”. While I can’t claim to have ever paid attention to art history, a mistake like that makes me wonder just how much actual history art historians are doing. Unfortunately while Ritchie understands this is a mistake, he doesn’t seem to have worked through the confusion to the point of being able to present it in a way that’s really correct...
I guess it’s not a different topic after all, as I originally said, just the same topic applied to a different discipline. I thought it was a different topic because he writes it as if he were going off on a tangent.
I’m not sure that it is that large a mistake. It seems that the mistake is that they weren’t influenced by time as a fourth dimension but by the pre-Einsteinian idea of more than 3 spatial dimensions. If that’s what Ritchie is saying then the problem might have been subtle to someone who didn’t know much math or physics. I don’t think that understanding this is helped by Ritchie’s writing style.
Some of these answers are definitely a bit confused, e.g. Sheldrake’s. And Matthew Ritchie seems to be talking about an entirely different topic...
Yes, they aren’t all as good as Pepperberg’s. Geoffrey Carr is also clearly talking about issues well outside his expertise. The history of spontaneous generation is much more complicated than he describes it. The narrative of everything hinging on Pasteur is often repeated but historically inaccurate. In the case of Ritchie I think he’s trying to say that the incorrect idea was that of art historians believing that Einstein and Minkowski influenced cubism?
Yeah; I’d actually call that a pretty interesting mistake, especially because it’s so ridiculous—I don’t see how it could happen unless you basically just ignored the actual art and the history in favor of some half-baked notion of “the fourth dimension is time”. While I can’t claim to have ever paid attention to art history, a mistake like that makes me wonder just how much actual history art historians are doing. Unfortunately while Ritchie understands this is a mistake, he doesn’t seem to have worked through the confusion to the point of being able to present it in a way that’s really correct...
I guess it’s not a different topic after all, as I originally said, just the same topic applied to a different discipline. I thought it was a different topic because he writes it as if he were going off on a tangent.
I’m not sure that it is that large a mistake. It seems that the mistake is that they weren’t influenced by time as a fourth dimension but by the pre-Einsteinian idea of more than 3 spatial dimensions. If that’s what Ritchie is saying then the problem might have been subtle to someone who didn’t know much math or physics. I don’t think that understanding this is helped by Ritchie’s writing style.