Fractals Chaos and GOD

[Final-Fan]

How is it propaganda? The whole piece oozes disdian for the "OLD science" that was completely dead wrong and couldn't even cope with the IDEA that there was something fundamental that they were missing. It made it sound to me like it was saying that the "crumbling", decadent old paradigm was washed away by the shining light brought by the "brave early explorers", the noble Chaoticians. And take this passage:

There was no room for chaos and so it was conveniently swept under the rug. The inevitable outcome of the ordered machine view was the complete winding down of the clock, the end of time in complete entropy - the second law of thermodynamics where everything tends to breakdown, to dissipate. This big picture of science naturally spawned the "God is dead" philosophies, nihilism, the life nausea of existentialism, behavioralism, communism and the like. Now with the Chaos theories this paradigm is itself dead. A whole new scientific view has been born, one much more in accord with an organic view, the common law, and philosophies of hope and spirit.

The entropic worldview of science gave rise to COMMUNISM? Srsly?

Paul Davies doesn't appear to be saying that kind of thing, but the article in your OP most definitely is.

And as for why it took so long for Chaos Theory to be accepted, well, you have to admit that such a far-reaching overhaul of the very bedrock of our science is something that would -- and should -- be subjected to thorough rigorous criticism and testing before toppling old paradigms that have worked so well (with tiny variances that could only be RELIABLY detected relatively recently) for so long?

I doubt very much that it's a coincidence that a science that depends so heavily on the accuracy and number-crunching ability of computerized tools had to wait for the advent of computerized tools to gain wide acceptance.


Moving on:
And I agree with fractals being important to chaos theory but if I put "biology and evolution" in the title of an article I think you'd expect more than one or two throwaway mentions going towards evolution.

But yeah, I think more people need to know about this kind of stuff.