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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Does a light bulb implicate the sun? In some very specific ways certainly, but believing it generally does will cause more errors than useful insights.

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Studying the physics of the sun is highly useful in understanding lightbulbs, and visa versa. It's not just a surface analogy but a deep physical commonality in which discoveries about one not infrequently informs both. The same is true of the study of replicators across domains that look very different on the surface.

That's really not true though. The important concepts in incandescent lightbulbs, mainly blackbody radiation, did not give us better knowledge about the sun because the sun is an immensely more complicated system heavily reliant on very different effects.

There is a strong connection between the incandescent lightbulbs and the sun because the sun is almost a blackbody emitter too. Studying incandescent lightbulbs allowed researchers to discover the blackbody spectrum and Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, which was then applied to the Sun to discover its apparent temperature. The spectral lines in the Sun's spectrum (the frequencies where it deviates from the blackbody spectrum) then allowed researchers to study elements present in the Sun's photosphere.

I agree with your point, just wanted to add that 'implicate' is not even the right term to describe the paper in question. Metaphors and analogies don't prove or even implicate anything, but can provide new perspectives for considering a subject. Looking at the original paper, that seems to be why steam locomotives are discussed.

Still, "competition" among mechanical devices is inherently different from competition among species or clades.

you're right that it may provoke questions, but the inherent differences would give biologists plenty of reasons to just dismiss them.

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