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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

In biology, "evolution" is *defined* as being the process involving changes of the heritable characteristics of a population over time.

Corporations pass all manner of things on to other companies - including resouces, employees, business methods, intellectual property, documents, premises, computer programs, etc. We are not talking about just a few bits of analog information here - often vast quantities of digital resources are involved.

Corporations form a population. Frequencies of instances of the above listed items in that population varies over time.

Therefore the population of corporations evolves - in the spirit of the classical biological sense of the term.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Glen, I'm familiar with that article. As you noticed, I've restricted my discussion to the effect of placebos on PAIN. Although I think there is some good empirical evidence that placebo is effective in other conditions, there is very strong scientific consensus that it is effective with pain. In fact, this is one of the central areas of investigation in contemporary pain science. Your worry that such claims about pain involve untestable 'subjective reports' is a bit out of date. There are plenty of objective measures of pain level, and the effect of placebo on areas of the brain associated with pain, such as the ACC, has been imaged with fMRI in many studies. For a short accessible summary of some of this work, checkhttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharma...

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