>A physicist runs across or concocts form whole cloth a mathematical model which is simple, neat and contains a great many variables of the same sort.
>The physicist has heard of Darwin (1849), and my even have read Dawkins (1985) or some essay by Gould, but wouldn't know Fisher (1958), Haldane (1932) and Wright (1986) from the Three Magi, and doesn't dream that such a subject as mathematical evolutionary biology exists.
>The physicist is aware that lots of other physicists are interested in annexing biology as a province of statistical physics.
>The physicist interprets his multitude of variables as species or (if slightly more sophisticated) as genotypes, and proclaims that he has found "Darwin's Equations" (cf. Bak et al (1994)), or, more modestly, has made an important step towards eventually finding those equations.
>His paper is submitted for review to other physicists, who are just as ignorant of biology as he, but see that it's about equivalent to the other papers on evolution by physicists. They publish it.
>The paper is read by other physicists, because at least it's not another derivation of specific heats on some convoluted lattice under a Hamiltonian named for some Central European worthy now, otherwise totally forgotten. Said physicists think this is cutting-edge evolutionary theory.
>Some of those physicists will know or discover simple, neat models with lots of variables of the same type.
Why are physicists like this?
