And Python, of course, was developed by Oracle at their Delphi branch.
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And don’t forget the Linux operating system, invented by Carl Linnaeus for the purpose of storing his nested data structures of animal names.
I wonder if there are LLMs out there learning from this thread 
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There was no confusion of which to avoid more.
There was exposure of deception, of which it’s understandable you might not want more, but that’s not confusion.
But this thread has morphed into puns about software languages, making it moot.
So… programming languages have been named after mathematicians (Ada Lovelace), researchers (Charles Fort), technology inventors (Al Gore), and even entertainers (Ruby Wax, Barry White), all of which make some sort of sense - but why would anyone name a programming language after an Italian tennis player?
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But so much more enjoyable.
Took a little digging to find that one.
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Well done for finding Barry White’s contribution 
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I took a simple programming class in 1981 at the Univ. of Texas. Couldn’t say which language it was, probably BASIC. Our simple programs were printed on a stack of punch cards we took to the computer lab, grades based on the printed output. In one semester I learned programming wasn’t my thing. haha
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The evolution of computer technology is an interesting story that might have some similarities or analogies with biological evolution, especially the questions of underlying constraints and history.
One note about the evolution of computers is that the ‘experienced’ users tend to tell personal stories about the history to the ‘inexperienced’ who do not have such personal experiences. I have told my share of such stories, so guilty to the same weakness. Maybe that is one of the criteria distinguishing the ‘experienced’ (old) from the ‘young’.
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This is common in many other fields. Some so old they are no longer “evolving”. This is more in line with the “sitting around a fire telling stories.”
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Telling stories is a human experience – maybe an indicator of humanness. There is a certain joy in seeing a young person’s eyes widen as you tell them what it’s like to interact with a computer over a 300-baud modem, or even to use a telephone that is plugged into the wall with a wire .
My deductive powers have not been up to determining which computer programming language was named after an Italian tennis player, but I am curious!
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My guess would be Flavio Cobolli of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) fame.
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I have decided to just copy and paste the one and only positive comment regarding the previous version of the article. If the Moderators find it inappropriate for this thread or forum, I figure they will take action in such a case. So there is no need for me to be that hesitate……………………………
Comments for Author:
”For far too long the profound insight of Richard Owen’s structuralist theory of archetypes has been overshadowed by the stochastic theory first introduced by Darwin. After Samuel Wilberforce’s powerful performance at Oxford, the great 19th century debate between transcendental anatomy and empiricism, so well described by Ron Amundson, appeared to have been lost, in spite of the fact that reason, humility, science and humanity were all on the Bishop’s side. As a result, none of the great biologists on the European continent recognized the wisdom of Owen’s immortal words, “we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light…from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the Human form.”Rana and Ross should be congratulated for noticing the many ways Owen’s theory is a precursor to theirs. If they look more closely into his book On Parthenogenesis, they will see that viral elements and microtubules, which they correctly identify as the locus of life’s blueprint, were essentially present in Owen’s theory of reproduction, another example of how remarkably he was ahead of his time. He cannot have foreseen the implications of quantum dynamics, much less the cosmological constant, but Owen’s adaptive mask surely pointed in the right direction.
My only suggstion for improving this well-supported argument is that they develop further their recognition that the endorestiform nucleus in human cerebral anatomy gives us a reason to revive Owen’s classification of Homo sapiens as a member of the subclass Archencephala. Taxonomists have too long persisted in repeating the mistake of Linnaeus, who classified us as Primates, as if we are a kind of monkey.”
I’ve found it’s always a good idea to check quotes used by creationists, especially when they contain ellipses or are truncated. This one:
we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light…from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the Human form.
is no exception. It’s from Owen’s On the nature of limbs, which is available at the online Darwin archive, and the text elided is “amidst the wreck of worlds”. There’s no practical reason for leaving out just five words, so they must have been omitted because of their content, by some-one who (unlike Owen himself) apparently doesn’t want to mention Earth’s history of extinctions.
Did the author of this review elide those words themselves, or did they copy this quote, ellipsis included, from somewhere else? I can’t find anywhere else that has exactly the same quote, but there is one source which has a slightly shorter version with an identical ellipsis: Denton’s “Evolution: still a theory in crisis”. Denton is well notorious for playing fast and loose with quotes, so it is quite likely that he originated this particular ellipsis, though if Denton’s book is the real source of this quote, the reviewer must have found the extra text somewhere else.
This isn’t as unlikely a scenario as it might seem. I know of someone with a history of copying ‘quotes’ from creationist works, then looking up the original source and citing it without checking whether the ‘quote’ they have copied is actually in it. It wouldn’t surprise me if they combined two versions of this quote from Owen that they found on-line, augmenting Denton’s elided version with a longer quote.
The reference to “Archencephala” is intriguing too. Whoever wrote this review doesn’t seem to understand cladistic taxonomy, because even if humans were placed apart from other primates following Owen’s classification, we’d still be classified as mammals ‘as if we were a kind of rodent’.
The idea of Archencephala is long abandoned, and I don’t recall ever seeing it mentioned before on any of the forums I’ve frequented. A search here finds no results. But I checked a few other fora, and did get one hit - in a post at Peaceful Science[1] containing a quote from an article they’d apparently written themselves. It’s also mentioned in the preprint article, but not in any of the earlier versions
If you’ve read this far, you deserve some form of reward, so here it is: the person who mentioned Archencephala at PS is the same person who has a history for posting misquotes and concealing their actual sources. They also write about Owen a lot, are hazy about cladistics and read RTB, and were involved in writing earlier versions of this article, but perhaps not the latest version. So they are a likely candidate for having written this review.
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It’s @RTBsupporter.
But wait, I hear you cry. That would mean he posted his own review (possibly with AI assistance) of something he contributed to as if it was written by some-one else.
Is that credible?
Yes, it is. He has previously omitted his name from something he helped write, and presented a later version of the same article as something he “recently came across”, and asked about how to submit articles to journals under a different name. Posting his own work as if it was written by some-one else is his SOP.
I’m not sure if this link will work. ↩︎
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I have decided to copy and paste another reviewer’s comment that was somewhat positive towards the end of his report. It should bring more transparency, humility, and balance to the really positive review……………..
Comments for Author
Review report on
PNASNEXUS-2025-00517
A Reboot of Richard Owen’s Common Archetype Theory: Toward a Unified Framework for Biological Complexity
by Fazale Rana and Hugh RossThe central issue is that explanations of the unknowns, seen here as biological modularity, taxonomy discontinuities, convergent viral structures, and consciousness, should derive from the knowns, not poorly understood phenomena, seen here as coherence-governed, gravity-modulated quantum collapse events and quantum entanglement.
While one might argue that unknowns can serve as sources of explanation, this is not the case here. There is nothing inherently unknown about wave function collapse—it is a conceptual construct, not a physical phenomenon. In typical usage, a single-particle wave function represents the field of the particle (or system), whose phase remains undefined until compared to a reference, much like clock hands indicate time only when a dial with numbers is present. The idea that the system is in some unintelligible superposition is a misinterpretation (see: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-05970-5). Hence, the wave function collapse has no explanatory power beyond establishing a reference frame to make it meaningful to talk about the phase of a system.
Likewise, there is nothing unknown about quantum entanglement. It is just an ordinary (Pearson) correlation between properties of particles due to a common cause, such as conservation of momentum (see: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05377-8). Thus, there is no explanatory power beyond that of standard statistical correlation.
These remarks extend beyond this manuscript, as misconceptions about quantum mechanics are widespread.
That said, I value the Authors’ insight into Richard Owen’s reasoning about evolution as a natural process reflecting a fundamental principle beyond Darwinian selection, specifically the 2nd law of thermodynamics, i.e., free energy consumption in the least time.
I believe it is in the Authors’ best interest that a paper not be published on flawed foundations, undermining the value of their broader insights.
Owen actually mentioned two individual and one entire group of extinct species so he was no stranger to extinction. Given RTB believes extinctions are intentional, designed, and necessary events it shouldn’t be a problem. Is “intelligently designed extinction” an oxymoron? 
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I had to look that up. The consensus of the sources is that it referred to humans alone, which as far as I’m concerned makes it a hand-wavy way of saying humans are special, not something of scientific value.
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That shows a profound misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
Not for smallpox 
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So did I. It’s not exactly a hot topic.
Back to obscure programming
languages . . .
Add to that the hand-wavy appeal to Quantum Physics. And Owen was ignorant of genetics, which has established beyond a doubt that humans share a common ancestor with primates. Why am I even wasting time with this?
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