Evolving Thoughts

It's the end of the world as he knows it

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:47:58 -0500

This is just embarrassing. Here's a representative of Parliament in the ALP, which I have noted before is increasingly pandering to religious interests:

LABOR MP James Bidgood, the first-time MP under investigation for selling pictures of a protester attempting to set fire to himself outside Parliament House, has declared the global financial crisis an act of God.

Mr Bidgood, who was carpeted by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd over his actions yesterday and apologised to Parliament, makes the new claims in a DVD, The Australian reports.

In a speech to a function held in Parliament he argues that Christian marches for Jesus in London caused the October 1987 stock market crash.

He also predicted the end of the world and one world monetary system.

"We have to say 'What would Jesus do?'," he said.

"In 1987 there was another march for Jesus. That took place in April. And guess what happened in October 1987? The stock market crashed. All property values lost one this of their value and over a million people lost their homes.

"I believe when Christians pray, God does things. I believe what is happening today is as much to do with God in economics bringing judgement."

He went on to warn that "there is God's justice in action in what has gone on here".

"I believe there is God's justice in action in what is going on here. We haven't seen the end of it.

"The ultimate conclusion is like I say, we look at Bible prophecy, we are going towards a one world bank and a one world monetary system. And if you believe the word of God and you read Revelations...you will see clearly what is being spelt out. We are in the end times."

Somebody put this guy on the front bench, say in the Treasury portfolio. I so want him serving my nation by preparing for the end of the world...

Read the comments on this post...

Another antipodean philosopher's blog

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:13:45 -0500

Note the careful ambiguity there: this is not a blog of another antipodean philosopher, but another blog of this antipodean philosopher. The ins and outs of Australian politics and policies are not of interest to much more than 0.3% of the world, so my asseverations are even less interesting to you all. Hence I have started an intermittent blog, The Drought Resistant Philosopher, wherein I will whine (or as we say here, whinge) about the latest stupidity from our representatives and public service, and so on. All ISP filtering posts will go there from now on.

No more mister nice silverback. I even have an ugly photo of me as I am (or was a while back): no mercy at all!

Read the comments on this post...

The Policy policy, and a Bill of Rights

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:01:24 -0500

When my kids were in school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon that went something like this:

Headmaster: No, your kids can't be being bullied. We have a policy against bullying.

I came to call this the "Policy policy": so long as there's a Policy in place for some longstanding problem, action is unnecessary and complainants can be silenced by reference to the Policy.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the present government (AKA the Clean Feed Censorship Party) wants to establish a Bill of Rights in Australia to protect citizens against laws that are unconstitutional and against said Bill. I can only see this as misdirection, and a pure instance of the Policy policy. After all, we have seen no infringement of rights in the UK (the most surveilled nation on the planet, death for looking like a terrorist) or the US (Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, police home invasion, Taser deaths...) because they have such Bills.

Look, a Bill of Rights is a nice idea. It may even have some positive effects on legislative excesses, like attempts to restrict marriage to straights (how's that working in the US right now, by the way?). But it won't stop a government like the Clean Feed Censorship Party from being able to circumvent liberties to achieve something For the Children (i.e., for the bureaucrats and their ministers) if they want to do so. The only thing that prevents that is citizen activism, speaking out against these restrictions on freedom.

Hat tip: Sam D at Philosophy Hurts Your Head

Read the comments on this post...

Bigotry in the sunshine state

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:21:24 -0500

The only problem with Queensland, apart from the occasional severe storm, is that they filled it with Queenslanders. Here's a bunch of northern bigots protesting a Muslim school being built on the Gold Coast "because they won't integrate" with Australian society by being, I don't know, Christian or something.

Resident's spokesman Tony Doherty said Muslim schools did not encourage multiculturalism.

"It's segregation, not integration," he said.

"They're not trying to integrate into the rest of society.

"Since we have started protesting against this our churches have been covered in hate-filled graffiti."

He denied it was hypocritical to oppose Muslim and not Christian schools.

"Catholics aren't a different culture," he said. "They are the same as us."

Actually, Catholics aren't the same as me, most of the time. They have illiberal views about most social issues like abortion or contraception, and insist on imposing these views on the rest of us, including the around 15% or more who have no religion. The only thing about Catholicism and indeed Christianity in general is that it has been around longer.

If a Muslim school promoted tolerance, secularism, civic duty, rule of law and didn't wake me on a Sunday morning, I might actually be more like them than a Catholic school.

Read the comments on this post...

How the Windogs do howl

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:03:32 -0500

Because Apple posted an advisory [a while back now] suggesting that an antivirus program be used, the Windows bigots have erected a strawman: Apple says it is immune from viruses, so now it looks like Macs aren't so great huh?

Of course, that's not what is happening at all. I have used a virus checker for years, largely so I don't pass on Windows viruses. Not Linux viruses. Not Unix viruses. Not Mac viruses. Windows.

It's not that there can't be Mac, *nix and other non-Windows viruses. It's that they are harder to do than a Windows virus. Almost in all cases there aren't the security holes, so you have to trick the user. Sure, you can do that - users can be lusers on any platform. But since *nix-based OSs are as secure as feasible from the getgo, the number of viruses or worms, etc. that we find on these OSs is almost nil. Apple are being cautious, of course - this is prophylactic practice for the inevitable viruses that one day will attack Macs and other non-Windows platforms. But it's not an admission of equality. Face it, Windows is a kludge, and has been since its inception. So, too, was the original Mac OS, which is why the shift back these many years to a Unix-base was such a great idea. And why this attack is pure strawmannery.

OS wars are religious wars. You either are baptised into an OS or you convert to it, which is why these arguments are vacuous. It is clear there is only one absolute about OSs. Don't use a proprietary system that is unsafe, complex, has too high an overhead, and means that you won't be able to access your legacy data in ten years. In short, don't use Windows.

Read the comments on this post...

Worst. Argument. Ever?

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:21:43 -0500

The chair of a course on religion, philosophy and ethics at the University of Gloucestershire (being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"), David Webster, is calling for people to give the worst argument in Britain. Go leave yours. Caveat: They already have the full complement of creationist nuttery, and anyway most of it's American, which is too easy.

Personally, I think that, as there are an infinite number of ways to mess up an inference, there is no single "worst" argument, so this is really about aesthetics.

Read the comments on this post...

Five-fiftysix meme

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:01:40 -0500

New: Solutions listed

Mike Dunford, who is still trying to get me to pay for that time he put me up in Hawaii when his wife was on active service in Iraq (if I knew what I'd have to pay, both in climbing horrific rainforested slopes to release wallabies, and this meme, I'd never have gone) has tagged me, the bastard. It's a meme created by Henry Gee (I'll get even with him later, too).

Find ten books, the first ones you see, go to page 56, sentence five and transcribe it. You readers are supposed to guess what they are. [I better keep a note or I'll be screwed later...] Below the fold:

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Replication, at Stanford

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:00:30 -0500

The absolutely brilliant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Ed Zalta, has just published my revision to the Replication article. This article was written by David Hull, and substantially remains his work, although I have made some additions to it - but this revision introduces Jim Griesemer's notion of a "reproducer". Griesemer has challenged the informational notion of genes. For him, reproduction is a physical process that precedes the evolution of replication coding systems (which are also physical). That is, evolution is an embodied process, unlike the largely abstract notions of genes and gene-analogies that has ruled the airwaves since at least Williams' 1966 book.

Why this matters is that it resolves, among other things it corrects, the scientific miracle of where genes, the pre-eminent replicators of biological evolution, came from. So long as systems were capable of reproducing by some (presumably mechanical) means, they could evolve (through natural selection) replication systems that had some kind of embodied coding system. Under the Dawkins view in which replicators are the sine qua non of evolution, there is no explanation for them but simple happenstance.

I strongly recommend the notion to thinkers everywhere...

Read the comments on this post...

Trashcan - linklove and folkbiology

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:12:44 -0500

I have run across a useful little site by Yan Feng, me/diumwhich he calls a Linklog. He links to video material of some interest to those who are science-concerned. Some of the best are: Einstein and Eddington - A BBC dramatisation of Eddington and Einstein's correspondence leading to the famous solar eclipse observation that made Einstein a star, with David Tennant as Eddington and Andy Serkis as Einstein (and both are fantastic); Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics; and a plant that blogs: Blogging plant posts daily news on its mood.

Migrations has an essay in which they suppose that creationism is a form of folk biology. This seems true, indeed, truistic. But I must demur with this:

Naturally, this ties folkbiology closely to systematics and taxonomy, and the inductive approaches of Linnaeus and his contemporaries. Like Linnaeus, the categorization or classification of the organic world into ontological categories leads to a fundamental impression of the immutability of species, or Essentialism.

Three things are wrong with this:

1. Linnaeus was not folk biology - in fact he did a considerable amount of work differentiating classification from folk biologies and folk nomenclatures.

2. Classification doesn't necessarily lead to immutability of species, and indeed it set up the conditions for which mutabilism (evolution) was a solution. Darwin was led to the problem by dealing with the tree-like classification of Linnean classification.

3. Essentialism is not about immutability of species. It is the view that taxa have a set of necessary and sufficient properties, characters or traits. It doesn't mean that there cannot be intermediate forms that lack or superadd such properties. In fact, essentialists have always held that evolution involves vagueness of classification in speciation. And (which Wiki doesn't yet know) essentialism post-dates Darwin.

Moving on, even a child welfare group now opposes ISP filtering. Clive Hamilton, the idea's originator in Australia, tries to defend it as weighing the rights of children against the rights of adults (an argument that allows the removal of quite a lot of rights - call it the "Somebody think of the children" defence of witchhunts). Some Greens note that apparently the free market excludes ideas for neoliberals.

Read the comments on this post...

van Roosmalen freed in Brazil

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:39:07 -0500

Readers may recall I reported on this case before here and here: Marc van Roosmalen, a Dutch primatologist working in Brazil, was convicted on charges brought by his opponents for actions that were technically illegal but done with the complicity of Brazilian government departments, and also by every other researcher. Also he was convicted of theft of government property. The latter charges have been quashed, as the equipment was donated to him by a TV company. The other charges remain, but he's been freed for time served.

It still remains a dangerous country to do science in, which may be the purpose...

Read the comments on this post...

ISP filtering opposition grows in the MSM

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:51:13 -0500

So we are starting to see more objections to the "Clean Feed": The GetUp campaign has attracted the attention of the Fairfax Media (The Melbourne Age) and also an OpEd. Blogger Josh Catone at Sitepoint attacks it from Rhode Island, with many comments by readers. And a really badly designed news feed service for Australia, Australia.to, also reports negatively.

Read the comments on this post...

The birthday of John Ray

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:52:37 -0500

John Ray, that is. Today in 1627, courtesy of Professor Olsen @ Large. One thing, though: Olsen says of Ray (linking to one of my essays online at NCSE):

Ray’s most influential decision was to define a species as a group which has a mutual fertility, each member capable of reproducing with any other. This was the first recorded biological definition of “species.

It is true that Ray gave the first biological definition of a species - not in the sense of Mayr's "biological" species concept which is a matter of being able to reproduce with other members of it, but in the sense that the technical terms of logic - genus and species - were given a peculiarly naturalist's sense. Ray did not define species as mutual fertility; he defined it as reproducing the same traits from seed:

After long and considerable investigation, no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species, if they spring from the seed of one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species … Animals likewise that differ specifically preserve their distinct species permanently; one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa. [In the Historia plantarum generalis 1686]

In short, Ray, and pretty well every naturalist from him until 1900 and the Mendelian revolution, held that a species was a morphology (distinguishing features) that was reproduced through a generative process. There is no mention of interfertility at all. Likewise, Linnaeus, who inherited much of this from reading Ray, also held that a species was a morphology that was reproduced through generation.

It's a common mistake to think that talking about reproduction implies talking about interfertility, but even Darwin rejected interfertility as a test of a species.

And yes, creationists, he was a creationist. In fact, he invented it. Prior to him, the traditional educated Christian view was that species were rough and ready, things that could be variable, with monsters, hybridising across what we would now think of as fairly large distances (the hyena was thought to be a hybrid of the jackal and the leopard, and the giraffe of the camel and leopard (hence the old term "cameleopard"). Because there was no firm conception of species as such until Ray, the idea they were fixed was, literally, unthinkable. You can't say that something you never thought of is anything. One of the translators of the King James Bible (1611), the Calvinist George Abbot (1562–1633), Archbishop of Canterbury. In his A briefe Description of the whole world, (1605), he wrote

There be other Countries in Africke, as Agtsimba [?], Libia interior, Nubia, and others, of whom nothing is famous: but this may be said of Africke in generall, that it bringeth forth store of all sorts of wild Beasts, as Elephants, Lyons, Panthers, Tygers, and the like: yea, according to the Proverbe, Africa semper aliquid apportat novi; Often times new and strange shapes of Beasts are brought foorth there: the reason whereof is, that the Countrie being hott and full of Wildernesses, which haue in them little water, the Beastes of all sortes are enforced to meete at those few watering places that be, where often times contrary kinds haue conjunction the one with the other: so that there ariseth new kinds of species, which taketh part of both.

And once the idea of species was formally proposed, and Ray held they were fixed, it took a very short time for them to be thought of as mutable (1745, Pierre Maupertuis, as I describe here).

Read the comments on this post...

A mild apology

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:38:22 -0500

I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Dennett has heart surgery after an aortic dissection, and gives thanks

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:15:31 -0500

... to his doctors. Here.

Late Note: Ronan in the comments points out this was in 2006. I think I was sleeping that year...

Read the comments on this post...

Noooooooo!!!!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:49:37 -0500

Read the comments on this post...