Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2008
Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in the second that biology is about machines, things that do work. I want to say that he is wrong about the first and right about the second, and moreover that they are contradictory ways of looking at the living world.
I've argued against informational metaphysics when it comes to genes before (see here and here).…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models.
The paper is nicely reviewed by K. Kris Hirst here, however. And when we mere mortals can get it, the paper is listed at the bottom of that and this post.
What Rogers and Ehrlich (yes, that Paul Ehrlich) did was analyse 95 variables in the design of the canoes of the "Lapita Complex", a group of Polynesians regarded as having colonised their islands around 1400-900 BCE. They found that…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of the Lecture to ponder what propaedeutic use lectures are. Or, in other words, do they help or hinder learning?
Years back, I had a friend who ran the Science and Humanities School at a small regional campus of Monash University who often said to me, with his psychology hat on, that lectures are the worst way to teach. I never found them all that helpful,…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known, he gave an explanation differently to Paley's external intelligence that designs all these facets of life - instead he claimed that natural selection, a process like Adam Smith's "hidden hand" explanation for the functioning of economies, was enough to explain adaptation.
I have long thought that Darwin was too much in thrall to the traditions…
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
Some of you may recall I was immensely impressed by Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old who started Pro-Test, which defended the use of animal models against the vicious and largely unthinking nastiness of animal "rights" protesters. Now Nick Anthis, at The Scientific Activist, is reporting that they seem to have achieved many of their aims in defending science from the ignorant. However, I think they will always have to be active - this stupidity has been around for over a century in Britain and elsewhere, and won't go away any time soon.
evolvingthoughts | February 4, 2008
I am quite sure that this is how undergraduates in philosophy see the whole thing:
HT: Creative Synthesis
evolvingthoughts | February 1, 2008
A rather cute article at the Catholic News Service says this:
In commentaries, papal speeches, scientific conferences and philosophical exchanges, the Vatican has been focusing more and more on the relationship between God and evolution.
From the outside, this may seem a reaction to the U.S. debate over creationism versus evolution, but it really has as much or more to do with the pope's interest in defining the legitimate spheres of science and faith.
Pope Benedict has weighed in several times on evolution, essentially endorsing it as the "how" of creation but cautioning that evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2008
It is widely understood that philosophers aren't as a rule, intentionally funny. Partly this is because we are often old fogies whose sense of humour was formed in the early Jurassic. Mostly it's because when you deal with the absurd professionally, you tend not to find the funny side of things. But an article in the Guardian lists a prime example of philosophical humour. Get ready...
And this marriage of humour and instruction is what makes the joke I am now going to tell you so wonderful. The logician in question, the late George Boolos, used to give a lecture in which he went through a…
evolvingthoughts | January 17, 2008
OK, so by now a number of you are either quite puzzled or are up in arms about this notion of mine that genes aren't information. First I'll recap and then make some general philosophical and historical points.
I argue that something can only be said to be information bearing if it is isomorphic to one formalisation of what counts as an Information Processing System (IPS). Anything that doesn't have the requisite mapping between these formal descriptions and physical systems doesn't count. I further argue that genes do not show the right properties of these formal systems, and hence should…
evolvingthoughts | January 17, 2008
Shelley at Restrospectacle gives a poem she learned in school, an excellent piece by A. E. Housman, So I got to thinking - what poem sticks with me? Is it the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by Eliot, who I think is a wonderful poet? Shakespeare? Kit Marlowe? I mulled and mulled for, oh, five seconds before I recall the first poem that ever really gripped me, by another Marlowe.:
To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,This coyness, lady, were no crime.We would sit down and think which wayTo walk, and pass our long love's day;Thou by the Indian Ganges'…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic...
OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out of hand. Information has become the new magical substance of the age, the philosopher's stone. And, well, it just isn't.
In the article linked, physicist William Bialek at Princeton University argues that there is a minimum amount of information that organisms need to store in order to be alive."…
evolvingthoughts | January 13, 2008
TR Gregory at Scientific Blogging asks why advisors would encourage their students to publish. One of the reasons is:
Most of the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked directly have been quite excited by the possibility of seeing their names in print on a high quality piece of work.
I agree with this. I was encouraged by David Hull, who marked my MA thesis, to publish some of it, and as a result I got my first paper, ten years ago. I still recall the thrill of seeing the reprints arrive in the mail. That was my name there. I did a little dance.
Even now, seeing a…
evolvingthoughts | January 8, 2008
Some things I spotted today..
It's Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday. Mike Dunford has a post card. I always think that if Wallace had recognised that selection is not all about survival, he could have come up with an account of social selection causing big brains (the so-called Machiavelli hypothesis) instead of Spirit.
The Environmental Action blog is calling for the resignation of the head of the EPA for refusing to allow California to regulate emissions. See also Effect Measure.
Two really good Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles have been just published:
Animal Cognition…
evolvingthoughts | January 7, 2008
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true?
For a start, I doubt that postmodernism was ever a coherent movement, but there were themes that are shared by many distinct schools of thought. One of these is the social influence on knowledge claims. Yes, postmodernists so-called tended to act and talk as if there were only social influences on knowledge claims, but the lesson has been learned that we cannot ignore the social causes of knowledge. Even the most analytical philosopher…
evolvingthoughts | January 5, 2008
Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a man, displays the evolved nature of morality. I tend to agree with this view.
Huck decides, "Very well then, I'll go to hell". Here's the entire passage, one of the greatest in English literature.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell…
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2007
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links...
Wesley Elsberry at Austringer has a nice piece on why creationists use the conflict model for the relation of science and faith.
Thinking Meat asks if life was "nasty, poore, brutish and short" as Hobbes thought, or things were simply just as much about survival as they are now, in preagriculture.
PsyBlog asks how well Epicurus, one of my favourite Greek Philosophers, fares in the light of…
evolvingthoughts | December 27, 2007
The online journal Episteme has a special issue out on conspiracy theories. Examples include God as a conspiracy theory, the 9/11 WTC "controlled demolition" theory and questions of rationality of those who engage in them.
Late note: This is a subscription journal.
evolvingthoughts | December 18, 2007
PZ Murghl has challenged me to explain why there are theology departments in universities. Of course, most universities lack theology departments, and some, like the Princeton Theological Seminary, have been hived off their home institution. Back when I actually did theology, at Ridley College at the University of Melbourne, the theology was run independently of the university under the aegis of a nationwide theological umbrella institution, and its entire connection with the university was as a domiciliary college.
But that's not what PZ is asking. So I will give a reason and limited…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2007
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I do try to communicate clearly when it is needed. My kids indicate that maybe I am not so successful as I might think, but this is a letter I received yesterday from a student that I thought might be useful for others. Named have been erased to protect the innocent (i.e., not me).
Mr. Wilkins,My name is Alex ***** and I am a junior in high school. I'm doing a research paper on the moral…
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2007
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to find out what people actually think before launching into the sorts of armchair theorising for which philosophers are famous (or infamous).
X-phi was started by, among others, Stephen Stich, at Rutgers, as a way to see whether the sorts of intuition pumps philosophers use in their arguments really hold true. It has become very hot in ethics, with undergraduates being…