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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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Philosophy of Science:
Denyse O'Leary uses Bill Dembski's blog (and a dozen other ID blogs) to report a comment from a friend about the mission statement for Nature. The mission statement reads: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.Her friend replies: To report advances and serve scientists means not...
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Posted on July 21, 2007 1:28 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Truth," the late philosopher Richard Rorty explained, "is what your contemporaries let you get away with." It has been observed that his contemporaries did not, as a general proposition, let him get away with that understanding of truth. This comment came to mind not just because Rorty passed away last Friday, but because of the spat going on over agnosticism and atheism. John Wilkins quoted Bertrand Russell saying that "An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at...
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Posted on June 11, 2007 1:38 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In which I defend framing and argue it is as important a part of a good argument as accurate data.
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Posted on April 9, 2007 11:54 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In honor of MarkCC's latest effort to explain to the deeply egnorant Michael Egnor why the fact that any inferentially true set of statements – including scientific theories – can be reformulated as a tautology, I thought I'd crack open Elliot Sober's excellent Philosophy of Biology, in which he discusses the relevance of the "tautology" objection to evolution. But before doing that, I have to take exception to something Egnor said. I actually take exception to nearly everything he says, but I'd rather not bog down in the details. Egnor tries to summarize natural selection as "survivors survive," but that...
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Posted on April 4, 2007 3:31 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Misogynistic authoritarian Vox Day requests a definition of science. His commenter suggests: Science - sci·ence (sī'əns) n. - The organized attempt to disprove the existence of God so we can do whatever we want without feeling bad about it.Anyone involved in the arguments over creationism will recognize this sentiment that science is about morality and theology, but it really and truly isn't. Dr. Myers offers a much better tripartite definition. He puts science-as-encyclopedia first, which I think is unfortunate. People tend to think of science as a collection of facts, which ignores the important role that uncertainty plays in science....
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Posted on March 6, 2007 12:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As I'm clearing out material I keep meaning to write about, I came across an excellent post about Bayesianism and 21st century intellectualism: Popperian falsification is just a special case of the Bayesian view: if the likelihood P(data|model) is zero (indicating that the data is impossible given the model), P(model|data) is zero, regardless of the prior [and the model is falsified]. But the Bayesian approach offers some sort of a weighted preference among all the models that haven't been refuted yet, balancing the Ockhamist preference for simplicity through the prior and the desire for accuracy through the likelihood.This is very...
Posted on February 19, 2007 5:41 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
At Billy Dembski's place, GilDodgen quotes Denyse O'Leary: Bear with a simple lay hack here a moment: Why must we know a designer’s intentions in order to detect design? If the fire marshall’s office suspects arson, do the investigators worry much about WHY? Surely they investigate, confirm their finding, and turn the information over to other authorities and interested parties, without having the least idea why someone torched the joint. ALL they need to be sure of is that the joint did not torch itself, via natural causes.Let's say, first of all, that we are not talking about a bush...
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Posted on January 21, 2007 1:44 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As a side-note to macht's commenters: don't try to "translate that which Josh is not explicitly stating but about which he would likely concur." I don't. If you don't understand something, just ask. I've never claimed that science has a monopoly on truth. It is, however, the only method we know about that allows us to objectively clarify what is or isn't true.
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Posted on December 14, 2006 10:33 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A month or so back, someone very strange published an article explaining how evidence based medicine is "fascist." Evidence based medicine, of course "is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients." How horribly fascist. Indeed, the main individual targeted for "fascism" was himself a prisoner of the Nazis and a soldier in the fight against Spanish fascism before the Second World War. The bloggysphere of course was very excited by this idea, and responded with its characteristic calm, dispassionate analysis. Alan Pearson ("RN MSc PhD FAAG FRCN") has...
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Posted on December 13, 2006 2:37 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
IDolatrous bloggers ask Is altruism all about cost-to-benefit ratios?, and conclude after reviewing a paper in Science that lays out the current thinking on the evolution of altruism: Of course, there is another avenue for thinking about altruism: but this means going beyond neodarwinism and entertaining the thought that human beings need to be explained not only in terms of law and chance, but also in terms of design.Let's set aside that they never bother to explain how "design" would actually resolve this. That would require some sort of "theory of design," and we all know no such thing exists....
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Posted on December 11, 2006 1:46 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
