So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid.
One thing that I came back fired up over are the unfinished projects I have running. So I intend to finish them. They are, in no particular order:
1. Denying that genes have information [heresy #1] Status: Written and needing to be submitted.
2. Denying that functions in biology exist outside models [heresy #2] Status: Written but badly in need of a rewrite.
3. Denying that essentialism ever existed in biology [#3. Four more and I get a free auto da fe] Status: Assembled materials, now for the pearls of wisdom.
4. My generative conception of species paper. Status: Ditto.
5. My joint paper with Ian Musgrave and Clem Stanyon, which has languished for ten years, on the origins of life and genes. Status: Written, but needing to be brought up to date and edited a little.
6. Pierre Trémaux, one of history's victims of whiggery: on species in 1865. Jointly with Gareth Nelson, who did the translation (and I did a bit of further judicial englishing). Status: About 50% written.
7. My Book on religion. C'mon, everybody's got one in them, right?
8. My paper with Craig Miller on the role of philosophy in ecology. Status: Indeterminate. More coffee input needed.
In other news, my species definitions reader has been accepted for publication if I can find the subsidy somewhere. And I really must organise a "species book" to go along with it.
Several job applications have failed, but others are in the pipeline. Now that Paul Griffiths, my boss until 3 days ago, has moved to Sydney, I have nobody to write progress reports to. Consider this my expiation.
I'll do the religion one as an initial series here. I have about 5 chapters drafted so far, so you all get to critique. I get the money, though.
It was great to meet Lynch and cohort (Lynch has a posse) at Exeter. Also, we dissed Nigeria a lot after a criticism was received via channels (a threat to withhold the beer) that I was ragging on a certain English speaking country with about 350 million people in it too much and could we please talk about some other country, say, Nigeria. Did you know that Nigeria has the worst education system, invades other countries illegally, and is riven with religious influence peddlers? Yeah, me too...
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I hope you don't mind me putting this here, although it's not directly responsive to your post; but it seems like you and your readers are the right people with whom to raise a question that I've submitted for a 3-hour interview that will be aired in the US this weekend (and available after that on the Web).
My question, along with info on the program, is posted at
http://curricublog.org/2007/08/03/eo-wilson-naturalism/
I would welcome comments there if anyone is interested.
Here's the question I sent about "Methodological Naturalism" (since my concern is school curriculum, I am concerned here not with whether ID is true or credible or not, but whether it belongs in science classes):
Dear Professor Wilson:
I would be extremely interested to hear your response to this question about something you said in the Q&A portion of an event aired earlier on BookTV:
You said that Intelligent Design cannot now be considered to be science because we do not have any method of testing it; and you said that if we did acquire methods for testing the claims of ID, then ID could be included within science.
Do you really think the problem is essentially one of methodology, or is it something deeper -- a more fundamental principle at the root of the methodological problem?
What would it take for a test of ID to be a �scientific� test? Doesn�t that depend on the nature of the enterprise in which it�s used as a test, rather than intrinsic qualities or characteristics of the test itself as an �instrument� or �method�?
By analogy: If I show you a bone on a table, how could you judge whether that bone is scientific fossil evidence? Whether it�s a �fossil� or not is a property or characteristic of the bone itself; but whether it is �scientific evidence� is not a matter of the bone itself, but a matter of its actual or potential use as evidence in the activity of science. In the case of the ID controversy, the �science� at issue is natural science (not �Wissenschaft,� or �science� conceived so broadly as to include the �sciences� of geometry and theology), and it seems to me that the claims of ID (claiming that some phenomena in nature cannot, in principle, be explained on the basis of natural processes) are claims that define themselves as being outside the scope of the natural science enterprise (which is the enterprise of seeking naturalistic explanations) � so any kind of test that�s possible would not be a �scientific test� in the sense of being a test that�s does something meaningful within the enterprise of natural science. Fundamentally, this is not a matter of methodology, or even epistemology, it seems to me, but a matter of the ontology of natural science as naturalistic inquiry. This is not an ontological claim about the natural world itself (as in the �Metaphysical Naturalism� that is commonly distinguished from �Methodological Naturalism� in these disputes); rather, it�s just a claim that natural science itself is ontologically a naturalistic enterprise.
What do you think?
I'm sorry I just pasted from MS Word, before, so there was extra code that made it hard to read. Also, I should have named E.O. Wilson as the interviewee. Here it is again, easier to read, in case you want to just delete the messy one.
For a 3-hour interview with E.O. Wilson that will be aired in the US this weekend (and available after that on the Web), I've submitted the question below, which is posted (along with info on the program) at
http://curricublog.org/2007/08/03/eo-wilson-naturalism/
I would welcome comments there if anyone is interested.
Here's the question I sent about "Methodological Naturalism" (since my concern is school curriculum, I am concerned here not with whether ID is true or credible or not, but whether it belongs in science classes):
Dear Professor Wilson:
I would be extremely interested to hear your response to this question about something you said in the Q&A portion of an event aired earlier on BookTV:
You said that Intelligent Design cannot now be considered to be science because we do not have any method of testing it; and you said that if we did acquire methods for testing the claims of ID, then ID could be included within science.
Do you really think the problem is essentially one of methodology, or is it something deeper -- a more fundamental principle at the root of the methodological problem?
What would it take for a test of ID to be a "scientific" test? Doesn't that depend on the nature of the enterprise in which it's used as a test, rather than intrinsic qualities or characteristics of the test itself as an "instrument" or "method"?
By analogy: If I show you a bone on a table, how could you judge whether that bone is scientific fossil evidence? Whether it's a "fossil" or not is a property or characteristic of the bone itself; but whether it is "scientific evidence" is not a matter of the bone itself, but a matter of its actual or potential use as evidence in the activity of science. In the case of the ID controversy, the "science" at issue is natural science (not "Wissenschaft," or "science" conceived so broadly as to include the "sciences" of geometry and theology), and it seems to me that the claims of ID (claiming that some phenomena in nature cannot, in principle, be explained on the basis of natural processes) are claims that define themselves as being outside the scope of the natural science enterprise (which is the enterprise of seeking naturalistic explanations) - so any kind of test that's possible would not be a "scientific test" in the sense of being a test that's does something meaningful within the enterprise of natural science. Fundamentally, this is not a matter of methodology, or even epistemology, it seems to me, but a matter of the ontology of natural science as naturalistic inquiry. This is not an ontological claim about the natural world itself (as in the "Metaphysical Naturalism" that is commonly distinguished from "Methodological Naturalism" in these disputes); rather, it's just a claim that natural science itself is ontologically a naturalistic enterprise.
What do you think?
Regarding your interest in Nigeria, I wanted to know more about that country and ended up writing this post.
It's my experience that most people are woefully ignorant about Africa in general and for some reason Nigeria in particular. (I was.) In a cold and callous way Nigeria is interesting because it may be the most vivid recent example of how a struggling, developing nation is being used by the United States and others as merely a source for oil and its other raw mineral resources -- and becoming poorer in the process.
If it is not obvious, I meant in that last sentence that Nigeria is becoming poorer by virtue of being a rich source of raw material.
I'd love to see these -- will they be available online? (FWIW, I agree with your heresies. Of course, me not being a philosopher, no one cares)
1. Denying that genes have information [heresy #1]
I assume that would mean, "independent of something to interpret them", in the same way that words on this screen have no information content, unless there's a well-adapted reader. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one's there to listen...
Ah, good times.
/wipes tear
On naturalism, the sense in which it is used WRT ID is misleading and philosophically malformed. I'll blog about that one day. Suffice it to say that we usually know when something is scientific or not, and ID isn't.
On Nigeria, I wasn't talking about Nigeria, but rather "Nigeria". But that's a nice post, well done.
On information, of course I mean "in genes sans observer". Neither paper is in a fit state to release into the wild, though.
(clears throat)
Stefan and I exhibited guilt at Exeter. He's back in a couple of weeks, and we'll meet then.
[Unfinished job, for all the rest of you]
As for Nigeria, and ignorance thereof:
President George W. Bush, at a news conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14, 2001
a certain English speaking country with about 350 million people in it
Shit, have they annexed Canada since yesterday? (Wouldn't surprise me.) It was only 301m last I looked.
Your papers on genes, information content and function sound interesting.
As I vaguely remember it, in communications theory the mathematical treatment of information strictly deals with message replication over a noisy 'channel' totally apart from meaning. In that sense, it's possible to speak of content without meaning.
If you're dealing with matters of interpretation, I can see where 'meaning' and 'function' as cognitive acts are closely related.
I'm denying that DNA even makes sense as a Shannon communication system, let alone meaning.
Welcome back. Sounds like we'd better have a coffee and see whether we can move indeterminate to semi-indeterminate.
I'm denying that DNA even makes sense as a Shannon communication system, let alone meaning.
As a EE (now retired), I can see where a deceptively simple but wrong metaphore can be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
John,
If genes really lack information sensu Shannon, then one would expect that they would be no more compressible than non-coding regions or even random sequence. But in fact, quite a large literature shows that coding sequences are more compressible than non-coding sequences and non-coding sequences are more compressible than random sequences. If genes really "have no information" then how do you explain this result?
Tony Whitson wrote:
In and of itself placing a bone on the table in the middle of a discussion is just an unexplained and probably inexplicable act that has nothing what so ever to do with science (no matter how you define or delineate it), naturalism, epistemology, ontology or cleromancy for that matter. It is simple the act of placing a bone on the table that at best will be ignored and at worst regarded as slightly bizarre by the other participants in the discussion.
Jonathon, sorry for the delay in replying - I've had two solid days of teaching.
I really do not know what you mean here by "compressible" (which, by the way, is a feature of Kolmogorov-Chaitin information, not Shannon). Are you saying we can take a DNA sequence and run it through PKZIP and either get a shorter (lossless) sequence or not? That is an operation performed on abstract symbols - nucleic acids and phosophate backbones don't go through PKZIP all that well.
You need to be a bit more exact before I can respond. And a ref or two wouldn't hoit.
Actually, John, compressibility is a feature of *both* Shannon and Kolmogorov information. The whole point of Shannon's source coding theorem is that the contained informational entropy is the limit on possible compression.
And yes, I really do mean literally compressing DNA sequences with an algorithm not that dissimilar in theory to PKZIP (although general purpose compression algorithms don't perform as well as algorithms designed for DNA) There have been many such programs made -- a recent example with helpful background can be found here.
My personal interest in the field of DNA compression is that in my younger years I wrote a paper along with Ming Li and colleagues on using conditional DNA compression for phylogenetic inference. Here the problem *is* defined in Kolmogorov's terms but it wouldn't have to be. I'm not entirely convinced myself how practical the method is, but apparently 125 papers cite ours, so somebody thinks its promising, I guess.