I survived!

Just out of professional curiousity, PZ: what did you present to the philosophers specifically? The "mangling of philosophy issue" that has been discussed?

I'd like to see your analysis of this:
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2006/03/students-on-teaching-creati…
What the high-school kids say about teaching IDC in science classes.

Keith: No, I gave a biologist's perspective on the issue: I talked specifically about the bad science of ID. I don't think I could lecture philosophers on philosophy.

Coturnix: Since little Tara could not go on if there were no god, I think we ought to just let the poor thing die. Survival of the fittest and all that, you know.

Seriously...eh. Teenagers will tell you they'll die if they have to learn trigonometry. Listening to uninformed minds tell you what they ought to be taught is a pointless and counterproductive exercise.

I really liked the way Tom put everything succintly and correctly and to the point. He describes himself as not a Christian but believing in God.

This also reveals a little bit what is actually going on in classrooms.

The second saddest thing about the roundtable: it seems to me that the girls had a much greater need to "just believe" and less willingness to apply rational/scientific thought than the boys. I fear that suggests that we've failed another generation of women by not encouraging them in science at an early age.

The second saddest thing about the roundtable: it seems to me that the girls had a much greater need to "just believe" and less willingness to apply rational/scientific thought than the boys. I fear that suggests that we've failed another generation of women by not encouraging them in science at an early age.

In my experience, the most "pious" people always seemed to be women. Growing up in a religious household, I always suspected my dad was secretly pleased when we overslept on Sunday and missed church -- it was only my mother who was at all distressed. And old ladies seemed to make up the bulk of the congregation. I'm not sure whether it was lack of science training relative to my father (neither of my parents were scientists), but more science programs for girls couldn't hurt, I suppose.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me utterly ashamed to be a teenage girl.

I like to think that most of my peers (boys and girls) don't buy into the creationist nonsense, but then there is one girl I know who believes dinosaurs never existed.

In a liberal school like mine, however, people laugh at her more than anything else.

If by any chance you happen to spend some time in Paris for a colloquium or the like, would you mind mentioning it on the blog?
I would love to hear you, especially on ID topic, although it is not a problem in France as it is in the US (I guess the fact that the Catholic Church is cool with evolution helps a bit, but on the whole it goes down to the secular tradition).

Keep up the good stuff!

PZ we have a science & religion seminar series at NDSU. What about coming up to Fargo sometime? We'd love to have you speak here.

I'm a British post-doc at the NDSU entomology department with my main research area being evolutionary ecology. In particular, information use/decision making, life-history evolution and social evolution. I love pharyngula it's great blog PZ!

We all need to fight the lunacy and the promoters of the lunacy. Tough on ID and tough on the causes of ID.

Incidentally PZ you seem to hint at a dislike of Dawkins in some of the posts I read. To be honest I dislike some of the ideas of Dawkins (memes are a ludicrous idea), but I personally can't think of a better introduction to evolutionary biology than �The Blind Watchmaker�.

Me again. This reminds me of a special issue of a French magazine that discussed the rise of ID, mainly in the US. Thanks to you and a few more blogs I already had a pretty good idea of what they were talking about, but some articles were quite original.

I don't have the figures (I lent the magazine) but it appeared that the French don't think twice about evolution: if asked, they say it is true. But if they are asked *precisely* what they understand about evolution, things get more complicated : in fact evolution viewed by the man in the street is pretty much adaptation (the giraff's neck gets longer and longer...). So it the French layman is a evolutionist, but a gut Lamarckist.
Do you think it has anything to do with jingoism? :-)

I disagree with Dawkins on narrow interpretations of selection -- I tend to be more Gouldian than Dawkinsian on the importance of forces other than selection on evolution. But in general, I love his forthrightness, and agree that he is one of the best writers and advocates of evolutionary biology we've got.

I could probably be talked into a visit to NDSU fairly easily -- I think you're only about 2.5 hours away from me.

Cool PZ, well I see what I can do on the seminar/invite front. I'll email you later this week about it and see what your timetable is like.

On Dawkins versus Gould; to be honest I'm an adaptationist.

BTW didn't you think Gould's "Structure of Evolutionary Theory" was simply awful? Moreover for an evolutionary 'theorist' there isn't much in the way of mathematical models in Gould's work, is there? I tend to agree with Maynard Smith's less than complementary view of Gould.

Maynard Smith in the NYRB

"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1703

Finally I would recommend the "The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus" by Elliott Sober & "Adaptationism and Optimality (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)" by Steven Hecht Orzack (Editor) & Elliott Sober (Editor) for far more rigorous and interesting examinations of some of the conceptual issues around ideas like adaptation or optimality than Gould ever provided (IMHO).

Moreover for an evolutionary 'theorist' there isn't much in the way of mathematical models in Gould's work, is there?

Why the numbers fetish? Evolution is a conceptual field. Sure, once the smart guys work out the concepts, the techs can work out the mathematical models that can help one design research protocols....

BTW didn't you think Gould's "Structure of Evolutionary Theory" was simply awful?

No. In need of editing to about half its length, yes.

Moreover for an evolutionary 'theorist' there isn't much in the way of mathematical models in Gould's work, is there?

And what models has Dawkins discovered? Essentially everything Dawkins has ever written is a paraphrase of what Bill Hamilton and George Williams wrote before -- including the idea of genes as units of selection -- and yet the public somehow thinks he was responsible for the idea of the "selfish gene".

Maynard Smith in the NYRB...

While any reasonable person would agree that Maynard Smith was a far greater scientist than either Dawkins or Gould, that little bit of "trash-talking" in the New York Review of Books always gets trotted out in these debates -- to what purpose I fail to see -- the debate in question wasn't science but ideology -- the NYRB is a politically charged magazine, not a scientific journal. So Maynard Smith was a fan of human sociobiology. His mentor, J.B.S Haldane, an even greater scientist, was a fan of eugenics. What of it?

Finally I would recommend the "The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus" by Elliott Sober

Sigh. Why do *philosophers* always think they have anything meaningful to say about the *science* of evolution? Why don't they go bother chemists with philosophical debates about the meanings of orbitals or something?

Sigh. Why do *philosophers* always think they have anything meaningful to say about the *science* of evolution? Why don't they go bother chemists with philosophical debates about the meanings of orbitals or something?

What a odd comment. You have a biologist recommending a book that he's presumably read to another biologist, and you're effectively saying nobody should read it because happens to be by a philosopher.

If you have a problem with what Elliot Sober actually says, great. But please spare us the generic philosopher-bashing.

BTW, I'm no biologist, but I was fairly impressed with Sober & Wilson's treatment of the units of selection controversy in Unto Others, in particular the relation between formal models of selection and multilevel game theory.

That may be relevant to Coturnix's question; I'm not a math-fetishist, either, but it didn't seem so much like a "numbers fetish" to me as some interesting conceptual analysis using simple models and yielding existence proofs, refuting some of Dawkin's greedy reductionism about units of selection. (Roughly, if Dawkins is right in some of his stronger claims about units of selection, some well-established game theory must be wrong, and it's not. Group selection can be both real and significant, under certain circumstances that are easy to define and likely not as rare or insignificant as Dawkins would lead you to think.)

Again, I'm not a biologist, which is one reason I'm bringing it up. I'd be very interested in biologists' take on Unto Others. (Especially liberal biologists, given that it's largely about whether altruism can be "real" or "sincere" at various levels, and how misunderstandings of those issues lead to bad philosophy and politics.)

FWIW, Unto Others is by a philosopher and an evolutionary biologist, so it's not necessarily all crap to be dismissed out of hand. :-)

If you have a problem with what Elliot Sober actually says, great. But please spare us the generic philosopher-bashing.

It's just that I get frustrated that evolutionary biology is seen as a field where it isn't seen as necessary to have done work in the subject prior to writing a book about it. I mean it's great that non-biologists have an interest in evolution -- I have an interest in a lot of other things other than biology too, but I wouldn't dream of writing a book about Socrates or something -- I'd concede that ground to philosophers.

I am a liberal biologist and I love Unto Others and I love David Sloan Wilson both as a scientist and as a person and I love philosophy of biology and think that Sober is darned good (though Brandon usually floors me with his clarity and insight much more than Sober).

I also loved Structure of Evolutionary Theory and hated Selfish Gene.

I understand that Dawkins' PhD Dissertation is really good and on an interesting topic touching on sympatric speciation (and behavior) in crickets. I wonder if it is available online as I would love to read it. However, since then, he has not done any biology. He's played some computer games that superficially look like evolution and written a bunch of popular books. Each of his books is better than the previous, as he concedes his opponents' points one by one. However, he is too invested in genocentrism to make the final step and join the rest of biological/philosophical community in the current paradigm.