General Science
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2007
All the strangers look like family
All the family looks so strange
The only constant I am sure of
Is this accelerating rate of change
— Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up, from the Ovo Album
Creek Running North has a delightful rumination on the lack of a balance of nature, in which he notes that
The sheer fecundity of the world conceals its vulnerability to change.
and
There is no balance of nature. Or if there is, it is the balance of a teetering rock on a pedestal stable enough to hold it for the moment.
This instability of the world bothers many people, or they ignore it and hold fast…
evolvingthoughts | September 14, 2007
When the Republicans began their deconstruction of American democracy, under Newt Gingrich, one of the immediate targets was the emasculation of the Office of Technology Assessment. Since that time, the Republicans have mangled, misused and rhetorically denied any science that failed to fit their self-interests or those of their sponsors, as Chris Mooney detailed in his magisterial The Republican War on Science.
There's an old saying - you are entitled to your opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. If there is nobody telling American legislators what the facts are, they seem…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2007
Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get "the controversy" taught in the school district of his kids' school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was "discriminated against... for being Christian". The suit was just thrown out.
What bothers me is not that antievolutionists would again try to use the legal system to change the definition and content of science - we have come to expect that in this political battle (and it is nothing else but a political battle. There's no science or even decent philosophy there). What bothers me is…
evolvingthoughts | September 7, 2007
Now we turn to the modern accounts of life.
In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler produced uric acid without using “kidney of man or dog”. Prior to that time, there was considered to be something different between organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Living things had some “vital fluid” that other things lacked. Most often this was expressed in Aristotelian terms even if, like Buffon, they were very anti-Aristotelian. But still life was not fully explicable in chemical terms.
Vitalism, as this idea was termed, did not die with Wöhler, though. In fact, we can find instances of it until the…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2007
So, you thought that Colony Collapse Disorder, which is causing billions of dollars in losses in American agriculture, was an act of nature? You poor fools! It's a plot, I tell yez. We Australians have hardier bees than you do, so they can carry an infectious disease that your weakly pathetic American bees just can't deal with. And it's no accident that we sent them to you. Now you have to buy our produce! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2007
COSMOS magazine has an interesting article sure to stir up trouble by suggesting that, among other things, global organic farming would necessitate clearing all remaining forests and even then a substantial portion of the earth's population would starve.
I don't know enough about this topic to speak sensibly, but I will anyway. What with the current, and it now looks like permanent, drought in Australia, the carrying capacity of the land, not only in Australia, is stressed to the max. Fisheries are declining. Amazonian and Malaysian forests are being cleared. Biodiversity is dropping…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2007
Carl Zimmer has one of his usually clear and precise articles on recent work on the nature of life, focussing on the work of Carol Cleland, who is at the National Astrobiology Institute, despite reduced funding for actual science by the present administration. I met Carol last year when we both spoke at the Egenis conference on the philosophy of microbiology.
Carol argues that we do not have a theory of what life is. She may be right. One of her arguments is that if there were multiple "origins of life" events that used different chemistry, we may not even be able to "see" the others…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
Continuing on from my last post, let's consider the modes of speciation that are called into account for the existence of species.
Here is a list taken from Sergey Gavrilets, which I put in my most recent paper in Biology and Philosophy (2007).
Vicariant – divergent selection and stochastic factors like drift after division of a population by extrinsic factors such as geographical changes;
Peripatric – a small subpopulation, mostly isolated, at the extreme of the parent range. The idea is that it will have both a non-standard sampling of alleles, and also be subjected to divergent…
evolvingthoughts | August 15, 2007
Dear readers, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has suggested that we have a universally available icon to indicate that the blogger is blogging about peer reviewed research, and he has created a discussion blog at BPR3. Please go make suggestions and add to the discussion. Muggins here will implement it when the consensus has been reached.
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2007
I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of "species" in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It's designed as a reader for scholars to see how the notion[s] have evolved separately in the logical definitional sense - for Aristotle, eidos, which we translate as "form", "species", and "kind", was a logical term, not a biological one, which had to wait until the 16th century, and even then they were distinct notions.
I argue in the commentaries that there was nothing…
evolvingthoughts | August 10, 2007
Rob Wilson has a new entry up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled "The Biological notion of an individual". It discusses an interesting problem, one that goes back to discussions by Julian Huxley in 1911. What is an individual in biology?
The term "individual" means, etymologically, that which is not divisible. Of course we can divide up organisms, but if we do this physically, they immediately thereafter cease to be the organism. Except... there are colonial organisms that can be so divided - sponges, hydras, slime molds, and so on. To make matters worse (much worse, as…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I've been pretty quiet of late. In part this is because I've been travelling with little internet access, but also it's because I'm teaching a subject I haven't studied in years, and because I was asked to write a popular essay for a magazine.
It's COSMOS Magazine, an Australian popular science magazine, and what the editor wanted was something like my posts on philosophy of science as the ornithology of science. It takes effort to write clearly to a word limit (which is why I blog - I'm fundamentally lazy), but with the help of the editor, Tim Dean, I managed to say one thing rather than…
evolvingthoughts | July 31, 2007
Some guy named Chris Mooney got reviewed for his latest book Storm World in the LA Times. You'd think from the reviewer's comments that he did a good job. I've heard the name before... now where? Hmmm.... leave that one with me for a bit.
[I got my copy, Chris, and I'll read it as soon as I get time, promise.]
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2007
Run by Matt Haber at Utah, it's a forum for discussions of work in progress, student matters like employment, tech issues and biology and society topics, to mention only a few. It's in alpha form now, but expect it to grow. The sidebar blurb is this:
Thank you for visiting the Philsophy of Biology Cafe. Our forums are currently under construction and are in ALPHA testing stages.
This forum is a place to come, sit down, and have a hearty swig of the many topics concerning philosophy and biology.
We try to keep things in a coffee-house theme (in case you didn't notice) so if you have any…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2007
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
A new paper in New Mexico Geology has the following rather tendentious title:
Fassett, J.E. 2007. The documentation of in-place dinosaur fossils in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and Animas Formation in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado mandates a paradigm shift: dinosaurs can no longer be thought of as absolute index fossils for end-Cretaceous strata in the Western Interior of North America. New Mexico Geology 29(2):56.
Ack! He mentioned the p-word! Now I have to find him and extract his teeth without anesthetic.
So here's the abstract:
Extensive geochronologic…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
No! Not orgasmic! [There, that should bump up the hits]
You all know, of course, the inestimable Darren Naish and his wonderful blog Tetrapod Zoology. What? You don't? Go there immediately and come back when you've read it all, and the old site too.
[Fifteen days later]
So, I wanted to mention a similar blog, by a student working on spider systematics (way cool), name of Christopher Taylor, called Catalogue of Organisms. In this 300th anniversary of the first real such catelogue by Linnaeus, that's a way cool title. And of course you have an almost endless supply of cool material, even…