History
pharyngula | March 12, 2009The Open University is having an open lecture on 17 March, and you're all invited! The topic sounds historically, philosophically, and scientifically interesting:
Richard Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the discovery of natural selection: Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin.
The fifth bridge of evolutionary understanding is identified as modern genetics - which he terms digital Darwinism.
It's all going to be streamed live on the web, if you are awake at 7:30 pm Natural…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2009Taxonomy - the science of classifying organisms into putatively natural groups - is often treated as a kind of necessary bit of paperwork without much theoretical import by some biologists. Others think it is the single most important thing to do, usually justifying it in terms of conservation biology, but sometimes in terms of foundational knowledge. One thing that has become clear to me is exactly how foundational taxonomy is. Now, historian Polly Winsor has published a paper in the leading taxonomic journal, appropriately named Taxon, in which she argues, I believe correctly, that Darwin's…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2009Leiter's poll has Wittgenstein beating Frege. I'm disappointed that Peirce didn't get a higher ranking, and astonished the Nietzsche did.
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2009Dear Reader Derek asks,
Perhaps you can help me out here. For years I've been confused as to whether "Goths", "Geats", and "Jutes" are the same people with different spellings, related people with different spellings, or different people with coincidentally-similar names. Also, where "derek" (or "dietrich", or "teodric") comes from. Is it goth, or hun, or something else?
It's really easy to get confused here, because we're dealing both with historical reality and with historical fiction written a long time ago.
Goths: a Germanic-speaking ethnic group that took a major part in Migration…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2009A talk Michael Ruse gave recently in Sydney for the celebrations of Darwin's 200th birthday is now available as a podcast from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) here. Or here:
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week.
The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…
oracknows | March 7, 2009It's a rare thing indeed for this to happen, but words fail me here:
Wow. Just wow.
Because clearly the Obama administration is getting ready to fire up the ovens for responsible borrowers who paid their mortgages on time. Truly, a black hole of stupid in a single cartoon! The stupid burns on so many levels at once, that I remain astonished.
Either there was nothing for the Hitler Zombie (you remember, that undead dictator whose feeding on a victim's brain leads to incredibly dumb Hitler, Holocaust, or Nazi analogies) to find here, or the Undead Führer so thoroughly snacked on Mike…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2009Darwin's Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as "Darwin's theory". But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection.
First off, let's say this again: Darwin did not think that evolution was due to chance. His mechanism of evolution was not "random chance", as Behe and others have asserted. He believed that variation was not correlated with fitness, yes, and occurred in ways that are statistically distributed (a conception not available until Galton came up with the…
ddobbs | March 2, 2009The Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice round-up of some beautifully informative and often luscious work that "visualizes" news -- that is, turns news trends (and the social concerns and changes they document) into visual representations of data, like changing maps, splats of paint, or -- a favorite -- a simple needle meter.
For example:
An interview with Tim Schwartz (who has more great stuff at his site) about his indexing of various terms as used by the Times over the decades:
Tim Schwartz visualizes history (1851-2008) through word usage in The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on…
evolvingthoughts | March 1, 2009William Smellie wrote The Philosophy of Natural History in 1791, and it remained in print for over a century. It's a lovely and explicit expression of the Great Chain of Being view that all things grade insensibly from simple to perfect, and all classifications are arbitrary. This was effectively the last time in which someone could argue that from within natural history itself. I transcribe the whole chapter below the fold (it's a great way to engage the text in detail):
From Smellie, William. 1791. The philosophy of natural history. Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, pp463-469.
CHAPTER XXII.
Of…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2009This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology.
One of the constant and incessant complaints made against Darwin by theists in particular, is that he introduced chance and purposelessness into our worldview. I don't believe in such entities as worldviews, but leave that for now: did he introduce chance, and if so, does it imply a general lack of purpose in the world?
Here are some classic examples of that complaint. From Is Darwin Right? Or, The Origin of Man in 1877, William Denton wrote:
... it has been said that those who advocate…
evolvingthoughts | February 19, 2009This myth has more to do with what people thought their own views contrasted to, than anything Darwin said, but like all myths, there's a hint of truth underlying it.
The problem with this myth is the ambiguity of the term "gradual". It is a weasel word, which can mean one thing at one point and another when the first meaning has no purchase. This is referred to the fallacy of ambiguity in logic: when attacking terms in science, one must make sure the terms stay the same form beginning to end.
"Gradual" can mean one or more of the following things:
Steady: the rate of change is constant…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2009I finally have internet - only took Primus three weeks to install and get working my internet and phone - and that was with an existing account and line!
Tonight I went to the opening of a Thomas Henry Huxley exhibit at the Macleay Museum, and Michael Ruse gave an excellent talk on Tom and his Sydney connection (his wife Nettie came from Sydney and THH himself spent a fair bit of time here and up north on the HMS Rattlesnake). Then a nice Thai dinner and talk, although (you may be surprised to learn) I spent a lot of time just listening. Ruse and Paul Griffiths at the same table made for…
oracknows | February 16, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2009Myth 3: Darwin was actually a Lamarckian
This one is subtle. It implies that Darwin, because he lacked a Mendelian account of heredity, was not actually a "true" (or Neo-)Darwinian. The error depends on the extent of what is named as a school of thought in science and why.
As far as I know, the term "Lamarckian" for those who think heredity is acquired during the parental generation and passed on to progeny, was coined by August Weismann, a pre-genetics developmental biologist with an interest in heredity. He contrasted this with his own view, that germ cells - the cells in which inheritance…
gregladen | February 15, 2009I have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get "made" and this is simply how things are. The child did not seem too concerned.
Moments later, the child noticed his sister playing in the other room. A thought occurred to him ... a light went on, as it were. He turned back to his mother with an expression somewhere between accusation and perplexity.
"You did it twice…
clock | February 14, 2009John McKay has been blogging his research on the early days of mammoth discoveries in Asia and it is an amazing read! Who ever said that academic writing has to be dull!?
Fragments of my research - I:
Studying early knowledge of mammoths presents two problems. The first, is that the people who found mammoth remains were almost never literate and the people who wrote about mammoth remains were so far removed that they almost always got their information second or third hand or worse. The second problem is that, lacking a common name for mammoth remains, it is a huge task to sort out…
gregladen | February 13, 2009Genesis 2 ends with Adam and Eve being naked yet not ashamed. In Genesis 3, the Serpent, who is wiser than average, tricks Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit of one of god's two magic trees. This results in Adam and Eve recognizing their own nakedness, and compelling them to produce the first clothing. The word "naked" in the original Hebrew is either eromim or arumim. The former means naked (no clothes) and the latter means exposure as in exposing lies. The original Hebrew for the "clothing" that they put together, "chagowr" probably means "belt." The parallel (and probably…
terrasig | February 12, 2009This guest post comes to us from a colleague and friend, Dr Michael Wolfe. Enjoy!
The simultaneous celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin today offers a special opportunity to reflect on the state of our democracy and the status of science in our society. That these two iconic figures were born on the exact same day is, of course, a coincidence. And yet, as often happens in life, a chance confluence of events can help us see connections that we might otherwise miss.
Today we lionize Lincoln as perhaps our greatest President, and his eloquent…