Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Yesterday, a commenter asked why I said this and what I meant by it:
All species at a given time have exactly the same evolutionary duration, and on average, probably the same number of ancestral species, as their nearest relatives.
Consider this diagram:
This is an evolutionary tree, or rather part of it since we probably do not know all the branches and taxa that actually occurred in it, for four extant species. The concestor c for A and D is shown by the lowest circle, for A and B and C at the next highest circle, and for B and C at the top circle. The number of previous species to…
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2007
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution.
Ergo...
The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram.
That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
The first wrinkle is…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it. That said, we can invert the issue and say that a function of religion is to…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
Hank Fox at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has posted an Atheist Declaration of Rights. With two minor changes I reprint it below the fold.
Nonreligious Declaration of Rights
1. Freedom from Fear and Hate:
In every part of a secular society, the nonreligious have the right to live free of fear for their personal safety, their homes, pets and possessions. The nonreligious have the right to be safe from public hate speech and vilification.
2. Freedom of Speech:
The nonreligious have the right to freely speak of atheism in public, or to publicly display characteristic messages or symbols, without…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
One of the best of all American writers - I'd put him up with Twain - has died, leaving us all the poorer.
HT: Dynamics of Cats
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2007
John Hawks links to Greg Laden's blog in which he points out that Nisbet and Mooney misused the notion of framing. It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they think it means, as Inigo Montoya might have said if they were Sicilian.
Or does it?
Words do not always mean the same thing as their theoretical contexts imply or define. Take "paradigm". Kuhn used it in a context (later deconstructed by Margaret Masterman into 21 distinct senses, some subtly…
evolvingthoughts | April 5, 2007
I count PZ Myers as a friend. After all, he drove 1000 miles to come visit me when I was in Toronto two years ago (breaking his car in the process and having to spend time in some isolated Canadian wasteland). But friends can disagree about basic issues, and this time I do.
Elaine Pagels is the leading scholar on the Gnostic Christians. These guys were effectively Buddhists in Christian garb - the real world is not real, Jesus did not die, the point is to look within for salvation, etc. All in all, a very Platonic, dare one say, philosophical - god and theology.
Pagels made a comment…
evolvingthoughts | April 1, 2007
This is one of the main works of art by a fellow known as Fred Dagg, whose oeuvre includes the discovery and commentating the sport of farnarkling, and who wrote the real New Zealand national anthem. In it, he explains the meaning of life, in 1977 to the presenter of the ABC's Science Show 100th episode, Robin Williams (no relation) who was choking in the background for most of it.
I think that this is a particularly significant occasion for the program and it seems imminently suitable that we should ignore very briefly the peripheral areas however valuable, in the wonderful tapestry of…
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
"It is up to you to give [life] a meaning."
--Jean-Paul Sartre
"It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth."
--Blaise Pascal
More info at Arocoun's Wikipedia User Page...
Existentialism
85%
Utilitarianism
60%
Justice (Fairness)
55%
Kantianism
55%
Hedonism
45%
Strong…
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2007
Many words in English come directly via Latin or indirectly via French from Latin, and they have a meaning in English that is sometimes quite different from their etymology, occasionally leaching back into French.
Two such words are instruction and information, and both have peculiar meanings when used in the context of genetics.
Instruction is particularly interesting. The OED tells us that it has the following etymology:
[f. L. instruct-, ppl. stem of instruÄre to build, erect, set up, set in order, prepare, furnish, furnish with information, teach, f. in- (IN-2) + struÄre to pile up…
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing, to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bull-rush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 1757, Sect XI.
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2007
At Res Ipsa Loquitur comes a tale of a law professor trying to use Cicero to argue that all morality comes from intelligent design. Yes, that intelligent design. Read the smackdown by the student, who gives me much hope for the legal profession...
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2007
A major argument for the existence of the entities in scientific theories is that if these entities did not, on the whole, exist, the empirical adequacy of the theories would be miraculous. In other words, positing the reality of these entities, and the truth of the theories, is an inference to the best explanation, or IBE as it's abbreviated. Alan Musgrave has a new paper out in the online Rutherford Journal (which is of very high quality for an online journal) entitled "The 'Miracle Argument for Scientific Realism" which canvasses these issues.
IBE is also called "abduction", after C. S…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2007
Grrlscientist just pointed out that MDs are threatening to boycott The Lancet, because Reed Elsevier, the publisher, supports weapons fairs, including manufacturers of cluster bombs.
This is a worry. Elsevier publishes around 40 journals that have a philosophy component. Perhaps philosophers, who are after all supposed to be consistent on principles, should also boycott those journals. I list some of the major ones under the fold.
Cognition
Cognitive Systems Research
Endeavour
Historia Mathematica
History of European Ideas
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
International Review…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2007
And can somebody explain in non-mathematical terms, why E8 is so important?
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
I have an ambivalent relationship with the medical profession. On the one hand - my left - I lost a finger because a general practitioner refused to investigate a wart, that turn cancerous. On the other, I think medicine is one of this civilisation's greatest achievements, at least when it is made available to people.
But I don't think highly of medical practice. So it comes as a great pleasure to read a medical practitioner saying:
So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Unfortunately, the online…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim. Given the recent slurs on evolutionary theory as the foundation for Nazism and the holocaust, it's a good point to make.
But is Nietzsche even a "Darwinist" (a term only the Discovery Institute, or as we like to call it, DIsco, seems to use these days, as it has no real meaning)? He certainly accepted that evolution occurred, and he managed to avoid some of the sillier philosophical claims…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
Many people think we silverbacks are kind of dumb - interested only in sex and repelling competing males. Of course, these are important, but so is philosophy. Most of you just don't get it. But a correspondent has sent me this evidence that they get it in Copenhagen...
Apparently, according to my informant, Søren Delövenbo Kongstad, this is part of the local Libraries trying to pique people's interests in books by juxtaposing oxymoronic image and idea. Well they truly screwed up in this case, didn't they? Thanks to Søren and his wife who took this pic on her mobile.
evolvingthoughts | March 15, 2007
So, lots of people are talking about spirituality. What do I think it is, if anything? Below the fold.
I'm a naturalist. This means, in a philosophical context (i.e., neither a scientific nor a religious context) that I think that phenomena can be given a naturalised account. I think this also of spirituality.
I had something of an epiphany when reading Alfred Wallace's essays on Spirit. For those who do not know, Wallace had an argument that ran roughly thus:
1. All humans are roughly as intelligent and capable as each other (Wallace was a true racial egalitarian, even when Darwin…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".
First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…