Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2008
But, allowing that we were to take the operations of one part of nature upon another, for the foundation of our judgement concerning the origin of the whole, (which never can be admitted,) yet why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a principle, as the reason and design of animals is found to be upon this planet? What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so…
evolvingthoughts | October 1, 2008
In the light of the ongoing automation of impact factors, usually by somewhat opaque algorithms or procedures, a number of editors of various biomedical jounrals have asked to be taken off a new European reference index. I have taken the liberty of formatting the text below the fold in paragraphs. It was taken from the HOPOS-L@listserv.vt.edu forum for history and philosophy of science, and originally on the H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology [mailto:H-SCI-MED-TECH@H-NET.MSU.EDU].
From: Finn Arne Jørgensen
Date: Tue, September 30, 2008 2:31 pm
Journals…
evolvingthoughts | September 28, 2008
Readers know I think religion is post-agricultural, which raises some difficulties if we find evidence of organised religious behaviours before the onset of agriculture. The case in point here being Göbeli Tepe. Now a recent model of the process of cereal domestication has set back the beginnings of agriculture some ten thousand years earlier than the c10kya version, the "rapid onset" model, in favour of a "protracted transition" model.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog has a very nice roundup of the issues, and there is a summary at Science Daily. The crucial question resolved by this…
evolvingthoughts | September 28, 2008
It all began with Larry Arnhart giving a "Darwinian" account of the case for financial bailouts. Then David Sloan Wilson rejected the argument from the Invisible Hand. Then Massimo Pigliucci entered the fray. What's at issue?
There are two basic extremes in economics: laissez faire and command economies. The former suppose, with the overextrapolation of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, that a truly unbiased and free market will generate goods better than any other economic system. The latter is socialism, and supposes that a central planner, usually the State, will control economies reducing…
evolvingthoughts | September 21, 2008
Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made silly and false claims before. I thought some words about what a fallacy actually is might be to the point.
According to Archbishop Richard Whately, whose book The Elements of Logic, first published in 1828 from an encyclopedia article revitalised the modern study of logic in the English tradition,
By a Fallacy is commonly understood, "any…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2008
Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now.
A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent. Thony is not permitted to point out any further historical inaccuracies...
Leiter reports that a philosopher who blogs, from Yeshiva, James Otteson, may have been removed because he said things on the blog that are sexist, or at least interpreted to be, according to Inside Higher Education.
Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has the first of a series on the historian Simon Schaeffer, on…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2008
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2008
Sometimes it's so cool to know smart people, so you can congratulate them when they win awards. Go Kimbo! Hat tip Leiter.
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points us at a paper in a new journal, Review of Symbolic Logic, which appears to be Open Access, by the redoubtable Graham Priest, on whether existential quantifiers imply existence. Why this matters is a deep issue in metaphysics: on the one hand we have the noneists, following Meinong, who hold that a quantifier in a formal sentence (and…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right
2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment:
Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you.
Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument...
As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real…
evolvingthoughts | August 19, 2008
The local evangelical students society had me along last night to talk about "Is belief in the Christian God rational?" I was on the negative, although I did ask them which side they wanted me to argue for. It was done in traditional debating format, and I found it incredibly restrictive - speakers were allowed to get away with introducing stuff they hadn't mentioned in their main point piece, and a number of things were left up in the air.
Kudos to the undergraduate organisers Tim and Stewart for having a philosophy lecturer and a graduate student in physics and moral philosophy (…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright's initial metaphor and ideas and how they changed (it hadn't occurred to me, but should have, that the landscape metaphor fails to deal with new mutations, which change the landscape itself (although I did say something like this in my 1998 paper). Anya Plutinski discusses the iconography of Wright's…
evolvingthoughts | August 6, 2008
Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David Hull's view of science as a semantic conception of theories. In the light of problems such as suboptimality in evolution, many people decided that science could not be just an evolutionary (in the sense of selectionist) process because science did not require the sort of random wanderings in order…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold with abstracts and my comments...
Evolution of reproductive isolation in plants
Heredity advance online publication 23 July 2008; doi: 10.1038/hdy.2008.69
A Widmer, C Lexer and S Cozzolino
Reproductive isolation is essential for the process of speciation and much has been learned in…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2008
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation.
Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with…
evolvingthoughts | August 1, 2008
Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog:
I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist" and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are possibly atheists. Sagan and Hemingway, maybe. I don't know much about them; but Jefferson, Franklin, Darwin were all deists; Lincoln a theist (though not an orthodox Christian), and also Clemens (unless that's Tom Selleck), and Einstein a "Spinozan theist".
Atheism has a number of conflicting…
evolvingthoughts | July 30, 2008
For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer's own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer himself. Supposedly the founder of the justification for robber baron capitalism, Spencer actually proposes feminism, liberal protection of the poor and weak, and other ideas that are more redolent of Mill than Malthus (who is also the subject of similar demonisation, as Flew showed). Now someone has affirmed my unease: Damon Root, writing in Reason…