Logic and philosophy
evolvingthoughts | May 23, 2008
One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.]
Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes.
I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2008
I have been called, for my denial of outright atheism, a Chamberlainist. Well I never felt so much like Neville Chamberlain today as I walked through the corridors of the Seat of Learning* with a contract from the publishers for my book Species: A history of an Idea. I felt like shouting as I waved it, "Peace in our time!" except that the corridors are empty and I'd have felt like a right loon doing that.
As has been noted recently, by the way, Neville Chamberlain noticed that his rapprochement with Hitler had failed and rearmed Britain for the coming war, and responded to Hitler's…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2008
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda's naive optimism and Huxley's sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and "to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement". They also have a blog. It is…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2008
... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on
Women and superstition (parts one and two)
and
Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four).
Go check them and her out.
evolvingthoughts | May 3, 2008
Duck and cover, folks. I'm about to upset somebody.
I have previously been fairly critical of DNA barcoding, the proposal to use a small fragment of the COI gene - a mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase, subunit I - as a surrogate marker for species. That is, in simple terms, the use of COI sequences to "barcode" species so that straightforward molecular gene sequencing will tell you if you have a species or not, and how many there are in a given area.
Now I'm going to defend a new paper that proposes a barcoding method, for philosophical reasons. Here's the paper:
Inferring Species…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment.
First of all, some of my commenters think that this doesn't rule out religion being the threat. It may still be the major source of illiberalism, and I cannot deny that, but I think the problem lies not in the instantiation of the antimodernism, but in the psychology that underlies it. For religious ideas would have no issue if they did not…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein...
And knowing one of the principals in this comment, I had to laugh. When Kimbo says he thinks you are full of shit, he uses those words. I once had him say to me during a Q&A after I gave a talk, "'Fuck you,' he explained." To be fair, I had just told him I thought he was wrong.
So anyone who thinks Intelligent Design has been expelled and they are victims, or that bloggers should be treated with…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2008
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel like a fraud, but hey, you all know I love the "sound" of my own voice. There's also a lot of interesting material there for those who want to know more about the history and philosophy of science, and history and philosophy in general. Go visit it even if you don't want to hear more of your favorite silverback.
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2008
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit.
Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with five majors and no departments. It set me thinking: why has it come to this? It's not unique to the university I work at - all around the world, the humanities, and in particular the "core" humanities like philosophy and history, have been increasingly wound back in favour of science, technology,…
evolvingthoughts | April 6, 2008
While it's always nice to see a scientists step up to argue that intelligent design or creationism ought not to be taught as science because they aren't science, this worries me somewhat:
Scientists have failed to explain the limits of science, Peshkin said. Science deals in what can be observed and measured through experimentation. Assertions or beliefs are not part of it. A theory, he said, is a hunch about how the world works that is then subjected to experimental observation.
Religion, on the other hand, accepts revealed knowledge. The two, therefore, take different approaches to…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2008
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here.
In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…
evolvingthoughts | March 28, 2008
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.
So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories. Why this is more than a "gotcha!" is that since the late nineteenth century, philosophers of science have…
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2008
My friend and colleague Neil Levy has inaugurated the first edition of a journal devoted to a new field, Neuroethics, the first edition of which is available to all for free here.
Neil has a convincing introductory editorial, arguing that advances in neurobiology call into question and in other ways illuminate the nature of ethical reasoning. In particular it challenges the notion of personal responsibility, and indeed of personal identity in action. Moreover it can along with other new disciplines such as comparative primatology illuminate traditional philosophical topics such as the…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2008
I once sat across the table from Alex Rosenberg, a well known philosopher, who argued persuasively that one cannot be both a Christian and accept natural selection. I think Alex intended this as a reductio for Christianity, as natural selection is both true by definition and also observed in the real world. Is it correct?
The recent Frame Wars (which followed the Clone Wars) suggest this is really what's at issue in the Expelled case (Yes, I said I wouldn't post on it, but this is broader than that kerfuffle). Is accepting evolution going to make nasty atheists of us all?
Let's think of…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent Mishler of UC Berkeley and others (including mein host in Phoenix, Quentin Wheeler, and Kip Will) were correct in their concerns that barcoding was being touted as a replacement for proper taxonomy and that it will draw resources from it.
What are the issues?
There are three, as I see it.
One…
evolvingthoughts | March 15, 2008
Sorry that I didn't liveblog today. The room was too far to carry my Mac, and I was tired damn it. Blame Lynch, Todd Grantham, Michael Ghiselin and Roberta Millstein among others, who all made me drink beer. No, I swear, they really did. Anyway the final session (below the fold) was very interesting and revived my interest in some work I did ten years back, and even published.
Before I get into that, I should note a couple of non-philosophy items. First, the Chocolate Nazi. This way too thin to be a chocoholic gourmand who works a fine foods store in Salt Lake City tried to convince me (…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
This is a session on paleontology that I missed the start of because I had to go get my power supply.
Julia, a paleontologist, is discussing the evolution of birds, and how paleontology was misled by hypotheses that used the wrong taxa and characters. I'd love to blog it more extensively, but I missed the start.
She is noting the telic nature of some hypotheses, and how she and her colleagues worked in a different way, phylogenetically. Adopting a method used in molecular phylogeny, they supposed that character states might be decomposeable into smaller subregions, anatomically. They…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2008
I (and apparently Jim Lippard) went to see Dawkins' talk based on his The God Delusion, which I have critiqued before. I was impressed at the technique. It was definitely the very best Revivalist Sermon I have seen. I was not impressed by the content, nor by the fact that Dawkins was playing for laughs, applause and identification of Us versus Them.
In particular I was annoyed that those of us who do not condemn someone for holding religious beliefs were caricatured as "feeling good that someone has religion somewhere". Bullshit. That is not why we dislike the Us'n'Themism of TGD. We…
evolvingthoughts | February 27, 2008
Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example of why I don't want to demonise those who are religious but accept evolution and the rest of science:
Yes, Darwinian selection explains the species, physical laws decide planetary orbits, and human ingenuity brought the Bible into being. But religionists should view them all with Heschel’s “radical awe.” The fact that they occur is miracle enough; that natural law governs their…