Philosophy of Science
tfk | April 14, 2011
...Or "What I've been up to for the last week or so."
Last week was a busy travel week. I was in West Virginia for the first half of the week, on a whirlwind tour of the Morgantown area, speaking in the geology department at West Virginia University, then twice at a symposium on science communication, and then at a local freethought group (meeting in a beautiful Unitarian church with a view of the valley).
The video above is a slidecast from a talk NCSE's Steve Newton and I gave about the Process of Science and Scientific Controversy. Steve didn't record his talk, so you miss the lead-in,…
tfk | December 29, 2010Virginia Hughes, once the benevolent overlord here at Scienceblogs, asks the Question of the Year: What is Life, Anyway? She notes that many of the major scientific discoveries or advances of the year hinged on that question, and this month's Astrobiology has a series of essays on the state of our understanding. She explains:
Is life simply the ability to reproduce? Well, no. If that were true, as one scientist famously noted, then âTwo rabbitsâa male and femaleâare alive but either one alone is dead.â In 1994, a NASA committee deemed that life is âa self-sustaining chemical system capable…
tfk | August 2, 2010T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which â briefly â argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains:
Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]:
- Does scientific research for a living,
- Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals,
- Is funded by granting agencies to do it,
- Does not just write about it, or…
tfk | June 20, 2010John Fleck, a superstar science journalist whose work on water in the southwest is consistently brilliant, has some sage thoughts on the Problem With Science Journalism:
In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of science. I like to call it âthe textbook problemâ, but one might also characterize it as âthe science journalism problem.â
Lay exposure to science comes in two fundamental ways. The first is academic learning, in which non-scientists are exposed to textbook explanation of things scientists have…
emjohnson | June 15, 2010Chimpanzees have culture (or not) depending on your definition.Image: Irish Wildcat / Creative Commons
Author's Note: The following is an expansion on my reply to anthropologist Dan Sperber on the PLoS ONE article "Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees."
Culture is like art or pornography, it's hard for people to define but everyone knows it when they see it. Cultural anthropologists have long struggled to develop a consistent definition of the very thing that they study, a problem that has resulted in bitter arguments between scholars that, to an outsider, may seem as esoteric…
emjohnson | April 11, 2010
In his recent TED Talk Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter To A Christian Nation argues that science can and should be used to address moral issues. His newest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, will be published in October, 2010.
For more see Sam Harris, Franics Collins, and the NIH, The Feeling of What Happens, and the debate with Michael Shermer, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston Does God Have A Future?
revere | March 25, 2010The Robby in the title refers to Robby the Robot in the 1956 movie, Forbidden Planet, and what follows was a tag line in an ad for Grant's whiskey: "While you're up, get me a Grant's." That's in case you've forgotten or never knew.
I'm still working on the grant, doing things it feels like a robot could do. Writing pieces on the facilities, lists of Key Personnel, charts of graduate students trained, budgets, budget justifications, etc., etc. I have lots of help from great staff and colleagues, but it is the kind of necessary but tough slogging that doesn't feel very creative. I don't mind…
emjohnson | March 23, 2010Harvard Medical School physician and researcher J. Wes Ulm has a fascinating paper in the new edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the quarterly academic periodical put out by Johns Hopkins University. His paper "The Cachet of the Cutthroat" investigates the legacy of ideas that formed the basis of laissez-faire social Darwinism:
Ultimately, Social Darwinism fails in practice because it never succeeded as a theory. It's not even Darwinist-Herbert Spencer, after all, had sketched out its contours even before Darwin published his own work. And when the great naturalist outlined a…
emjohnson | March 16, 2010 Looking nonhumans in the eye. Image: Elephant Man by Chris GallucciIn 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote his now famous essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" and outlined the general reasons for why he rejected such an ideology. This approach has been followed by other writers such as Ibn Warraq in Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ramendra Nath in his essay "Why I Am Not A Hindu" and David Dvorkin in his "Why I Am Not A Jew." My own choice of title is not in the same tradition as these other writers (since I agree with much of what humanism has to offer), but I do share with them a concern over…
emjohnson | March 10, 2010It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series…
revere | March 3, 2010The Reveres consider themselves progressives (check the masthead), a word used for people who believe government has a role to play to make the world better, but also tend to be social libertarians. Many scientists and doctors are progressive in that sense. But it's a mighty big tent, and apparently covers some folks whose politics I agree with on many issues but can still be very far from what progressives also call the "reality based community." Very far. Far, as in "they can't see it from where they are."
Literally:
Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff…
emjohnson | March 1, 2010It's wonderful to see that my Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front has generated discussion on this important topic. The issue as I see it is really quite simple and boils down to two essential issues: the benefits to science versus the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research. Furthermore, our current understanding about primate cognition, emotional complexity, and their rich…
laelaps | February 23, 2010
Way back in 2007, when I was still a neophyte science blogger, Rutgers University philosophy professor Jerry Fodor published an op-ed in the London Review of Books called "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings." It was a critique of a straw man version of evolutionary theory characterized by a brand of adaptationism so narrow that (if it were at all true) biologists could be charged with just making things up as they went along. But Fodor was not so much concerned with science as the extension of evolutionary ideas outside of biology. Motivated by his irritation with evolutionary psychology, a…
revere | January 16, 2010[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here]
After a detour through the meaning of causation and the need to find a substitute for what can't, in principle, be observed (the counterfactual), we are now ready to consider what many of you might have thought would be the starting point, randomization. It's a surprisingly difficult topic and this post will probably be more challenging for non statisticians, but I feel confident you don't need to be an expert to understand it.
First a quick recap. If you want to know if mammography screening will prolong the life of a woman under the age…
emjohnson | January 15, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Richard Hofstadter wrote in Social Darwinism in American Thought that this political theory was "one of the leading strains in American conservative thought for more than a generation." In this series I have shown many of the inconsistencies that exist in the literature on social Darwinism and have emphasized the main objections that scholars have raised about the utility of the term.
In Part 1 I presented the standard definition of social Darwinism as defined by Richard Hofstadter and R.J. Halliday. In Part 2 I highlighted the common objection that there…
emjohnson | January 14, 2010Scientific innovation relies on open communication and always has. It has only been through the free exchange of information and ideas that scientific pioneers have expanded the boundaries of knowledge. Through books, pamphlets, letters, journals, and now blogs, scientists communicate their results and imagine new frontiers in the natural world. But even as we reach our highest point of scientific achievement have we failed to learn the lessons that history teaches?
The barriers to science have always come in the form of restricting information. Figures such as Copernicus, Kepler,…
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…
revere | January 8, 2010Let me start with an apology. This post is again fairly long (for a blog post). Blog readers don't like long posts (at least I don't). But once I started writing about this I was unable to stop at some intermediary point, although I might have made it more concise and less conversational. I haven't done either. Even worse, I didn't quite finish with the single point I wanted to make, so it will be continued in the next post. Hence the apology. Now to recap a bit and then get down to business.
My "challenge" from 10 days ago has drawn quite a response: over 40 quite substantive comments on the…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas.
It is first important to point out that Darwin…