Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2008
I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all.
This one's for Eli Gerson...
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith community and start a public relations and political campaign to have the form-substance dichotomy (hylomorphism) taught as chemical science. What would be the outcome?
Well, for most people they would remain as uneducated on the topic as before. They may know, vaguely, there is a dispute of some…
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 16, 2008
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.
Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter.
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 4, 2008
Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which I really like.
Tometheus (Prometheus' and Epimetheus' little brother, responsible for bringing egotism from the gods, I think) quotes my list as one of its favourite Aprilschmerzen.
It's good to be appreciated...
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…
laelaps | March 26, 2008Among the phrases that are most likely to make my hackles rise, "missing link" has to be among the most irritating. There is no good reason to continue to use it, the idea that evolution is a "chain" of progress being closely associated with the terminology, but this seems to be of little concern to some journalists. Even if we put accuracy aside, the phrase "missing link" is terrible because it has a sort of "half-joking" connotation to it, often being associated with bigfoot and cartoons rather than the remains of ancient humans.
Maybe they feel like they're trying to help by creating a "…
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 23, 2008
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were just ordinary words he coopted for the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics. He used them interchangeably in the Liber Animalia, and sometimes didn't use either words for living kinds. Rule Number One: You can't do science by definitions.
Here's a furore (is that pronounced "few-roar" or "few-ror-ay"?) about whether to respond to the Expelled gaff. Nisbet…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2008
On the one hand you have Jake Young discussing the role of expertise in public debates, concluding that maybe experts shouldn't expect that information from knowledgeable folk will automatically influence the uneducated. On the other hand, this...
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
Roberta is a great philosopher from UC Davis and she's talking about the notion of populations.
Known she needed a definition of population for a long time - this is a first stab.
"Population" has many definitions by biologists. Most try to limit it by space or time or interbreeding. But very little analysis. We invoke it often - it needs a proper definition. Uses include conspecificity, arbitrary delimitation, geography, area and time, interbreeding, etc.
Second motivation based on selection and drift, which are processes that occur in populations. These processes become arbitrary if…
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 14, 2008
Jay is an ecological philosopher. He wants to sketch how ecologists have used boundaries, and outline both a skepticism and an interactive approach.
He's not talking about types of ecosystems but tokens; not biomes, for example. Second, some ecosystems are sociopolitical objects (Greater Yellowstone).
In 1935, A. G. Tansley distinguished ecosystems - the abiotic and biotic resources - and rejected communities - set of interacting species. Ecosystem ecology focused on the flow of nutrients and energy through organisms and their environments. Organisms are transducers of energy and…