Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Lunch being had we crowd into a new room to hear Stephen Peck, a biologist from Brigham Young University down the road a ways in Provo. Stephen is talking about ecological boundaries.
A group of ecologists set up seven different ecosystem groups for agroecosystem studies. They debated how to define an ecosystem, and it simply got harder. They needed a biological indicator to determine the state of the ecosystem and couldn't even get to defining the latter. Over fifteen years, he hasn't been able to figure it out.
Properties of ecosystem boundaries:
Fuzzy
Non-regulated -> Highly…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Bill Wimsatt is somewhat of a hero around here and for good reason. He is perhaps one of the most influential under-published philosophers of biology. Today he's talking about modularity in biological and cultural evolution.
Modularity is a recurrent theme in biology and culture. Evolved systems are usually modular. It's easier to make a modular system, because there are fewer part types - polyfunctional parts.
They are easier to modify if you can adapt to local circumstances by changing one or a few parts rather than the whole system. Quasi-independent parts
A small number of parts…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Jim Griesemer is one of my favourite philosophers. Here he's discussing the work of Herbert Simon on dynamical boundaries.
What Simon said was that subsystems are nearly decomposable - systems are hierarchical and their internal relations are stronger than their cross level relations - and that this is a criterion for the dynamic specification of such systems.
He discusses the Hora and Tempus example. Jim asks, how do either of them make watches at all? He asserts that scaffolding - any structure or element that facilitates the development of a system's skills or capacities - is…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Monica Piotrowski (Utah) also is talking about DNA Barcoding. She starts with a child's coin sorter. Imagine that it's a bug-sorter, sorting by DNA samples. What does the child now have? She claims Barcoders must have a species concept to measure the success of their practice. They have none, and so they are in a two-horned dilemma neither option of which is a good option.
COI is claimed to be 99.75% identical within, and <97.5% between species. Hence it can delimit, but not describe, species, according to Hebert and Strauss, the founders and promoters of Barcoding. So, what's the…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Brent Mishler is a very nice guy who is wrong on a few things - Phylocode, species, and so on - but he's absolutely right about barcoding. He's talking today about so-called DNA barcoding and species concepts.
He says that species are just the least inclusive taxa for whatever view of taxa one has - there is no species problem per se.
He thinks that species are just the smallest monophyletic group worth diagnosing. And more: since biology should be free of taxonomic ranks, species (as a rank) should be dropped. I can agree or not depending on what interpretation is given here. Brent…
evolvingthoughts | March 13, 2008
I have just sat through one of the most teeth clenchingly bad philosophy talks, given on phylogenetics by a philosopher who has never read anything sensible on phylogenetics to phylogenetic systematists. One of the last mentioned leant over to me and asked "Does this guy know anything?" I had to say no. I am protecting the guilty for reasons of manners, but people: If you are going to lecture professionals about what they do as a philosopher, at least try to learn the science first. Whatever you do, don't think that because you've read a book by a critic of the topic that you understand the…
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2008
Below the fold is a humorous and possibly true account of reality TV trying to include geologists. With appropriate substitutions, the same thing could be said of any academic...
While the media rarely represents geologists to the general population, (excluding sound bytes on Discovery Channel volcano specials), there was one recent attempt to integrate geologists into a television program.
According to various blog sources, CBS was looking to produce a new reality TV show for 2008, after correctly predicting that the writers’ strike would cut down on their ability to create blue-toned…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2008
After a three day workshop on the future and nature of taxonomy (or systematics; I'm still unconvinced there's a difference) I am exhausted and enthused. The former because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the latter, well, because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the conversations that followed.
In particular I am very impressed by Quentin Wheeler's International Institute for Species Exploration, and the outreach program, "Planet Bob", both of which stress the vital need to identify, describe and study the planet's biodiversity in detail before it is all gone (and…
evolvingthoughts | February 27, 2008
Well, actually the weather in Tempe, Arizona, seems to be very much like the weather here in Brisbane, but that's where I'm going. For a couple of weeks. Also in Salt Lake City. So blogging shall be sparse unless I get inspired at the Systematics and Biodiversity workshop, as I surely shall. And then to Utah to the Edges and Boundaries of Biological Objects Workshop, at which I'm not presenting 'coz I didn't know I'd be in the States early enough, but I'll be a gadfly to those there, I warrant.
So expect even less blogging than before. I'm even lecturing while travelling (the course is…
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2008
Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in the second that biology is about machines, things that do work. I want to say that he is wrong about the first and right about the second, and moreover that they are contradictory ways of looking at the living world.
I've argued against informational metaphysics when it comes to genes before (see here and here).…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2008
In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks:
However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ...
This sad situation should not surprise us because the ranks, on which the traditional (RN) codes are based, are purely artificial. As Ereshefsky (2002: 309) stated, ‘they are ontologically empty designations’. Ranks were initially thought to be objective because, for Linnaeus, each rank reflected the plan of the Creator and could be recognized on the basis of…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2008
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin...
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models.
The paper is nicely reviewed by K. Kris Hirst here, however. And when we mere mortals can get it, the paper is listed at the bottom of that and this post.
What Rogers and Ehrlich (yes, that Paul Ehrlich) did was analyse 95 variables in the design of the canoes of the "Lapita Complex", a group of Polynesians regarded as having colonised their islands around 1400-900 BCE. They found that…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of the Lecture to ponder what propaedeutic use lectures are. Or, in other words, do they help or hinder learning?
Years back, I had a friend who ran the Science and Humanities School at a small regional campus of Monash University who often said to me, with his psychology hat on, that lectures are the worst way to teach. I never found them all that helpful,…
laelaps | February 18, 2008As T. Ryan Gregory recently pointed out in his paper "Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path," it is a shame that the English language is so impoverished as to cause the concept of evolution to be so controversial. Within the evolutionary lexicon, "theory," "saltation," " macroevolution," "direction," "purpose," and "design" are among the words that unfortunately seem to conflate rather than enlighten as far as the general public is concerned, and now Ken Miller (of Finding Darwin's God fame) wants to take back "design" for evolution. I don't have a good feeling about this one...
As John Wilkins…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known, he gave an explanation differently to Paley's external intelligence that designs all these facets of life - instead he claimed that natural selection, a process like Adam Smith's "hidden hand" explanation for the functioning of economies, was enough to explain adaptation.
I have long thought that Darwin was too much in thrall to the traditions…
evolvingthoughts | February 17, 2008
In particular, see the final panel...
Cf. also here on Private Languages in philosophy
laelaps | February 13, 2008It just so happens that at the end of next month David Mention of Answers in Genesis is going to be presenting a multi-day creation seminar in Bucks County, PA (which puts the event within driving range). I haven't decided whether I'm going to subject myself to Menton's rendition of crusty, old arguments that I've heard elsewhere, but I'm considering it just to see what goes on at such gatherings. As it happens, I was just perusing a list of quotes I had compiled in search of something else and came across this passage from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum which I felt was quite appropriate;
The…
evolvingthoughts | February 13, 2008
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers know, since David Hume, that normativity doesn't develop out of facts. So no amount of factual statements about species, organisms and ecosystems will give a definition of what is normal.
A suitably abstract introduction to the Seed Masters' Imperative: "Tell us what a disease is", right? Hey, I'm a philosopher. What did you expect?
One of the normative words of…
laelaps | February 12, 2008
199 years ago today, Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England at the home of his family (known as the Mount). By pure coincidence, Charles would have published one of the most important books ever written 50 years later in 1859, and next year will mark not only the bicentennial of Darwin's birth but also the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Indeed, next year will give us cause for raucous celebration, but this year I have been asking myself why Darwin's work is important enough to still get excited about it nearly a century and a…