Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?
I mean, Darwin did some very cool science, and often was remarkably perceptive about the nature of biology, but he's not the only one in his day. In fact, he was beaten by a great many people on various notions like the Tree of Life (Heinrich Bronn), Natural Selection (Patrick Matthew, and possibly Alfred Wallace), universal common ancestry (his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin), transmutation (Pierre Maupertuis, Lamarck) the struggle for existence (de Candolle), division of labour (Adam Smith, of course),…
laelaps | February 9, 2008Tonight I finished Rudwick's Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes, and I certainly feel that I have a better understand of Cuvier's work than I did previously (although the subject of his embranchments and debates with Geoffrey only received a fleeting mention). What is truly curious, though, is that Cuvier was not a biblical literalist and yet did not seem to favor a mechanism by which the various unique fossil taxa he described could have come into existence. He noted that an "age of reptiles" likely preceded an "age of mammals" (divided by a catastrophic revolution…
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
Some of you may recall I was immensely impressed by Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old who started Pro-Test, which defended the use of animal models against the vicious and largely unthinking nastiness of animal "rights" protesters. Now Nick Anthis, at The Scientific Activist, is reporting that they seem to have achieved many of their aims in defending science from the ignorant. However, I think they will always have to be active - this stupidity has been around for over a century in Britain and elsewhere, and won't go away any time soon.
evolvingthoughts | February 8, 2008
By Matt Ridley, in Time:
... by the end of this century, if not sooner, biotechnology may have reached the point where it can take just about any DNA recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the animal it would create.
So long as you also know the developmental machinery, the necessary ecological conditions, the structure of the cells, the maternal investment involved... in other words, if you know the facts about the structure and biology of the organism, you'll be able to read off the structure and biology of the organism, just from the DNA. Err....
evolvingthoughts | February 8, 2008
So, it seems that 44 is the median age of depression. Old news, or at least it is for me. Although for 44 to be the median age of depression for me, I'd have to live until my late 70s. Right now, after a week of working on a grant application and dealing with my son returning to school, I'm not a happy camper, let me tell you. So blogging has been a low priority, and is likely to remain so.
But this caught my eye. Some researchers have reconstructed the ancestral DNA of bacteria and worked out that it is (physically) adapted to higher temperatures. Or have they?
There is a mathematical…
laelaps | February 8, 2008
The American mastodon (Mammut americanum), illustrated in one of Cuvier's memoirs.
When I taking biology in high school science seemed so simple. Lyell was a uniformitarian hero, Cuvier was a brillant anatomist (but sadly a narrow-minded catastrophist), Charles Darwin was the hero of all biology, and Lamarck was the official whipping boy of evolutionary science, the deconstruction of his ideas receiving more time than Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection! In the years following my graduation in 2001 I didn't think too much about the issue, the work of naturalists who lived…
evolvingthoughts | February 2, 2008
Here's a comment that represents a widely held misconception about the evolution of religion:
Whenever there is an discussion about religions and changes in religions someone always pulls out the argument that religions evolve. I am very sorry but I believe that applying the concept of evolution to religion is not a valid argument.
The argument suggests that religions start off as primitive beliefs and then change to become better beliefs. This is not the idea of evolution. Evolution does not necessarily make life forms better. Evolution changes life forms and sometimes these changes…
laelaps | February 2, 2008I just passed the 325-page mark in Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which puts me in the middle of chapter 4. Chapter 1 was perhaps the most difficult, the abstracts at the end of the opening section being a bit cumbersome. Once I got into chapter 2, however, the sailing was a little smoother, and by Chapter 3 Gould hits his stride. Whatever complains I might have about the style or need for editing aside, I am getting quite a lot out of this book. I'm curious to see how Gould unveils his hypothesis for hierarchical selection in the later chapters, but as far as the historical…
evolvingthoughts | February 1, 2008
A rather cute article at the Catholic News Service says this:
In commentaries, papal speeches, scientific conferences and philosophical exchanges, the Vatican has been focusing more and more on the relationship between God and evolution.
From the outside, this may seem a reaction to the U.S. debate over creationism versus evolution, but it really has as much or more to do with the pope's interest in defining the legitimate spheres of science and faith.
Pope Benedict has weighed in several times on evolution, essentially endorsing it as the "how" of creation but cautioning that evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | January 25, 2008
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print:
The only objections that have occurred to me are 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting 'Natura non facit saltum' so unreservedly. I believe she does make small jumps--and 2nd. it is not clear to me why if external physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose variation should occur at all--
Darwin indeed used that phrase, which…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2008
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in earth's history.
A new paper by Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton attempts to do this for the Permian extinction, arguably the biggest of all time. They attempt to reconstruct the "guilds", or ecological roles communities, of the Permian, and assess the biological diversity in terms of taxonomic…
laelaps | January 23, 2008Modern geology is dictated by uniformitarianism as proposed by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, a book that rightly displaced the "armchair speculations" of catastrophists.
In nearly any book about 19th century science, Charles Darwin, paleontology, or geology, the name Charles Lyell shows up at least once, even if only to state his connection with the idea of uniformitarianism. This important concept, often summarized as "the present is the key to the past," has often been described as triumphantly kicking catastrophist explanations out of geological science, researchers like…
evolvingthoughts | January 21, 2008
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of the life sciences, but the blurb covers topics I wouldn't have put up myself:
This course looks at some of the philosophical issues arising out of the study of the life sciences-primarily biology & ecology. These issues include problems associated with the theory of evolution such as: (i) recent philosophical debate on the unit of selection; (…
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2008
... sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler – Robert Frost
It was a typical hot and humid summer's day, so I entered a nice dark bluestone pub, hoping the dark would offer some cool and beer. As it was about 11 in the morning, the bar was empty save for one fellow sitting at a table - one of three next to the pool table - so I got my lager, icy cold as God intended, and went to practice my trick shots. I have found that after exactly two and a half beers, I can hit shots that professionals would blanch at, and this persists from the remaining half glass. At least once I managed…
evolvingthoughts | January 17, 2008
OK, so by now a number of you are either quite puzzled or are up in arms about this notion of mine that genes aren't information. First I'll recap and then make some general philosophical and historical points.
I argue that something can only be said to be information bearing if it is isomorphic to one formalisation of what counts as an Information Processing System (IPS). Anything that doesn't have the requisite mapping between these formal descriptions and physical systems doesn't count. I further argue that genes do not show the right properties of these formal systems, and hence should…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
This isn't something I would often write, but I think that the recent protest against the Pope speaking at the secular university La Sapienza in Rome is misplaced.
Critics say that the Pope, when he was of more humble rank, had in 1990 defended the Inquisition's judgement against Galileo in 1633.
Signatories to the letter protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Roman Catholic Church's doctrinal watchdog, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633.
In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic...
OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out of hand. Information has become the new magical substance of the age, the philosopher's stone. And, well, it just isn't.
In the article linked, physicist William Bialek at Princeton University argues that there is a minimum amount of information that organisms need to store in order to be alive."…
evolvingthoughts | January 13, 2008
TR Gregory at Scientific Blogging asks why advisors would encourage their students to publish. One of the reasons is:
Most of the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked directly have been quite excited by the possibility of seeing their names in print on a high quality piece of work.
I agree with this. I was encouraged by David Hull, who marked my MA thesis, to publish some of it, and as a result I got my first paper, ten years ago. I still recall the thrill of seeing the reprints arrive in the mail. That was my name there. I did a little dance.
Even now, seeing a…
evolvingthoughts | January 10, 2008
One of my colleagues just raised a point I hadn't thought of vis á vis Special Relativity.
I had always thought that an observer on a photon would not experience time. My colleague suggests that each frame of reference - the fast moving and the "stationary" - would experience time as "normal" but see the other FoP FoR as having stopped. I don't know enough to be more than mildly dangerous. Can anyone resolve this?
Anti-Einsteinians will be summarily deleted from the responses.
evolvingthoughts | January 8, 2008
Some things I spotted today..
It's Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday. Mike Dunford has a post card. I always think that if Wallace had recognised that selection is not all about survival, he could have come up with an account of social selection causing big brains (the so-called Machiavelli hypothesis) instead of Spirit.
The Environmental Action blog is calling for the resignation of the head of the EPA for refusing to allow California to regulate emissions. See also Effect Measure.
Two really good Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles have been just published:
Animal Cognition…