Philosophy of Science
laelaps | December 1, 2007If there is any phrase that is sure to raise the hackles of an evolutionary biologist, it is that evolution is "just a theory." This rallying cry of creationists plays off of the public misuse of the term "theory" to mean "Any wild guess that comes to mind which doesn't have substantial evidence to be taken as fact." Issac Asimov put this more humorously in his essay "The 'Threat' of Creationism" (1981) when he wrote;
Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning…
evolvingthoughts | November 30, 2007
This guy is a great drinker, ranconteur, and wit, all with an Irish accent. It turns out he's also a great teacher.
evolvingthoughts | November 29, 2007
The term "radical" is a very loose term. It basically means "something that differs wildly from the consensus" in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won't take offense if I say that they have a radical interpretation of the nature of classification. In a couple of recent posts - one on Adolf Naef, and one on Molecular Systematics - they have presented some views on classification that do, indeed, differ from the received consensus. So, I need to blather a bit...
The nature of classification is highly contested in biology, let alone the ancillary philosophical…
evolvingthoughts | November 26, 2007
Brian Leiter is reporting, and the University of Cambridge confirms it, that Peter Lipton, a well known philosopher of science, has died. Leiter will put up an obit later. For now, here is a very good paper of Lipton's explaining philosophy of science to scientists.
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2007
This paragraph:
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
Codswallop.
While it is true that the…
laelaps | November 25, 2007To some, the universe is a place that has been fine-tuned to be "'just right' for life," a place where human beings (or at least organisms that are upright bipeds with binocular vision, large eyes, and grasping hands) are an inevitable consequence of evolution. I've never found such arguments (the anthropic principle and a teleological "march of progress" in evolution, respectively) to be compelling, but there are some who still advocate such arguments. Paul Davies is one such advocate, and he has just published an opinion article in the New York Times called "Taking Science on Faith" in…
evolvingthoughts | November 24, 2007
I have a rule (Wilkins' Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith
Can anyone spot the enthymeme? That's very good, children. You spotted the easy mistake. Davies moves from "assume…
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2007
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts.
Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases…
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2007
This is the fourth of a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Wilson and Wilson (W&W) then continue on to employ some recent work on individuals as groups, and the "major transitions" literature.
Ed Wilson is well known for his idea of "superorganisms", in which eusocial hives or colonies of insects (his speciality) are treated evolutionarily as single organisms, resolving a problem Darwin had with these species' evolution. In other words, an ant colony is a fitness bearer. Here, W&W appeal to Lynn Margulis' theory of the eukaryotic cell as a symbiosis between prokaryotic cells to…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2007
[The third in a series on a recent paper by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. Post 1; Post 2]
In presenting a group selectionist account of sociobiology, Wilson and Wilson argue that alternatives such as kin selection are not really alternatives.
Kin selection and multiplayer games
Attacking the third leg of the tripod, W&W argue that even genic or individual selectionist accounts implicit include the existence of groups as a factor in evolution. This resolves, as far as I can see, to the view that equivalence classes in genetic selection form a group: if a population is…
evolvingthoughts | November 18, 2007
Wilson and Wilson begin by reviewing the reasons why sociobiology of the 1970s was rejected. They focus on the arguments against group selection.
Levels of selection
In the period in which sociobiology was first proposed under that label (from now on, the term sociobiology refers to this period, as outlined in Ullica Segerstråle's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond), there was an ongoing debate over whether gene-level selection was the sole form of selection, or whether some kind of group selection was also in play. W&W argue that,…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have recently (i.e., in the last five years) come to be an unflinching sociobiologist, I think it is worthwhile summarising their argument and making some comments. This is the first in a rambling series riffing on that paper.
Introduction
Back in the dark ages, when I was a masters student, Kim Sterelny…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
I have always enjoyed reading the work of Frans de Waal, a primatologist who focuses on the social structure and psychology of apes, particularly the two chimp species, and monkeys. His previous books, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, and Peacemaking among Primates have all entranced me and inspired my reflections on such diverse topics as evolutionary psychology, the origins of political and social structures, and, of course, the evolution of religion.
His recent book, Our…
laelaps | November 12, 2007There are some blog posts that I have in mind for a long time before they make it to Laelaps, others that are written in a more spur-of-the-moment fashion, usually about one topic or another that has left me aggravated and incised with no recourse except unloading my thoughts on the internet. Imagine the position I was in then, just having finished Armand Marie Leroi's book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, being halfway through Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man (having just rebuffed some genetic determinist nonsense myself), and fresh from a viewing of Logan's Run when I…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2007
Following on from my previous post "Are species theoretical objects", I want now to discuss what the status of species as phenomenal objects is.
Some recent papers by Ingo Brigandt and Paul Griffiths (see refs), a view has been developed for some core concepts of biology - gene and homology - in which the theoretical status of these ideas is challenged. This view treats the concepts as referring to either obervational or operational objects or properties, just as I have suggested that species does. Brigandt has suggested that these objects or concepts are "units of explanation", and he and…
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2007
I've been so busy reading and assimilating the latest issue of Biology and Philosophy I forgot to let you all know about it. It's a special issue on Homology, edited by Paul Griffiths and Ingo Brigandt. A discussion group has now been set up at Matt Haber's blog The Philosophy of Biology Café.
The papers are:
The importance of homology for biology and philosophy by Brigandt and Griffiths, which gives a clear and interesting summary of the issues;
The phenomena of homology by Griffiths, which argues that homology is a phenomenal, rather than a theoretical concept (as I have argued that…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
I can't believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he's just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young paleontologist, before I got to. So I will now, before he goes and does a better job.
Chris and his advisor Michael Bennett have come up with a possible way to test the "trees down or ground up" controversy about the origins of flight. That is, they have some independent evidence that early birds were basically ground dwellers, but that there was, as there is now, a mix of lifestyles…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it.
In the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, there are competing views of the nature of the mind. One school, the evolutionary psychologists, hold that the mind is composed of a large number of special purpose modules, each designed by natural selection to do one thing well (enough) and no more. Another school, represented by Jerry Fodor, holds that the central part of the mind (excepting the sensorimotor parts…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
Bill Wimsatt is one of the philosophy of biology's underappreciated performers. Many of his takes on biology have influenced a great many people, including me. Here is an interview with him on his latest book Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Harvard Press, 2007). According to the interview, he takes our cognitive limitations as a virtue. I hope to get a copy sometime, after which I'll review it. He says
“Complex systems are messy,” said Wimsatt, gesturing to the 400-page synthesis of his work. “And human beings make errors trying to…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care.
A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement.
I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains;…