Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Sorry about that pun - it's been around for a while since Antony Flew, quandam philosopher and "Darwinian", announced he was converting to a kind of deism. Jon Pieret, who often comments on this blog when he should be writing for his own, covers the facts as far as we can ascertain them.
I am deeply sympathetic to Flew here. I too suffer from nominal aphasia. I tell my students that I forget my own kids names, and I only have two. Of different sexes. They laugh, but it's true...
laelaps | November 3, 2007After many false starts I've actually started to write my "treatise" on evolution, some of the pages I've been turning out being in note form (I want to get the ideas down and then fill in the exact details later when I can pick up the proper reference books from the shelf) while others resemble actual passages and are in a near-finished form. My work isn't going to be a chronological overview of the history of life like many other books, but will instead take a more personal approach reflecting how I've come to understand evolution and how it proceeds. Differing rates of change, convergence…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
[This started as a discussion of the debate mentioned below. It got lost somewhere, and became me riffing on my favourite topics. Sorry.]
I love it when people I know have a barny* in public, but it presents some delicate choices and sensibilities to be honoured. The case in point today is between Malte Ebach and David Williams in the red corner, and Joseph Felsenstein in the blue. I'm not the referee - I'm just the seasoned journalist in the front row...
The issue is what counts when we classify in biology, and why. Malte and David argue that there are some notions of classification…
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2007
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans…
evolvingthoughts | October 29, 2007
The above are icons to be used when blogging on actual peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular reports or kookery). I had a marginal involvement in this (I made some passing comments early on) so it is with great pride... no, actually, it's all down to Dave Munger, who was a champion. I had nothing useful to do with it.
Here's what Dave said:
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2007
Michael Ruse has a new article up on creationism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There's not much new to those who know his work, but the following comment resonates - dare I say thunders - in the Science Blogs Atheism Wars:
Unfortunately at the moment, those opposed to Creationism are spending more of their energies quarreling among themselves than fighting the opposition. There is a new crop of very militant atheists, including the biologist and popular writer Richard Dawkins (2006) and the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2005) who are not only against religion but also…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind:
We (David Chalmers and David Bourget) are pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, a new website with a bibliography covering around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness. This site grew out of a combination of David Chalmers' old bibliography in philosophy of mind and his page of online papers on consciousness, but it is much larger and has many new capacities, programmed by David Bourget. The site…
sb admin | October 24, 2007 Omni Brain met its fundraising goal of $1000 for music education programs through DonorsChoose. Thank you to everyone who's donated. You rock! Now 30 kids will too.
But it'd be okay, you know, permissible (haha) to exceed our goal if you'd still like to help a Lisa Simpson. A few of the programs Omni Brain earmarked are still seeking fulfillment. Here, an Indianapolis music teacher describes his/her wish to teach kids science and music together:
I want to set up a program for fourth through sixth grade having students work on the scientific method of experimenting with sound. The resources I…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop calling evolution a theory, and start calling it a "law".
I disagree:
The term "theory" has much wider application than "law", and in any event, the very same sorts of rhetorical ambiguity will be used for that too (a law requires a lawmaker, doesn't it? Hmm? So evolution is false, blah, blah, blah). In fact, "law" is the term that should be, and…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2007
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional stance". That is, we ascribe intentions to non-agent processes. In earlier terminology, this was called "anthropomorphism", or the treating of non-human things as if they were human.
One will often read explanations of religion as the anthropomorphisation of natural processes like spring, rain,…
laelaps | October 17, 2007"Thinking again?" the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly...."
[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9]
It seems that creationists/ID advocates aren't the only folks discontented with Darwin's theory of natural selection, as I have been hearing murmurings that some scientists are considering genetic changes to be far more important to evolution. It's been difficult to find details about this "phantom menace…
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2007
Does anyone who reads this blog have access to JFP from the American Philosophical Association? None of the locals or my usual contacts do, and by the time I can get a subscription going, I'm likely to have missed the deadlines this year. Drop me a note if you do. Thanks
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2007
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the time.
So I took his scan and OCR'd and corrected it, and put it here. It is amazing how well Jordon managed to avoid the usual errors, and correct those that are with us still, so long ago.
The essay is beneath the fold. I left the headers in.
THE ARENA.
Vol. XVIII.AUGUST, 1897.No. 93.
EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.1
BY DR. DAVID STARR…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can't, for reasons that will become obvious.
He wanted to do the talk as a dadaist performance. How can I help? I enquired. That was my mistake.
Well, he said, I want us to give a simultaneous presentation. What, in turn? I asked. No, at the same time. With music. And Allison (his partner) folding…
grrlscientist | October 3, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, H-index, impact numbers, scientific journals
A friend, Ian, emailed an opinion paper that lamented the state of scientific research and the effect this has had on science itself. In this paper, by Peter A. Lawrence, a Professor of Zoology at University of Cambridge, the main point is that modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quality and quantity of research being produced by individual scientists. Worse, as this system careened out of control, it gave rise to a new and more damaging trend: ranking scientists…
evolvingthoughts | September 30, 2007
Thinking some more about PZ's latest comedic act, I think I see what the problem is.
People do not change their beliefs just because someone offends them. They change their beliefs because opponents offend them. If someone is a Muslim, they won't become an Islamist because another Muslim teaches something different, but because that Muslim is a member of an opposing sect. The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
There is not exactly a continuum of ideas between theism and atheism, because there is not a single dimension or variable along which a continuum might be drawn as a spectrum. But…
scientificactivist | September 25, 2007Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2007
On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism.
Then today my various feeds identified this rather excellent essay (more of a review paper, really) on strong reciprocity (the idea that we humans will behave reciprocally even if there is no individual payoff) by Benoit Hardy-Valée, of the University of Toronto. In this paper, he challenges what he calls "The Collective", a group of conservative…
evolvingthoughts | September 20, 2007
Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take on it.
Jason thinks that Hacking was pretentious, that he was not careful in his use of language, and that he was wordy. The essay was 4600 words long. Jason's response is 1520 words of part one of a two parter. Hmm...
The problem as I see it lies in the attitude of the sciences (and yes, I include mathematics amongst that tribe) to the humanities, and…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2007
Recently, that is since 1975 or so, the view has arisen that a living thing is something that satisfies several conditions.
In 1966 George C. Williams introduced the notion of an "evolutionary gene" in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, which was, he said, a "cybernetic abstraction". This idea was taken up by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins posited that evolution had some necessary and sufficient criteria:
There had to be replicators with the following properties:
Longevity (over evolutionary time)
Fecundity (more made than can survive)
Fidelity (nearly perfect…