Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
If an author publishes work and I copy it for my own purpose, then I have stolen something from the author (and publisher, if the copyright is held by both). But if I quote something of the author's for the purposes of discussion, then I have committed no theft, in pretty well every jurisdiction that is cosignatory to the Berne Convention on Copyright. It's called "fair use". In fact, the whole point of publishing is to have people discuss what you publish, right?
Not according to Lisa Richards of the Society of Chemical Industry, it isn't. She sent a nasty letter threatening legal action…
evolvingthoughts | April 23, 2007
My friend Neil Levy has published yet another book (how does he do it?) entitled Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century.
Here's the publisher's blurb:
Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional. This book explores questions such as when is it permissible to alter a person's memories, influence personality traits or read minds? What can neuroscience tell us about free will, self-control, self-deception and the foundations of…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote:
1. Transmutation of species
1.1 Gradually (…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
Francis Darwin, that is, son of Charles and editor of his correspondence.
In Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume I, Francis reprinted a number of letters of Darwin's on the issue of religious belief, and in a footnote, he noted the following:
Dr. Aveling has published an account of a conversation with my father. I think that the readers of this pamphlet ('The Religious Views of Charles Darwin,' Free Thought Publishing Company, 1883) may be misled into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr. Aveling: and I say this in spite of my…
tfk | April 9, 2007Larry Moran criticizes Coturnix (and by implication Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbett) for their focus on "framing," as described in Chris and Matt's paper in Science (behind a paywall, alas):
the top three requirements for good science writing are scientific accuracy, scientific accuracy, and scientific accuracy. As soon as you sacrifice the attempt to convey good accurate science to the general public then you're not doing science writing. You're doing something else.
He presents this as a compelling argument against framing, but I think it argues for very careful thought about how we frame…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2007
John Hawks links to Greg Laden's blog in which he points out that Nisbet and Mooney misused the notion of framing. It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they think it means, as Inigo Montoya might have said if they were Sicilian.
Or does it?
Words do not always mean the same thing as their theoretical contexts imply or define. Take "paradigm". Kuhn used it in a context (later deconstructed by Margaret Masterman into 21 distinct senses, some subtly…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
Rarely has science been as much a public issue as in the past 30 years. Sure, people have queried the wisdom of this or that science or technology in the past, like the use of nuclear power or for weapons. But apart from anti-vaccination movements since the late nineteenth century, very little public attack was made on the science itself, and, when it was, it was rarely taken seriously. Sometime in the past few years, things changed. Why?
This is merely my impression, but I think that science began to be treated as equivalent to personal opinion some time in the 1970s, with the New Left…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
For some reason I am finding it harder to get published as I go on, not easier. I suspect I am getting dumber as I age. However, I just had a paper published in Biology and Philosophy:
Wilkins, John S. 2007. The dimensions, modes and definitions of species and speciation. Biology and Philosophy 22 (2):247 - 266.
Download here for subscribers.
tfk | April 4, 2007In honor of MarkCC's latest effort to explain to the deeply egnorant Michael Egnor why the fact that any inferentially true set of statements – including scientific theories – can be reformulated as a tautology, I thought I'd crack open Elliot Sober's excellent Philosophy of Biology, in which he discusses the relevance of the "tautology" objection to evolution. But before doing that, I have to take exception to something Egnor said. I actually take exception to nearly everything he says, but I'd rather not bog down in the details. Egnor tries to summarize natural selection as "survivors…
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.
But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st.
The story is this:
Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…
evolvingthoughts | March 29, 2007
In the very first page to the Origin, Darwin writes:
WHEN on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
Who is this greatest philosopher, and what did he mean by that phrase?
I was moved to follow this up when I was challenged on my claim in a forum that…
evolvingthoughts | March 28, 2007
Many ideas in the history of biology get going for reasons that have to do with agendas, ideologies, and plain old bad scholarship rather than the results of research. In particular, myths regarding the motivations of historical figures. I well remember Erik Erikson's execrable attempt to psychoanalyse Luther from a distance of 500 years, culminating in the claim that he was anal retentive (and, therefore, so was his theology).
There are plenty of these myths in the history of biology. One of the longer lasting ones, although it turns out to be a late arrival, is the myth that Darwin didn'…
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end]. This then became a talk and later a paper, now in review. My argument was that there was a principle by which we could tell if microbes were a single species or not, depending on how regularly it exchanged its genetic material.
Now the American Academy of Microbiology has caught up with me <insert smiley here>...
A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the…
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2007
A major argument for the existence of the entities in scientific theories is that if these entities did not, on the whole, exist, the empirical adequacy of the theories would be miraculous. In other words, positing the reality of these entities, and the truth of the theories, is an inference to the best explanation, or IBE as it's abbreviated. Alan Musgrave has a new paper out in the online Rutherford Journal (which is of very high quality for an online journal) entitled "The 'Miracle Argument for Scientific Realism" which canvasses these issues.
IBE is also called "abduction", after C. S…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2007
Grrlscientist just pointed out that MDs are threatening to boycott The Lancet, because Reed Elsevier, the publisher, supports weapons fairs, including manufacturers of cluster bombs.
This is a worry. Elsevier publishes around 40 journals that have a philosophy component. Perhaps philosophers, who are after all supposed to be consistent on principles, should also boycott those journals. I list some of the major ones under the fold.
Cognition
Cognitive Systems Research
Endeavour
Historia Mathematica
History of European Ideas
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
International Review…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2007
I can't believe I didn't think of this first:
Customer: Hello. I wish to complain about this so-called 'scientific theory' what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very establishment.
Salesman: Oh yes, 'Intelligent Design'. What, uh... what's wrong with it?
Customer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. Its vacuous, that's what's wrong with it!
Salesman: No, no, uh... what we need now is to 'teach the controversy'...
Customer: Look matey, I know an empty 'argument from incredulity' when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Salesman: No, no, it's not empty: it's just…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2007
Some more or less random links that I am grouping under the epistemology of philosophy of science.
For those who have not reached Level 9 or higher in the Illuminati, "epistemology" has nothing to do with getting drunk, but with how knowledge is acquired (episteme means "understanding, skill or knowledge of some field").
First, Medlar Comfits has a nice essay on what science is compared to the sort of "believe authority" view of creationists. Also, this is a really nice blog I hadn't previously seen, with for instance articles on the use of English to communicate by ESL writers. Well…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
It is, as JBS Haldane noted, a fact the whole world knows, which he called "Aunt Jobiska's Theorem" after Edward Lear's poem:
The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up,
To his Aunt Jobiska's Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish;--
And she said,-- 'It's a fact the whole world knows,
'That Pobbles are happier without their toes.'
What fact? Well, it doesn't matter. Any fact, that everyone knows, will do. Try this:
On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the…