Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2009It is often stated in the literature that Linnaeus late in life turned to an evolutionary view based on hybridisation (e.g., Clausen, Keck and Hiesey 1939). I myself have repeated this, but as always it's worth looking at the actual text. Unfortunately I have so little Latin that I can't even use pig Latin, so it is great to find, yet again, that archive.org has it in an English edition published in 1783. I love archive.org. Deeply.
It's in the context of what he bases his system on, the "fructification" of the plants; i.e., the reproductive organs:
26. The PRINCIPLE of Fructification, the…
evolvingthoughts | April 29, 2009As I investigate the use of tree diagrams in the nineteenth century, I keep running across things that shouldn't be there. One of them was this book:
Herdman, William Abbott. 1885. A Phylogenetic Classification of Animals (For the Use of Students). London; Liverpool: Macmillan & Co.; Adam Holden.
It's on Archive.org, but they didn't properly scan the figure on the foldout (a real problem of the electronic versions of old books is that they don't scan the foldout figures. Imagine the Origin without the one figure). So I bought a copy. It's a real revelation - he correctly uses "…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2009Wilkins is fragile and destablised
Intellectual tourist attacks local inhabitants
All happy bacteria are alike (or is that like each other?)
Australian current affairs gets vaccination right! [That's not a pun, it's an act of God] The original video is here.
Evolution does spreadsheets in origin of genetic code
Siris and Sandwalk go head to head on the Courtier's Reply. Neither of them are dressed.
Creationists misunderstand Deep Time. I'm shocked. I mean, it's only ten years since they were taken to task for it. Perhaps if they had millions of years to think it over...
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2009My Synthese essay has finally been published [paywall], in which I argue that on the basis of the more realistic notion of rationality devised by Herbert Simon, called "bounded rationality", certain heuristics are liable to lead people to rationally choose to believe in creationism under the right conditions. It's a conceptual developmentalist perspective. Here's the abstract:
Creationism is usually regarded as an irrational set of beliefs. In this paper I propose that the best way to understand why individual learners settle on any mature set of beliefs is to see that as the developmental…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2009Suppose you have a religion and are interested in science. Do you
a. Have to give up your religion
b. Have to abandon your effort to find out about the natural world through science
c. Try to find some accommodation?
Now suppose you are a member of a scientific body, and want to suggest to members of religions that they can be part of the scientific enterprise. What do you do?
a. Tell them they can do so only if they abandon their religion
b. Tell them they cannot be part of the scientific enterprise
c. Tell them that some religions have no apparent problem accommodating science?
According to…
evolvingthoughts | April 22, 2009I gave my talk today on tree thinking at the local science museum for kids and the general public, which is amazingly popular. The Portuguese seem to hold science and knowledge in high esteem. Which is great. The Ciências Viva helped pay for my ticket, so I hope they liked my presentation. It will be online as a podcast, and they apparently simulcast it at the time, too. I didn't let you know that because I want to check it before I tell my loyal readers about it. Oops...
I am overwhelmed by the hospitality and food here. If I could learn another language, or they all spoke English, I'd…
evolvingthoughts | April 19, 2009I sometimes worry about the lack of attention philosophers pay to actual biology, settling instead for purely verbal arguments. I am travelling right now so I don't have time to carefully critique Jerry Fodor's latest attack on "Darwinism", but it seems that he is actually making the argument that natural selection is not selection because there's no agent doing selection, and it's just a metaphor and hence bad science. At the same time as this debate is occurring over on PhilPapers, this piece comes out showing that selection on trout size by bear predation is directional and hasn't yet…
evolvingthoughts | April 16, 2009Yes, I know there are thousands of these this year, and by October we'll all be tired of them, but this one looks like the main game: Darwin/Chicago 2009. I am, of course, upset not to be invited to speak, but there are a few good names there to make up for my absence...
laelaps | April 14, 2009Evolutionary anthropology is a subject that has traditionally been dominated by a focus on males, or at least "masculine" behaviors like hunting. The most popular images of our own ancestors have often been of a group of males setting out for a hunt or crouched over a freshly-killed carcass. It is as if our evolution was driven by male ambition. Such tendencies have triggered some backlash, from the relatively absurd (i.e. the aquatic ape hypothesis) to more reasoned critiques (i.e. Woman the Gatherer), but it is clear that our understanding of our own history is most certainly biased by…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2009This is a response to David Brooks' column in the New York Times, today: "The End of Philosophy". Other respondees include PZ Myers, Brian Leiter, James Smith, bottumupchange, Mark Liberman, and chaospet (who does a very nice cartoon summarising many of the problems with Brooks' column).
Hume once wrote: "Reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions". By this he meant that reason is motivated by a moral sense, but at the same time Hume also wrote that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is", which attempts at naturalising morality G. E. Moore called the "…
evolvingthoughts | April 6, 2009Here is an interesting discussion of a recent paper on the operational and theoretical definitions of "epigenetics". This term - which has a deep history, well before genetics - is interpreted in every manner from inherited histone patterns on chromosomes to parental investment and extrasomatic inheritance. The authors of the discussed paper go towards the former extreme, while Eva Jablonka goes for the other. It's always fun to see scientists arguing over terms.
evolvingthoughts | April 5, 2009I received this via Channels:
Dear Philosophers of Biology, You'll be interested in the first biennial "Philosophy of Biology @ Madison" workshop/conference that we'll be hosting in Madison a year from May. It's a ways off, but note that submitted abstracts are due earlier than you might think: September. This will help allow for the eventual dissemination of accepted papers to all attendees well before the gathering, which should make for excellent discussion at the workshop/conference.
From the site:
The Philosophy of Biology @ Madison Workshop is designed to provide a biennial forum for…
scientificactivist | April 5, 2009As mentioned here previously, the stimulus package passed in February includes funds to encourage evidence-based medicine. Some uninformed critics will claim that this is some big government conspiracy to exert socialized control over private medicine. But, truly, encouraging a firmer empirical basis in all aspects of medicine--through more studies, government guidelines, and just improved common practice--is a very desirable outcome.
A post by David Newman at The New York Time's Well blog lays out a variety of examples of why this is so (with links to original studies!). Also, Hugh Pickens…
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2009There's a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and his friend Piero Sraffa by Norman Malcolm (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir):
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2009Well yes it was a joke. But it was based on the inappropriate manner in which the well-known work on lateral transfer was reported by New Scientist as showing that Darwin was wrong. That genes occasionally cross over taxonomic borders among single celled organisms by transduction (viral exchange), conjugation (sharing plasmid DNA) and transformation (reuptake of naked DNA in a medium) has been known for a while. What this showed was that gene trees and taxa trees don't exactly coincide. But for the animals and plants Darwin mentioned, evolution still runs in trees.
The other thing I was…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2009Anthony Grayling, who does a really interesting review column in the Barnes and Noble Review, entitled "A Thinking Read", has a piece on Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. This saves me having to read it and review it for you myself.
The column title is a pun on Blaise Pascal's statement that "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed". A pun which I wish I had come up with.
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2009There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model.
Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2009But this one's going to be huge. The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science has a new group blog. [How do I know? I set it up.] It will act as a clearing house for events and ideas at what has become a very large concentration of HPS types in one city (even as HPS declines elsewhere in Australia). So add it to your feed, and if you live in the city of Sydney, get the Calendar synced with your scheduler of choice and come to events.
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2009Marjorie Grene was a doyen of philosophy and history of biology, and I reviewed one of her last texts a while back and linked to an interview. She died yesterday, according to Leiter, aged 99.