Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
I have an ambivalent relationship with the medical profession. On the one hand - my left - I lost a finger because a general practitioner refused to investigate a wart, that turn cancerous. On the other, I think medicine is one of this civilisation's greatest achievements, at least when it is made available to people.
But I don't think highly of medical practice. So it comes as a great pleasure to read a medical practitioner saying:
So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Unfortunately, the online…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
Most historians of evolutionary biology have contended that Darwin did not believe that species were real. Instead, they claim, he believed species were arbitrarily delimited from each other, and the species was nothing more than a more distinct variety. Thus, according to Mayr, Darwin did not attempt to solve the problem of speciation because he did not and--because of his species concept, could not--appreciate that there was a problem to be solved. Since he did not consider the species a distinct natural unit, it was only natural that he did not see the need to explain how species multiply…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim. Given the recent slurs on evolutionary theory as the foundation for Nazism and the holocaust, it's a good point to make.
But is Nietzsche even a "Darwinist" (a term only the Discovery Institute, or as we like to call it, DIsco, seems to use these days, as it has no real meaning)? He certainly accepted that evolution occurred, and he managed to avoid some of the sillier philosophical claims…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
OK, day 4, and I'm still not smoking (Hi, I'm John... Hi John). This is attempt number 247 or so, but one thing that has motivated this attempt is the danger of passive smoking to my as yet unsullied son, who lives with me (and has a sensible attitude to smoking - it's bad, and you should stop it Dad).
But the published evidence on passive smoking is equivocal. Or is it? In Nature this week is a report that funding from tobacco companies was given to a study on passive smoking (concluding against the claim that passive smoke is harmful) that is methodologically challenged.
Given the…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
Carl Linné, or as we know him from his Latinised name, Carolus Linnaeus, turns 300 this year, on May 23rd. And Nature has a series of articles on the famous Swede in this week's edition, as well as a slew of other interesting papers. I don't know, nothing blogworthy comes along for months, and then they hit you with too much to do properly...
OK, there is a piece on his legacy to taxonomy in the age of molecular systematics; one on the role and problems of amateurs in systematics and how they may resolve some of the problems of insufficient professionals; Linnaeus' raccoon named Sjupp (not…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2007
I have put a file on my home site that lists as many species definitions, from Aristotle to today, as I can find. It's a work in progress, so if you find any that are significant in the history of biology or the present debate that I have missed, please let me know. In time, this may become a reader published somewhere. [It's a 1.3Mb PDF]
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of "accident" in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.
Why?
The reason is deep in the history of western thought. In…
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2007
Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
The villagers did not know where they came from. Well, that is not quite right, for there were two opposing schools of thought, both of whom said they knew. One group, the Ascenders, said they came from the villages below, or trekked past them from the valley, where there were many other groups, some quite similar in their languages, dress and…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2007You, dear readers, are all smart people. So I'm asking for your suggestions - how to analyse networks of links between blogs? Tools, sites with analytic tools, visualisation apps, the whole shebang. Please let me know...
tfk | March 6, 2007Misogynistic authoritarian Vox Day requests a definition of science. His commenter suggests:
Science - sci·ence (sī'əns) n. - The organized attempt to disprove the existence of God so we can do whatever we want without feeling bad about it.
Anyone involved in the arguments over creationism will recognize this sentiment that science is about morality and theology, but it really and truly isn't.
Dr. Myers offers a much better tripartite definition. He puts science-as-encyclopedia first, which I think is unfortunate. People tend to think of science as a collection of facts, which ignores the…
evolvingthoughts | March 2, 2007
Way back in 1843, John Stuart Mill wrote this:
When the laws of the original agent cease entirely, and a phenomenon makes its appearance, which, with reference to those laws, is quite heterogeneous; when, for example, two gaseous substances, hydrogen and oxygen, on being brought together, throw off their peculiar properties, and produce the substance called water---in such cases the new fact may be subjected to experimental inquiry, like any other phenomenon; and the elements which are said to compose it may be considered as the mere agents of its production; the conditions on which it…
evolvingthoughts | February 28, 2007
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in April 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series.
One of the more difficult conceptual problems the layperson has with biology lies in the simple word "primitive". It has many antonyms - "modern", "evolved" and "derived", and like many biological uses of ordinary words, everybody thinks they understand it, and doesn't.
It is a word from the Latin, of course, for "first fruits" or "first things of their kind", but in modern use it means "simple" or "undeveloped". And this is not - quite - what it means in biology.
It…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
"I support ignorance. There is my philosophy. I have the tranquility of ignorance and faith in science. Others cannot live without faith, without belief, without theology [or theory - the original is smudged. JSW]; I do without all of these. I do not know, and I shall never know; I accept this fact without tormenting myself about it." [Stebbins, p 135f]
The French is this (can anyone translate the final sentence for me?):
Je supporte l’ignorance: c’est là ma philosophie. J’ai la tranquillité de l’ignorance et la foi de la science. Les autres ne peuvent vivre sans foi, sans croyance,…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
The Australian is Rupert Murdoch's treasure. He began it to show that the established state-based papers weren't doing trheir job properly, and it took over 15 years to become profitable. So one might think that its editorials are somewhat representative of Rupert's own views.
Ian Musgrave has a couple of articles that show fairly conclusively both that the paper is becoming firmly anti-science (as all good conservatives must be these days, it seems), especially with respect to climate change. His first post discusses the ways the distinction between facts and belief are smeared by…
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
In another interesting piece about demarcation of science from nonscience (see my previous items about this here, here and here), Janet Stemwedel has a nice series of hand-drawn flowcharts that make the difference between creationist arguments and real science clear.
Janet, I would have done nice neat computer-drawn flowcharts for you, if you'd asked...
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
As I recently mentioned Grene's book with Depew, it's worth noting an interview with her by The Believer (Benjamin Cohen) here. It explains some of the themes in the book. Thanks to Benjamin for the heads up.
evolvingthoughts | February 23, 2007
When one is starting in a field for the first time, the choice of textbook is crucial, as it will often set the tone for the rest of one's study. Last year and the year before I helped teach Philosophy of the Life Sciences here, and we used, respectively, one textbook and no textbook. Right now I'm reading a rather marvellous book, that would have set me up years in advance of where I am now, so this got me thinking (it's the job description, you know): what are the textbooks on Philosophy of Biology, and what are their respective merits?
I'm going to ignore the various present and…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007Tom Hayden, who is some guy from some state in some country, writes a rather courageous thing, addressed to Christian clergy. Read on for the money quote:
When I chaired the Natural Resources Committee in the California senate, I noticed that the clergy never testified against the destruction of species, forests, clean air and water, the wellsprings of life itself. Even today, the California Fish and Game Code refers to fish and wildlife as "the property of the people" and says they provide a contribution to the state economy. The forest practices law mandates "maximum sustained production of…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: 'The human being is the only animal that...' We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.
Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive…
tfk | February 19, 2007As I'm clearing out material I keep meaning to write about, I came across an excellent post about Bayesianism and 21st century intellectualism:
Popperian falsification is just a special case of the Bayesian view: if the likelihood P(data|model) is zero (indicating that the data is impossible given the model), P(model|data) is zero, regardless of the prior [and the model is falsified]. But the Bayesian approach offers some sort of a weighted preference among all the models that haven't been refuted yet, balancing the Ockhamist preference for simplicity through the prior and the desire for…