Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2007
PEER have added some clarification over their pre-Christmas release about creationist literature at the NPS bookshops at the Grand Canyon. I interpreted it this way, but their loose wording caused a furor about NPS staff not being able to give the age of the GC. It turns out this was not true.
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2007
Fitness. Of the many concepts of evolution, this is perhaps one of the more widely misunderstood. It comes from the unfortunate slogan written by Herbert Spencer and urged on Darwin by Wallace and others: survival of the fittest. People think it means the strongest, or the most aggressive, and that it means evolutionary theory is a tautology. We'll look at these in a bit. but first, what does it really mean in evolutionary biology?
Fitness is a property of a competing variant in a population. It means that X, whatever it might be biologically, is increasing in its frequency in a population…
evolvingthoughts | January 21, 2007
Coincidentally, with my discussion of Peter van Inwagen's chapter on philosophical failure just past, comes a piece in Philosophy Now by Toni Carey, which asks if philosophy is progressive, which is another way of asking whether there is such a thing as philosophical success. Usually, and here also, philosophy is contrasted with science in this respect. It's nice to see the author has read and understood Hull's point that most science is not progressive, and that we have only got the basis for believing science progresses if we ignore the bulk of science which dies stillborn and is never…
tfk | January 21, 2007At Billy Dembski's place, GilDodgen quotes Denyse O'Leary:
Bear with a simple lay hack here a moment: Why must we know a designer’s intentions in order to detect design?
If the fire marshall’s office suspects arson, do the investigators worry much about WHY?
Surely they investigate, confirm their finding, and turn the information over to other authorities and interested parties, without having the least idea why someone torched the joint.
ALL they need to be sure of is that the joint did not torch itself, via natural causes.
Let's say, first of all, that we are not talking about a bush that…
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2007
I have delivered myself of all kinds of opinions about agnosticism in the past. One common refrain from (in this case, god) deniers is "Are you agnostic about X?", where X is some obviously non-existent object like Thor, fairies, or Republican environmental policies. And the answer to that is not simple. Why is it not simple? The answer comes in a recent book by Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher, which includes a chapter on "Philosophical Failures" (available from here as a PDF).
van Inwagen suggests that philosophical argument is not between two disputants each of which holds an opposing…
evolvingthoughts | January 12, 2007
This is the first in an irregular series of basic concepts in science, that I suggested to the Seed Bloggers we might do from time to time. If anyone wants to suggest a revision, because I got it wrong or am unclear, make a comment - this will be revised to make sure it is OK.
Clade: this term of art is a new one in biological systematics, or the science of classification, or taxonomy. The word has given its name to a new science of classification: cladistics, which is properly known as phylogenetic systematics.
A clade is, simply expressed, any branch (Greek: klados) of the evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | January 11, 2007
Quick... what was Darwin's most popular book? If you answered The Origin of Species, you were wrong. It was his last book, published the year before he died, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms With Observation of Their Habits. Darwin noted when he was beginning his career that worms churned up soil, causing heavier objects to sink slowly in the soil. He noted that all soil had passed through the alimentary duct of worms. It started off a fashion of cultivating worms by gardeners that continues to the present day.
Now called "bioturbation", this process has…
omnibrain | January 10, 2007Ahhh modeling... gotta love it - especially when it models something like procrastination - or "Temporal Motivation Theory" as Dr. Piers Steel from the University of Calgary business school calls it.
He find these interesting things in his paper, "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure." published in Psych Bulletin:
* Most people's New Year's resolutions are doomed to failure
* Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination
(He spent time reading self help…
evolvingthoughts | January 9, 2007
I hope the Austin American-Statesman doesn't mind me reproducing this obituary to one of the University of Texas' favourite sons...
Obituary
Robert C. Solomon Sept. 14, 1942 - January 2, 2007
Renowned UT philosophy professor dies suddenly in Zurich
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 05, 2007
Once a month or so, Robert Solomon and his friend James Pennebaker would meet for beer and conversation at a Guadalupe Street watering hole, the Dog & Duck. Most of the time, Solomon, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, and Pennebaker, a UT psychology professor, would talk…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2007In addition to the wonderful Darwin's Writings on the Web site, there's also a Lamarck on the Web, an Alfred Russel Wallace site, and a Buffon site. Put your favourite historical biology sites in the comments, and I'll assemble a general reference page.
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2006
Brent Rasmussen, at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, has a nice smackdown of the atheism-intolerance of Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York, with which I agree totally.
But in the course of it, Brent shows a taxonomy of the so-called "weak" versus "strong" atheism that is so common on the internet, but which is what I dispute. More below the fold...
Here is Brent's taxonomy in a diagram:
My problem lies in the primacy of the questions that are asked, to which these axes are…
evolvingthoughts | December 25, 2006
For those of you still in December 25, a short reminder of the meaning of this holiday. There was an individual who was born today, many years ago. His life and work changed the world. He inspired millions of people and changed our way of life, our sense of ourselves and what we can and should do. Please give it up, for Sir Isaac Newton.
Oh, and rumours that another individual, who may or may not have lived, was born this day, we honestly don't know when he was born, but it's likely, if there's any truth to the story told in the gospel of Luke, that it was in late April or early May, when…
evolvingthoughts | December 25, 2006
Larry Moran, at Sandwalk, has argued that evolution is indeed a matter of chance. It is, he thinks, something that atheism requires. This is an interesting issue, one that has deep roots, both in the role of chance explanations in science and prescience, and the theistic reaction to it.
Larry says
It's perfectly okay to say, as a first approximation, that lots of evolution is random or accidental. This is a far closer approximation to the truth than saying it's the all the result of design by natural selection.
What role does randomness or accident play here? Is it an explanation to…
revere | December 24, 2006[This is a very long post, a reply to Orac's (my respected SciBling at Respectful Insolence) equally long response to my also long original post that invited him to tell us what he thought separated his brand of medicine from the "alties" he frequently posts about. Probably most of you won't have the patience to wade through this. But a challenge is a challenge and must be met. Anyway, its Christmas Eve. Who's reading, anyway?]
I had to smile at Orac's response to my "bit of a pot shot" across his bow with my chicken soup provocation, because that's what it was, a deliberate provocation. And…
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2006
It's a season, so I am told, that has something to do with religion. We celebrate the birth of commodity capitalism, or something. So I thought I would combine my favourite issues - philosophy, religion and evolution.
It's all Alex Rosenberg's fault. At a dinner before the conference, he was sitting opposite me, and talk turned, as it does, to creationist attacks on science. Alex made the following claim: It is not possible to be a theist and believe in evolution by natural selection consistently.
I demurred, of course. But on further thought, I wondered if he might not be right.
To…
evolvingthoughts | December 20, 2006Sayeth the Deepak Oracle:
A number of evolutionary biologists are attempting to create a more holistic integral view of evolution that includes both objective and subjective dimensions of reality.
I don't claim to know what "reality" is, but I'm pretty sure that "subjective" is a modifier of something like "belief", not "reality"...
It's a bit like saying that engineers are trying to include wishes in their stress analyses of bridges. Let me know how that turns out, right?
omnibrain | December 18, 2006This is quite an old piece of news...but still pretty ridiculous.
Mangalore University Applied Botany Professor Annaiah Ramesh is all set to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as he successfully completed a marathon lecture, running to 96 hours and 40 minutes, here on Sunday.
Dr Ramesh who started his lecture on the subject, "Molecular Logic of Life," on March 22, completed it at 03:45 hrs on Sunday, surpassing the record set by South African Moosawazi (88 hours and 4 seconds).
Dr Ramesh, who delivered the non-stop lecture at the jampacked Old Senate Hall in the varsity without any…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2006
Well, I'm just back from the 3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference, convened by Paul Griffiths, which was titled "Idealization, mechanism and reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology". Speakers were Bill Bechtel (UC San Diego), Alex Rosenberg (Duke), Marcel Weber (Basel), Ingo Brigandt (Alberta), Mark Colyvan (Sydney), Stephen Downes (Utah), Karola Stotz (Indiana), James Tabery (Pittsburgh) and Rasmus Winther (UNAM, Mexico City), plus a host of people from around Australia.
It was, I expected, going to be more of the same old boring stuff on reductionism in biology…
omnibrain | December 14, 2006The mind is the most amazing, lying, cheating, charlatan televangelist ever imagined. It is so good at its job though that one 'part' of the mind can construct a completely false reality and then convince other parts that what it has just constructed is the absolute truth. Not only do other parts of the mind believe this information, they make up extra-information just to justify the original reality constructed. The most important questions though are: Why in the world does the mind have to be such a great con artist? And how does it accomplish this?
In a more formal sense, When a world…