Philosophy of Science
tfk | December 14, 2006Telic Thoughts responds (sort of) to a point I made yesterday. In the course of arguing that creationists and postmodernists talk about science the same way – as "microfascist," etc. – I pointed out a TT post with some confused thoughts on demarcation between science and non-science. Macht replies:
I wasn't talking about what was true and what wasn't true - I was talking about what the motivations for the demarcation problem are.
Which I understood. My point was that this view of the demarcation problem as fundamentally political is exactly how postmodernists approach it also. My point…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2006A paper gets retracted in Cell because of image manipulation.
Someone needs to tell scientists how not to use PhotoShop when preparing their images. I used to do precisely that to new researchers at the institute I worked at. Here are Wilkins' Rules of Scientific Image Manipulation:
1. If you have a blemish on your image, leave it there. Removing a blemish is like excising a word you don't like in a quoted piece of text. You may very well think it is irrelevant, but it may turn out to be the indicator of some artifact in your technique, so removing it looks like you are hiding something.…
tfk | December 13, 2006A month or so back, someone very strange published an article explaining how evidence based medicine is "fascist." Evidence based medicine, of course "is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients." How horribly fascist. Indeed, the main individual targeted for "fascism" was himself a prisoner of the Nazis and a soldier in the fight against Spanish fascism before the Second World War.
The bloggysphere of course was very excited by this idea, and responded with its characteristic calm, dispassionate…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2006If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the sky; cattle and other farm animals, and every kind of wild beast, would bear young of unpredictable species, and would make their home in cultivated and barren parts without discrimination. Moreover, the same fruits would not invariably grow on the same trees, but would change: any tree could bear any fruit. Seeing that there would be no elements with the capacity to generate each…
tfk | December 11, 2006IDolatrous bloggers ask Is altruism all about cost-to-benefit ratios?, and conclude after reviewing a paper in Science that lays out the current thinking on the evolution of altruism:
Of course, there is another avenue for thinking about altruism: but this means going beyond neodarwinism and entertaining the thought that human beings need to be explained not only in terms of law and chance, but also in terms of design.
Let's set aside that they never bother to explain how "design" would actually resolve this. That would require some sort of "theory of design," and we all know no such thing…
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2006The below-the-fold note was seen on WIRED. It's a plea to prevent political interference from continuing to demolish the scientifically worthwhile aspects of the NASA program, in favour of the bread and circuses smell to the lunar base. A friend worked in the Astrobiology Program NASA funded, which is where nearly all "origins of life" research takes place, apart from some European labs. They closed it down to fund the President's "Vision". Also, go read NASAWatch.
From: tpsmbl@planetary.org
Subject: NASA Science Situation More Dire Than We Thought!
Date: December 5, 2006 8:30:00 AM PST
Dear…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2006
A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in urban environments than when in forest environments. As the writer at ScienceNOW tells it, in forests they sound like Barry White, and in cities like Michael Jackson.
Passerine songs are usually adapted to the acoustics of their usual environment. Birds in denser vegetation will, I am told, end their songs on a rising sharp note, because there is more absorption of sound than in…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2006Janet has raised the undead argument from its grave again! I... must... respond...
The issue is (raised, as always, by the existence of woo science, antiscience, and pseudoscience) how do we know when something is, or isn't, science? This is often called the "demarcation problem" (DP hereafter). I'm going to offer a couple of ways to do this, based on the notion that science, like every other historical entity, evolves.
Janet discusses Popper's "solution" - something is science if it is potentially falsifiable. Leaving aside the problems with the notion of falsifiability, and indeed the…
revere | December 2, 2006I would be embarrassed by this cheap and easy post about chicken soup for symptoms of cold and flu, but I have a more serious purpose. I want to ask ScienceBlogger colleagues who inveigh constantly against alternative medicine (or "woo" as orac at Respectful Insolence insists on calling it) what they think of this and why.
Here's the set-up:
The suspected benefits of chicken soup were reported centuries ago. The Egyptian Jewish physician and philosopher, Moshe ben Maimonides, recommended chicken soup for respiratory tract symptoms in his 12th century writings which were, in turn, based on…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2006Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does.
Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that human reason was limited, and could not reach knowledge of things beyond the world. In short, he was an agnostic. Wait, I hear you saying - a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who thought that nothing could be known of God? Well yes, as Cusa held that "knowledge" of God was had solely by faith.
The world, as we are so often reminded, divides into two kinds of people.…
evolvingthoughts | November 22, 2006Our Lords and Masters ask
Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?
According to the dictionary, a "laureate" is "someone honored for great achievements; figuratively someone crowned with a laurel wreath". We can read this more than one way - you might read it as "having done the best science", or you might draw an analogy with "poet laureate" as the public scientist.
In the former sense, there are too many scientists who you never hear of to mention, so I'll mention only one, a man I know from working in the same institution. His name is Don Metcalf. Unless…
tfk | November 22, 2006DaveScot, apparently just having figured out PZ Myers' first name, has a problem:
I have a problem with these people in that they arbitrarily limit what science can potentially explain. The so called supernatural remains supernatural only as long as there’s no metric by which to measure it. Once a metric is discovered the supernatural becomes the natural.
The limits on science are not arbitrary. Science cannot study the supernatural. IDolators like to claim that people are arbitrarily limiting science to testable hypotheses about the natural world, but those limitations come from the nature…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2006Some time back, I was doing driving duty for a conference of philosophers (that's the collective noun; another is a dispute of philosophers) on a skin diving trip, and one of my passengers was Jonathon Kaplan (actually, if I'd crashed and killed us all, a large swathe would have been cut through the philosophy of biology, not including me). Jon was talking about adaptive landscapes and the work of Sergey Gavrilets, who proposes that in a realistic view of adaptive landscapes with thousands of alleles there will be hyperplanes of high fitness connecting nearly all regions of genome space. This…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2006One of the points made by Rabbi Slifkin in the article I cited recently is that if you insist on using God as an explanans in the aspects of the world we do not yet understand, that is going to mean a decreasing role for God as we learn more. This is an old point. Wesley Elsberry and I made this point about the so-called "explanatory filter" of the Intelligent Design movement - it makes it unnecessary to do any further investigation about things we don't understand, or don't want to because it undercuts our belief system. But the history of the term "the God of the Gaps" is even more…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2006
Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology.
1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts…
evolvingthoughts | November 1, 2006
The living world, it seems to me, causes no end of trouble for those who would classify it. Its levels, ranks, hierarchies and units all seem to be clear enough, until we encounter troublesome cases. Then they get very troublesome indeed. So I want to say, there are no ranks or set units in biology a priori, and very few and limited, a posterori.
Suppose we take one instance: the "units of selection debate" that was so widely discussed after the publication of a number of seminal works in the 1960s and 1970s. Genes were held to be what evolved, against group selectionists who thought…
tfk | November 1, 2006In poking around for information on a forthcoming post, I encountered an aspect of the life of John Dewey that I had previously been unaware of.
I know of Dewey for his work in education, and for advocating pragmatism as a philosophy. It turns out that, in addition to his famous applications of that philosophy to education, he also turned his steely gaze on the practice of journalism.
This makes sense of course, since journalism can be thought of as essentially a form of adult education. For Dewey, education was best practiced experientially, not via rote learning by static students.…
tfk | November 1, 2006Reposted from ye olde site, in preparation for another post soon to come.
Ed Brayton asks Is Risk of Theocracy Overblown? His answer is a slightly qualified "Yes." And he highlights why I don't rail against theocracy, but against "religious authoritarianism." While he may be right that Dobson and Falwell (or Fox and Johnston in Kansas) aren't theocrats in the strictest sense of wanting to replace the Constitution with the Mosaic Law, they do want to impose their own religious values on the entire society, which is authoritarianism.
This problem is one shared by many battalions arrayed on…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2006Courtesy of Mixing Memory comes the announcement of a conference at AlphaPsy on methodology and the social sciences, which raises an interesting thought. Is the use of scientific methodology and the naturalising of the social sciences a threat to those disciplines?
This is an old debate, though. It has been claimed for yonks that the human sciences have their own special methodology, usually called "hermeneutics", in which knowledge of the meaning of human institutions and mindsets is irreducible to physical, psychological and biological causes that might be investigated using the standard…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2006Karen Neander, an Australian philosopher of mind and biology, has moved to Duke. There's a nice press release about it here.