Philosophy of Science
tfk | October 25, 2006I don't read Greg Easterbrook, for roughly the same reason I don't read anything else in the sports pages. When I want to get the experience of bulky men straining themselves trying to exceed their innate abilities, I watch C-SPAN.
I was reminded of why I don't read Easterbrook by a comment that Brad Delong quotes from a post by Matt Ygliesias, in which Matt quotes Easterbrook saying that the Lancet's study of excess mortality in Iraq is "silly" and that it:
absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action.…It's gibberish.
Does the…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2006There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign influence on society? For example, any number of Islamic Imams, including the leader of Australia's Muslim community, think that women who don't dress "modestly" (which can mean anything from wearing a long sleeved top to the burka) are to blame for being raped.
And attacks on the moral influence of…
evolvingthoughts | October 21, 2006King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs is running a series of lectures on trust in science that looks very interesting. Bit far for me to drop in, but if you're in the neighbourhood...
The ChronicleHerald article is below the fold.
King's, ethics centre present five-part lecture series on how we trust in science
The University of King's College, together with the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs, is presenting the five-part Trust in Science lecture series, beginning Oct. 26.
The first lecture, Setting the Scene: From Magician to…
evolvingthoughts | October 20, 2006
Others have their own view, but the best science show on TV ever was done in Australia. In fact, it wasn't a show, it was a man - Professor Julius Sumner Miller. Miller was a student of Einstein's, and he got his start in the US and Canada before taking up a position in the Physics department at the University of Sydney, and in the early 1960s, he began doing what became an Australian institution - a science show, for school kids (in their blazers and ties), which actually got the kids to answer the questions themselves. His catchcry, in that raw eastern American accent, "Why is it so?"…
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006
Well, Stranger Fruit beat me to it (after I told him about it!) but there's a new version of Darwin's works online that has many juicy goodnesses, such as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin. Now we can check if these creationists are quoting properly. It has images as well as OCR'd text, and some of these editions were scanned from the Darwin family's own library. Also, there are field notebooks and lots of other stuff.
An OBE for John Van Wyhe, I say...
evolvingthoughts | October 16, 2006There's a new book on junk science out. The following is from an announcement on the History and Philosophy of Science list. I haven't read the book myself.
Although the term "junk science" has often been used by rightists in
the U.S. to describe science that contradicts their interests, they
have no ownership of the phrase.
Since the twisting of science by various special interests has always
been part of the history of science, I make (with your indulgence)
announcement of the following new book and its complete Table of
Contents:
JUNK SCIENCE: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other…
evolvingthoughts | October 13, 2006Ars Technica has an interesting post on how scientists themselves view the tentative nature of science. In ordinary language, a tentative conclusion is not to be preferred (the old "evolution is just a theory" canard), but in science it is in fact a virtue. Science's conclusions are meant to be tentative, but a paradox is that as its conclusions are used and extended, that tentative nature tends to evaporate over time.
John Timmer asked a number of scientists how they viewed their data, their models and the broad theoretical frameworks. He got differing answers from different fields.…
evolvingthoughts | October 13, 2006Those of you who live near San Francisco might be interested in this talk I'm giving at the Pizza Munch gathering at UC Berkeley in November.
For November we've made arrangements to meet jointly with the Bay Area Biosystematists in Berkeley on Thursday, November 9. John Wilkins (Queensland) will give a talk entitled "The Unseasonable Lateness of Being, Or, Essentialism Comes After Darwin, Not Before."
Abstract: The received view of the history of the species concept is that before Darwin, naturalists held to a view of essentialism, according to which species were constituted by necessary and…
evolvingthoughts | October 9, 2006If you go here you will find downloadable podcasts of this conference:
Second Queensland Biohumanities Conference, Philosophy of Ecology, held 29-30th June, 2006:
Introduction by Prof. Paul Griffiths, and Mathematical Models in Ecology and Conservation Biology: Mark Colyvan
The Agony of Community Ecology: Greg Cooper (not recorded, due to an equipment failure)
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: On the Very Idea of an Ecological Community: Jay Odenbaugh
Local Ecological Communities: Kim Sterelny
The Problem with Environmental Problem Formulation: Hugh Possingham
Toward a General Theory of…
evolvingthoughts | October 2, 2006Repost from the old blog:
One of the problems in having a philosophy related blog is that ideas are hard things to generate on demand, so often you need someone to raise the problems for you to think about. Being naturally (and preternaturally!) lazy, I don't go out looking for problems (of a philosophical nature; the ordinary kind seem to find me like flies find rotting garbage). Hence, this blog is sporadic.
Well, I just tripped over an interesting question raised by Certain Doubts: can we reconcile the Platonic value of truth with an evolutionary view of epistemology? That is, if we think…
evolvingthoughts | October 1, 2006
Here is a working list of species concepts presently in play. I quote "Concepts" above because, for philosophical reasons, I think there is only one concept - "species", and all the rest are conceptions, or definitions, of that concept. I have christened this the Synapormorphic Concept of Species in (Wilkins 2003). More under the fold:
A Summary of 26 species concepts
There are numerous species "concepts" (i.e., conceptions of "species") at the research and practical level in the scientific literature. (Mayden 1997) has listed 22 distinct species concepts along with synonyms, which…
evolvingthoughts | September 29, 2006
The Washington Post has an opinion editorial by Paul Hanle, the president of the Biotechnology Institute in Washington.
I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: "How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don't even accept evolution?"
I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of…
evolvingthoughts | September 27, 2006A new organisation, SEFORA (Scientists and Engineers for America), has been formed to counter the abuse and supression of science currently popular in American media and politics. They have drafted a "Bill of Rights" for scientists and engineers which includes:
Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.
and
The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.
The second one is worth playing up -…
evolvingthoughts | September 23, 2006New images of the Cydonia "face" show, as expected, that it's just another piece of Areology, not a monument left by aliens.
But this will not stop the woowoos from claiming that this is evidence of long-gone alien monument building. In a classic case of pareidola, the same psychological process that lets people find Jesus in a pancake or Mary in a fence post, Cydnoia is beyond rational thought. Pareidola is also the reason why people see patterns of design in living things. It suits us to see evidence of intention in the living world, because that's what we evolved to do. We are supposed to…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2006
We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what wilfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjecture, to return to us - if it does returns - by a back door. [Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, Penguin, 1973 (1931), 24…
tfk | September 16, 2006I think Gil means something different, but this pretty much explains why IDC doesn't make any sense:
A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, thankfully, are smart enough to figure out that this is a silly idea.
This is essentially what ID argues. With a few magical tweaks here and there, the IDol just *poof* created whatever. No process, just "mysteriously mutate" something into something else.
Science doesn't operate by invoking mystery. ID does.
evolvingthoughts | September 15, 2006
I'm reading Robert Carneiro's Evolution in Cultural Anthropology (Westview Press, 2003) right now, and it's a good introduction to the debate over cultural evolution in the social sciences from Spencer to the present day. But I have some criticisms.
Carneiro's view of cultural evolution is basically Spencer's - evolution means unilinear progress. He got this via his mentors Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. He criticises Boyd, Richerson and Rindos for being too "neo-Darwinian":
Rindos states that as raw material to work on, "Darwinian selectionism requires undirected,…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2006
Repost from the old blog: This week I am an Eighth Day Agnostic, as recent reformers in my irreligion have decided that we also don't know what a week is. My sermon for today begins with a question: When did it become possible to be an atheist?
On Friday I attended an interesting PhD confirmation seminar on the Marquis de Sade. Apart from a nice dirty graphic used as the backdrop, rather distractingly, for the PowerPoint presentation, there was little or no actual sex or sadism. Mostly the discussion centred on what it was that de Sade intended to be doing with his libertine ways. The…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2006
Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3
With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education?
Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-science belief sets, several implications might affect our mode of public education and discourse.
The first is that it is highly unlikely that we can argue creationists et al. out of their belief sets by merely presenting better information about science. Since they lack the epistemic values that…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this.
In a homily in…