Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
What happens when rational coherence is not assumed, in the development of creationist views?
No child is able to make their epistemic set maximally coherent, and so it is likely that they will acquire a number of mutually inconsistent epistemic values and principles. If your parent tells you to try and see if things work out on the one hand, and that you need not do anything but believe the pastor or Bible on the other, this does not register for most young children as a conflict.
Young learners are natively active explorers and experimenters to some degree, but this doesn't immediately…
tfk | September 10, 2006I couldn't make the speech by Ken Miller, the inaugural speech in KU's series on "Difficult Dialogues." Fortunately, the audio is out there so I can catch up on the controversy.
The controversy seems to center mostly on the section of his talk described like this by the Journal World:
Miller said the root of the portrayal of religion and evolution as opposites may come from scientists who have an “anti-theistic interpretation of evolution,” a stance he disagrees with.
“People of faith are shooting at the wrong target. They should not be shooting at evolution itself,” he said.
Miller, a…
evolvingthoughts | September 10, 2006The development of one's conceptual world is not done in a vacuum. As Gilbert and Sullivan noted
...every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
but of course that isn't true. Liberals, conservatives, Christians and atheists, scientists and creationists are made, not born.
When a child reaches a certain age, they learn many of their base attitudes from those around them. The space of conceptual alternatives that they encounter is restricted, but at the least each child is predisposed ordinarily to learn from trial and…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Early on when I was publishing for the first time, I published in an online open access journal entitled The Journal of Memetics. Being naif, I didn't think it mattered. I had an idea I wanted to get out, and that was the place where the discussion was going on. What I didn't realise was that this was new in the academic world of publishing.
The Leiter Reports has an interesting discussion on the need for expensive for-profit journals, with most commenters to the thread agreeing that the time for these publications is ending. I am skeptical that they will, and here are some reasons:
First of…
scientificactivist | September 7, 2006Student Pugwash USA (SPUSA), an organization that encourages the inclusion of social responsibility considerations in our scientific dialogue, has started a new blog called MindFull. The blog has already tackled a variety of issues from "ethical stem cells" to defense policy, and it should be an interesting source of information and commentary.
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2006John Allen, at National Catholic Review, has an interesting analysis of the motives behind the recent Evolution Study Day the pope held. Unsurprisingly, the issue is not whether life changed over time, or even whether natural selection works - although he indicates that as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict inclined to thinking that "macro-evolution" (speciation and above) was impossible by random variation and natural selection, showing that he knows very little about the actual biology.
No, it's this:
Evolution has become a kind of "first philosophy" for enlightened thinkers, ruling out the…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin entitled "3 Questions for America". The three questions are:
1. Should alternatives to evolution be taught in schools? Dworkin says yes, but only if they are actually scientific. Alternatives derived from and dictated by religious beliefs don't count. He recommends that we (that is, the USAians, but it applies in broader international contexts) need a Contemporary Politics course that discusses how these sorts of issues arise and for what political purposes.
2. The Pledge of Allegiance. Though this is not cast as a…
tfk | September 3, 2006While responding to the foolishness of IDolators has become increasingly dull business, there are occasional opportunities in it. The problem is that they offer nothing essentially new, which is why it isn't science. The advantage is that they give us insights into how they view the world, and by doing so, teach us what the misunderstand, and what other people might not understand either.
This is all by way of introduction to a comment at Billy Dembski's blog in which "BarryA" attempts to explain theology to Jesuit theology professor Father Edward Oakes. Oakes makes some quite sensible…
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2006One of the problems of living at the edges of empire as I do, is that often you want to have access to older books that are hard to come by. Anything from about 1870 is pretty easy to get, but if you want to access older material, it gets troublesome. Some of it is only available on microfilm or microfiche, and finding readers is annoying. Mostly, it isn't available at all.
The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has the Gallica project which allows you to download as PDF some of the treasures in its microfiche store, which has been very useful - I got the facsimile of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae…
scientificactivist | August 29, 2006For such a small planet (or non-planet now), Pluto sure has been making waves the last couple of weeks. I haven't really weighed in and instead deferred to the experts. I'm not going to really say much now either, but, hell, I'll admit it. I'm going to miss Pluto. A lot. Losing Pluto shakes the foundation of the worldview I grew up with, and this seems to be a widespread phenomenon.
Along those lines, Monday's Washington Post featured an article by Shankar Vedantam that placed the loss of Pluto into a broader context, using it as an example to shed light on more general social phenomena…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2006evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear membrane surrounding the genetic material). Now Bill Martin and Eugene Koonin have weighed in with a letter in which they say
Prokaryotes are cells with co-transcriptional translation on their main chromosomes; they translate nascent messenger RNAs into protein. The presence of this character distinguishes them from cells that possess a nucleus and do not…
evolvingthoughts | August 23, 2006Well, first there's flowers and chocolates, and then a nice restaurant...
Or, if you want the cheaper option, go to EARTHTIME and download the files that describe both the best modern results and the techniques used.
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2006For some reason, Alfred Nobel didn't endow a mathematics prize, but John Fields, secretary of the International Mathematical Union in 1931, did, and the Fields Medal is the math equivalent of the Nobel in that discipline. Four winners every four years get the medal, all under 40 years of age.
This year, an Adelaide man by the name of Professor Terence Tao, won one. He's 31, and was a professor at 24, at the University of California. Apparently he was something of a child prodigy, being tutored in university level maths at 12. Congratulations. I can only find comfort, though, knowing that…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2006The organisation that brought us BioMed Central has aggregated its open access journals. So far, BioMed Central (150+ journals), Chemistry Central (5 journals) and PhysMath Central (none yet) are linked here.
BMC has a host of nice addons, some of which require a paid subscription (they have to pay for the hardware and software somehow, I guess)...
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2006This, from LifeSite:
The Jesuit priest-astronomer who vocally opposed the Catholic understanding of God-directed creation, has been removed from his post as head of the Vatican observatory.
Fr. George Coyne has been head of the Vatican observatory for 25 years is an expert in astrophysics with an interest in the interstellar medium, stars with extended atmospheres and Seyfert galaxies. He also appointed himself as an expert in evolutionary biology and theology last summer in an article for the UK's liberal Catholic magazine, The Tablet.
Fr. Coyne was writing against Christoph Cardinal…
scientificactivist | August 18, 2006It has been known officially since 2002 that the sciences are hard, and, as much as we scientists love it when our friends and family tell us how smart and wonderful we must be since they could never understand what we do... is this elevated position going to cost us in the end? Big time?
Addressing this issue, an article by Emma Brockes in yesterday's Guardian explores the plight of the physical sciences in the UK, taking a humorous look at the question of whether a lack of interest from students will spell their eventual demise:
It is presumably never easy being a physics teacher, what…
evolvingthoughts | August 16, 2006Razib at Gene Expression has called for a followup to the "evolution in ten words or less" post he previously had and which I responded to (linked in his post above) with a call for "ten assertions about evolution". So I just saw this, and of course I rise to the challenge...
1. All progress in evolution is local. Any longer term trends are either responses to long term environmental changes or stochastic.
2. Natural selection is not evolution (as Fisher said in his Genetical Theory in 1930. Evolution also covers taxonomic diversity, random processes, sexual selection, and so forth.
3.…
evolvingthoughts | August 15, 2006Occasionally one comes across odd stories in the late medieval literature on natural history, and one is inclined to dismiss them as fablous stories born of credulous superstition. But they illustrate a much more important phenomenon - the shift from seeing nature as a source of moral lessons to seeing nature as something worth studying for its own sake. One such is the tale of the Barnacle Goose.
The Barnacle Goose, Branta leucopsis, is a small (less than 2kg) black and white goose of the order Anseriformes. It lives during the winter months in the Atlantic coasts of Scotland and Ireland,…
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2006New Light Microscope Images Cellular Proteins with Near-Molecular Resolution.
Advances in microscopy have fuelled biology. Here is a new approach that allows the visualisation of individual proteins, using fluorescent in situ hybridisation techniques. What's even more interesting is that the two researchers did this in their own time and at their own expense. They now have positions at Janelia Farm, at Florida State University.