Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | February 10, 2009Theologians can be monumentally stupid when they look at things through their doctrinal spectacles, especially when it comes to science. Since they think everything is theological, it must have a theological standing, either good or bad, and so they will undergo the most amazing gymnastics to achieve this outcome. Here's an example, by Anglican Bishop Tom Frame of the Charles Sturt University theological school:
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical…
evolvingthoughts | February 3, 2009
"Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution" (Mark S. Blumberg)
This book came to me well recommended, and as far as the content goes, I am very impressed. The writing style, however, and the intended audience, are at odds with each other.
Blumberg is a developmental biologist who has a real grasp of the topic, is enthusiastic about it, and has a clear target in his sights. That target is sometimes misleadingly called "The Modern Synthesis", although a better term might be something like "gene centrism"; the view often expressed in words like "genes are the…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009David Chalmers and his student David Bourget at the Australian National University have developed a new resource: PhilPapers. This is a hot list to online versions of (so far) over 188,000 items in current philosophy. I checked my own papers and they were all there (something Thompson International seems unable to achieve). So on the Wilkins Narcissism Scale it rates very highly indeed.
Check it out. It will make a big difference to students and teachers, let alone researchers.
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai'i - Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer linked to from Leiter's blog:
Metaphysics DISCLAIMER
Phil 310, Metaphysics, is a course in some core topics in Western Philosophy, including the Free Will Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, related problems in Philosophy of Mind, and the Problem of Personal Identity. If you’re interested in what these involve, you can find long discussions online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of…
evolvingthoughts | January 26, 2009If you happen to be near the University of Guelph, then not only is Massimo Pigliucci giving a talk there, but there's this event by my friend and former colleague, Stefan Linquist:
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2009It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this:
In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place."
At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2009There's been a slew of "Darwin was wrong" and "Evolution is more complicated" stories in the media lately. It's nearing Darwin day so simple minded media hacks can be explained as needing to find the requisite "drama" in their "stories". But the real picture is a lot more nuanced, and ultimately a lot more interesting, than the dichotomies pedalled by what passes for science journalism these days. I am picking up themes also covered by Larry at Sandwalk, Evolutionary Novelties, and Jason at Evolution Blog.
The targets journalists I wish to attack here are those of New Scientist, Newsweek, The…
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2009It has started, downplaying the unpleasant aspects of Nobel laureate Carleton Gadjusek's life. An obituary (paywall) in Nature has what is a rather positive overview of the man who discovered that kuru, which we now know as a prion disease like Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, was transmissible. It fails to mention that he thought it was a virus (it is a protein based disease). It also just barely mentioned his pedophilia.
Eccentricity was the source of Gajdusek's genius as a scientist, and of his notoriety late in life. In 1997, he was imprisoned on a child molestation charge involving one of the…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009One of the enduring mistakes made in science and philosophy is to confuse how things seem with how they are. In biology, the conjunction "pattern and process" has been around for decades, at least since 1947 in ecology, when Alex Watt used it as a title for an essay on plant communities. In 1967, Terrell Hamilton published his Process and pattern in evolution, and the phrase sort of took off from there. But patterns are relationships that are salient to the observer, while processes account for the patterns, and many other kinds as well. In the ontology of biology, it is common for theorists…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the speaker, and not about the things that are being spoken of.
There are a number of people trying to give short definitions of science on the blogs right now (see here). I have a one line definition that I think captures everything I want it to, and nothing else:
Science is the process of saying as much…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
evolvingthoughts | January 6, 2009I make no secret that I admire Darwin as a historical figure very much, but I recently submitted a paper for an open access journal for science teachers at secondary level named Resonance, entitled "Not Saint Darwin". I was motivated by some of the rather uncritical, unhistorical and unnecessary examples of Darwin worship, and its obverse, Darwin demonisation. Here are some examples.
Darwin worship:
Charles Darwin was crazy about dinosaurs (MSNBC) [He also liked roast beef]
Yale Center for British Art to Present Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (Artdaily.org…
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2009I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism
Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners
Why are there still monkeys?
Can a Christian accept natural selection as true?
Does religion evolve?
The heat of religion
The religious we have always with us
Agriculture and the rise of religion
The origins of agriculture now extended
Darwin, God and…
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2008Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't want to, on balance
Corollary: Everything we want to do has a neurological foundation
Discuss
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2008As an academic philosopher, one often finds it more interesting to discuss or debate the ideas of others than to assert what one believes to be true. This is because everybody has ideas they believe to be true, but few have managed to argue for them in any way, and philosophy is all about the arguments. But I keep finding that nobody really holds all the views I do but me, and I can't be bothered arguing for most of them, because individually they have already been argued for by others. Then it hit me - why bother? I have intelligent readers - make them do the work. So I resolved to set out…
evolvingthoughts | December 26, 2008It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the founder of western logic, had discussed groupings of things in terms of what they are not in the Categories, chapter 10, the importance of NOT seems to have been realised first by George Boole in the nineteenth century. In this post I want to discuss it in the context of classification.
Aristotle wrote of four kinds of "contrarieties":
We must next explain the…
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2008So what is it with Christians who are so able to debunk and demythologise the myths of everyone else, and fail to see that exactly the same logic applies to their own mythology?
A priest in northern Italy told kids there was no Father Christmas at a children's mass. Great. We shouldn't believe in magical beings that can break all physical laws just to get across a moral story. I concur.
What about Jesus? A magical being who can break the laws of physics, whose sole justification (and a not very good one at that) is that there is some moral foundation for treating folks nicely. Without a trace…
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2008Here at monkey's uncle, the blog of James Holland Jones, a Stanford anthropologist. Well worth the read. Basically he attacks the presumption that there was some kind of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness needed to make the rest of the EP argument.
Merry Christmas. Or should I say Happy Holidays, being that there's a war on Christmas?