Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely…
evolvingthoughts | December 15, 2008Below the fold is a video produced by the Australasian Association of Philosophy back in the 1990s. The talking head is, I think, Graeme Graham Priest.
evolvingthoughts | December 12, 2008
There is a widespread tendency of biologists to overgeneralise from their study group of organisms to the whole of biology. Sometimes this is because the organisms are model organisms, like Drosophila (the "fruit flies" that have been used in genetics since the beginning).Other times it is because specialists tend to overestimate the generality of their results and domain. The recent trend to finding "speciation genes" is an example. For some time now various researchers like Chung-i Wu and his collaborators have sought speciation genes. These are genes that cause speciation, in a general…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one.
Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying
"It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes."
It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2008I've been travelling a little to organise my move to Sydney. Love the building, the department, the people and the project. Not sure about Sydney... so anyway, nothing of substance from me for a while.
Here's a lovely little essay about Newton pissing off most of the European intellectual giants of his time, by one of our commentators, Thony Christie, at Etherwave Propaganda. He truly was the most egotistical and curmudgeonly bastard of his time, matched only by his actual achievements.
The latest Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Agricultural Biodiversity. They had the good taste to use one of mine…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2008
The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the "city university") invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts that will end up as some form of publication, I thought you might like to hear my dulcet and husky tones, and read the incredible slide. If so, go here, or get the PDF slides here and the WMA sound here. Check out some of the other speakers too. Thanks to Marco Fahmi for the invite and shepherding.
The actual title was: "…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
I am a fan of science fiction as far back as I can recall. The flights of imagination about large things, ideas and worlds, was enough to trigger off my own imagination. I read pretty well everything I could for over two decades before it all petered out into second rate thick books of fantasy and Star Wars knockoffs. Science fiction had a use-by date, and roughly when Dick Tracy's radio watch became ordinary, it stopped appealing, and I started getting interested in the science.
However, I had to unlearn much of the "science" I had picked up by reading SF (scifi is for latercomers). I…
evolvingthoughts | November 22, 2008
Siris has a nice short post on the use of "truth" in discourse:
This appeal to truth is incantatory: it is not an argument but a rhetorical ploy that usually involves a false dichotomy. By ritually displaying one's 'interest in the truth' in contrast with someone else's interest in something else, one simultaneously paints oneself as in possession of the truth and the other person as compromising the truth in favor of something else; when, of course, it is entirely possible that their concern with whatever it may be is itself a form of interest in the truth. Certainly, nothing says that…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
I'm introducing a new category - the Trashcan. This is a term used in systematics to identify a group that comprises "everything else" once you have done the identification of the real groups of some taxonomic grouping.
I will be using the Trashcan to group together all and only those links that have one common property - that they caught my eye. No other property is necessary or sufficient for inclusion. It has no rank, either.*
Under the fold is the Inaugural Trashcan.
Some work on the simplest vision system, of a marine worm, suggests how complex vision got started. Just two cells…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
The body of the man who started off the modern scientific revolution in the 16th century, Nicholas Copernicus, has been found and his face reconstructed.
evolvingthoughts | November 15, 2008
This one started at Nature Networks, where I am not a blogger, but as Larry and Bora have answered it, among others, I figured I'd have a go too...
1. What is your blog about?
Basically the philosophical implications of science, although that extends into the distance a bit when I get angry about antiscience or political moves that either interfere with science or rely on bad science.
2. What will you never write about?
There's not much I won't write about. I'm a philosopher, so a mere lack of knowledge hardly fazes me. I can express complex views on any topic even if, or rather…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger's 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell's and Whitehead's Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop a logic system that would account for all the objects of the theories of biology, especially of embryology, physiology (including cell theory) and genetics. It was hard going even for logicians (Tarski himself wrote an appendix), and the theory thus elucidated seemed to be very post hoc - it…
evolvingthoughts | November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
I am keen to jot down whatever I can about the ontologies of biology - not just evolution, but also molecular, developmental, taxonomic, ecological and other domains of biology. I want to do this in a relatively systematic manner, so I would appreciate readers noting in the comments the sorts of things/classes/objects that they would like to see discussed, and the domains in which these objects are objects. General categorials rather than specific objects like "humans" or "angiosperms" and the like, please. When we have enough requests I'll sketch out the topics in a later post. Thanks
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2008
An essay in Nature recently, titled "A question of class" (by Jeffrey Parsons and Yair Wand) puts the case that classification is crucial to science and needs to be understood. They hold, as I do, that a poor understanding of classification - particularly of the concepts/words "class" and "category" - lead to unproductive and dangerous conclusions within science. But I don't think they get there quite yet...
Classification - the act of putting things into classes - is something that every science does, ranging from elements and planets, to diseases, taxa and functions. The authors make the…