Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can't: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I'm a philosopher: I use philosophical values of "fun"). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I'd love to…
evolvingthoughts | October 27, 2008
The NCSE has put up more of its content from it's excellent, if badly laid out, magazine Reports of the NCSE. As a result, one of my better pieces, on species concepts, is now up, with a list of what I at the time thought were the concepts in the modern literature, derived from Mayden's 1997 piece. I would revise the phylogenetic concepts somewhat, but the citations are still useful. Also go check out the revised NCSE website. It has lots of useful links about antievolutionism and evolution. And happy birthday to Genie...
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2008
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had a religion or six, and although, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out. These…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2008
My favourite subject as an undergraduate was Historiography, which covered historical method and the nature of history. I was fortunate to be invited to contribute to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography by the editor, Aviezer Tucker, which is being launched in Prague next week. Unfortunately I can't attend...
But I did get to write about Darwin as a contributor to historiography, albeit one who was inadvertently causing a revolution in the way we saw the past rather than a deliberate iconoclast. It looks like a fascinating book and I can't wait to get my…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2008
That is not a riddle, or rather it's not meant to be, but it's a question worth asking about the barcoding project.
Wired has a nicely written piece about the rationale and program of giving species DNA barcodes and using the gene chosen as the barcode to identify the number of species out there in the world [Hat tip Agricultural Biodiversity]. In it, the founder of barcoding, Paul Hebert, recalls how he came up with the idea:
He says he came up with the idea for the machine in a grocery store. Walking down an aisle of packaged goods in 1998, he indulged in a moment of awe: Here, in a…
evolvingthoughts | October 20, 2008
So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to reason with him? Just try it, young fellow...
Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to make up for this, see below the fold.
Janet has done all Seed stablemates proud by attempting to get us to donate to DonorsChoose. Since it's an American thing, and I am not American, I have chosen to not get…
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2008
Melvyn Bragg, always an informed and interesting interviewer, has a podcast up from BBC Radio of an interview on the topic of vitalism in biology. Here the experts chosen are Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London, and Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford.
It's an excellent introduction to both the myths and facts about how modern…
revere | October 16, 2008
A piece online in The Scientist is an example of silly handwringing by science educators. James Williams, who describes himself as a science educator who trains science graduates to become science teachers, despairs because most trainee teachers he teaches don't have a clue about what makes science "science." He has been surveying them and reports:
Over the past two years I've surveyed their understanding of key terminology and my findings reveal a serious problem. Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor…
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2008
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years.
DP0984826 Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths
Approved Project Title: Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,195
2010 : $ 88,506
2011 : $ 88,446
Primary RFCD 4401 PHILOSOPHY
APD Dr JS Wilkins
Administering Organisation
The University of Sydney
Project Summary
The idea that religion is an evolved feature of…
evolvingthoughts | October 1, 2008
In the light of the ongoing automation of impact factors, usually by somewhat opaque algorithms or procedures, a number of editors of various biomedical jounrals have asked to be taken off a new European reference index. I have taken the liberty of formatting the text below the fold in paragraphs. It was taken from the HOPOS-L@listserv.vt.edu forum for history and philosophy of science, and originally on the H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology [mailto:H-SCI-MED-TECH@H-NET.MSU.EDU].
From: Finn Arne Jørgensen
Date: Tue, September 30, 2008 2:31 pm
Journals…
evolvingthoughts | September 28, 2008
It all began with Larry Arnhart giving a "Darwinian" account of the case for financial bailouts. Then David Sloan Wilson rejected the argument from the Invisible Hand. Then Massimo Pigliucci entered the fray. What's at issue?
There are two basic extremes in economics: laissez faire and command economies. The former suppose, with the overextrapolation of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, that a truly unbiased and free market will generate goods better than any other economic system. The latter is socialism, and supposes that a central planner, usually the State, will control economies reducing…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2008
Science blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, the impact of which is slowly becoming clear. Gone are the days when an albino silverback philosopher was a top ranking science blogger (I am quite happy to be a philosophy of science blogger, and not take credit for anything I didn't earn). I recently had a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the topic, which was more an analysis of how they functions for those used to the older publishing trajectories. Now Sciblings Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith have an advocacy paper in PLoS Biology, in which they seek to legitimate…
evolvingthoughts | September 19, 2008
Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy with a good patter in anti-ID; nothing I haven't heard before but, and this surprised and educated me, something that few of the audience seemed all that familiar with.
One thing that has been very useful to me is to get a cross bearing on what interested and intelligent folk know and do not know. That will help me be a little more clear in the future. My talk is tonight, so we'll see…
revere | September 18, 2008Steve Novella at Science-Based Medicine, a level headed and judicious advocate of better use of scientific evidence in clinical medicine, has written his own view of the BPA issue we covered in a post the other day. Orac pointed to it in the comments as "another take" on the issue. We aren't sure if he meant it disagreed with the view we expressed or not. For the record, we have some differences, but not on the judgment about the BPA paper. Differences about that are mainly a matter of emphasis and that's pretty subjective. "Real but small effects" may be very important but we don't know that…
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2008
In response to the unwarranted flap over the education director of the Royal Society making comments that of course the media and the creationists spun to suit themselves, Richard Dawkins had this to say:
Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to…
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2008
A paper I recently saw in EMBO Reports made the following assertion:
Ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork for the scientific tradition of critical inquiry, but they nevertheless missed out on one aspect important to modern science. Many philosophers obtained their results through a tradition of contemplation and thought rather than experimental procedure, which, not surprisingly, led to errors. Aristotle’s belief that the brain is a cooling organ for the blood was definitely not based on anything that scientists today would consider scientific evidence. He also thought that in…
evolvingthoughts | September 14, 2008If I weren't such a reductionist mechanist, I'd probably find this very very funny. And what Cleese does to things deserves its own verb.
evolvingthoughts | September 14, 2008
It occurs to me that I don't have a good list of these, so I invite you all to list and name your favourite science journalism narratives. You know, the sorts of things that journalists must squeeze every science story into, no matter what the actual content. Journalists in general have at best a few dozen of these pigeonholes into which to force every "news" story, and science is no exception. I'll start off with three of my favourites:
Frankenscience: scientists have done something that is going to cause the end of the world, major cancer, or they Meddled With Things Man Was Not Meant To…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2008
Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now.
A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent. Thony is not permitted to point out any further historical inaccuracies...
Leiter reports that a philosopher who blogs, from Yeshiva, James Otteson, may have been removed because he said things on the blog that are sexist, or at least interpreted to be, according to Inside Higher Education.
Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has the first of a series on the historian Simon Schaeffer, on…
evolvingthoughts | September 11, 2008
I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists.
Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to avoid naming heroes and villains, and in general a strong devotion to the minutae and detail of history, instead of the now-old-fashioned grand sweeps of a Toynbee or Marx. Sure, they disagree how to interpret things, including mindsets of agents in another time, but overall when a historian gives…