Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | May 30, 2008
I have for a long time now been very dissatisfied with the metaphysical categories bequeathed to us from Aristotle via a multitude of commentators and philosophers ranging from Boethius to Ockham to Locke to Hume to Kant. It seems to me that they are based on a prescientific notion of what sorts of things exist. In particular, the notion of substance strikes me as questionable: it is based rather explicitly on the distinction between the clay a potter uses and the properties of a particular piece of pottery. By starting with a human-centric activity, Aristotle inverted the way things are:…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2008
If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we need a real writer. Carl Zimmer is the guy. He has an essay on species in the current edition of Scientific American. And despite quoting some obscure Australian philosopher, it is a good summary of the issues. How he manages to get up on a topic like that amazes me. It took me a good five years.
There's a connection with this blog. A while…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
The Scientific Misconduct blog has identified a case of censorship based on fear:
Briefly, a postgraduate student (Rizwaan Sabir) was conducting research (into terrorism). He was arrested after downloading material (related to terrorism) from a US government website. I believe that the material is here - take a look. His Nottingham University supervisors insisted the materials were directly relevant to his research (which is on terrorism). A university administrator and previous student at Nottingham University (Hisham Yezza) printed some of the (publicly available) material for him. Both…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here>
Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what an encyclopedia article ought to do.
If I have a criticism, it is that they do not attend, as most modern philosophy doesn't, to the nineteenth century origins of this debate. I mean not only Mill, but Whewell, Jevons and all those who debated the relationship between scientific theories. Those who began the twentieth century…
evolvingthoughts | May 24, 2008
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault; we should have recorded our own video and sent it to the editors, instead we recorded each other by way of an Australia-USA link that was routed, I fear, via Mongolia and Finland, using packets carried by mules). I'm out of sync. But it doesn't matter - it's voice with some moving pictures, that's…
evolvingthoughts | May 23, 2008
One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.]
Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes.
I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2008
Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist:
Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2008
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they are researching. It makes them seem to be proposing something important, because everybody agrees Darwin proposed something that changed our way of looking at life and ourselves. If we are saying he was wrong, a "paradigm shift" cannot be far behind...
So a paper entitled "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds" is a surefire…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2008
I have been called, for my denial of outright atheism, a Chamberlainist. Well I never felt so much like Neville Chamberlain today as I walked through the corridors of the Seat of Learning* with a contract from the publishers for my book Species: A history of an Idea. I felt like shouting as I waved it, "Peace in our time!" except that the corridors are empty and I'd have felt like a right loon doing that.
As has been noted recently, by the way, Neville Chamberlain noticed that his rapprochement with Hitler had failed and rearmed Britain for the coming war, and responded to Hitler's…
scientificactivist | May 14, 2008On Monday, I attended an interesting lecture sponsored by the 21st Century School here in Oxford entitled "What Is Science For?". You can see a discussion on the event here and read a pdf summary of it here. The lecture was co-presented by scientist John Sulston and philosopher John Harris, and it was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who also moderated the Q&A afterward. As the summary focuses on, the event was partially a debate on the purpose of science, with Harris proposing a utilitarian view and Sulston defending a focus more on the intrinsic value of inquiry and discovery (and…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2008
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda's naive optimism and Huxley's sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and "to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement". They also have a blog. It is…
evolvingthoughts | May 9, 2008
So much has been happening in the world while I was giving a talk on the adaptiveness of religion in Sydney. The Platypus thing was one item I'd have blogged on if the rest of the blogosphere hadn't beaten me to it. All I can say is that no matter how many bloggers write on the mosaic nature of the platypus genome, at least I got to hold one. And I would never have used the meaningless term "reptile".
And although I have only been to NYC twice, I can say I have a favourite store there, and I saw it on CSI: NY recently (although they obviously tidied up the counter for the shoot).
And…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2008
... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on
Women and superstition (parts one and two)
and
Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four).
Go check them and her out.
evolvingthoughts | May 5, 2008
In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the "transcendental" relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents not visible or present, he claims. The paper is also a good historical review of theories of religion, and makes the point that "religion" is not well defined as a topic of investigation of explanation.
Like many others, Bloch infers that religion is a byproduct of things that were evolutionarily adaptive, such as cognitive skills. His…
evolvingthoughts | May 3, 2008
Duck and cover, folks. I'm about to upset somebody.
I have previously been fairly critical of DNA barcoding, the proposal to use a small fragment of the COI gene - a mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase, subunit I - as a surrogate marker for species. That is, in simple terms, the use of COI sequences to "barcode" species so that straightforward molecular gene sequencing will tell you if you have a species or not, and how many there are in a given area.
Now I'm going to defend a new paper that proposes a barcoding method, for philosophical reasons. Here's the paper:
Inferring Species…
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2008
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by an artist, Augustus Earle, who visited Australia and New Zealand, and spent some time on board the Beagle with Darwin. Earle wrote a book entitled A narrative of a nine months' residence in New Zealand in 1827: together with a journal of a residence in Tristan D'Acunha, an island situated between…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment.
First of all, some of my commenters think that this doesn't rule out religion being the threat. It may still be the major source of illiberalism, and I cannot deny that, but I think the problem lies not in the instantiation of the antimodernism, but in the psychology that underlies it. For religious ideas would have no issue if they did not…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here.
One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are more important for allowing people to vent than actually proving anything, is that those opposed to religion tend to think, as the Guardian commentator does, that anyone who has what I would think is a rational approach to belief, is a kind of "God-Lite", "an unthreatening and more-or-less rational - and private - approach. It's hard to object to that: practised in this way…
evolvingthoughts | April 26, 2008
I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such things. But I forgot that in this case there is a double whammy: philosophers have spent a lot of time mocking sociology, especially in the context of science. So below the fold, I put a comment made by respected sociologist of science, Eli Gerson, which he put in the comments of that post, and which…