Social evolution
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles.
Tara, from the scientists' perspective, gave a list of rules for science journalists. Her commentators broadly agreed, ranging from gentle to vociferous. Chris Mooney leapt to the defence of what is, after all, his profession (and one he's damned good at if his book is anything to judge by), and…
evolvingthoughts | June 15, 2007
After the Flood, the earth is repopulated, and so R and P give us a list of notable ancestors. In 10:4-5 they say "And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." [Taken from here]. This could mean either the coastlines of the nations or, as the NAS has it, the maritime nations spread out into their territories or something similar. No matter what the best translation, it is clear that each one of these sea peoples has their own language.…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
A 26 year old woman is convicted of twice driving while on probation for having done so drunk earlier. She is an adult who knew very well what the consequences of her actions would be, for her. Fortunately, she didn't kill or maim anyone. She is sentenced to a 45 day stay in a minimum security prison. This would be a pretty minor jail term in most cases.
Instead it becomes world news, the woman is released home, and then an outraged prosecutor asks the judge, who is equally outraged, to enforce the prison term. And the American inequality before the law of the rich and famous is…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural period. But YHWH (just the single name now) seems to value meat more than crops, for when Abel brings him an offering, YHWH treats it with respect (sha'ah, meaning to gaze upon), but not Cain's. Since YHWH is still around chatting to the folk, he is still a physical deity, so I guess he needs his meat. His greens, not so much.
After Cain does the deed of murdering his brother in jealousy (…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2007
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based on data to draw conclusions about the laws of nature. Thick books described this in detail, and they are still worth reading, in particular a book by W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, published in the 1870s. But induction, as anyone who has studied Hume knows, is problematic. You simply…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
The Fall. What can we say about the Fall that hasn't been said many times before? Well, if all you read is the text, quite a lot.
The Serpent is interesting, for a start. He talks, and so he's a magical creature. He has a human-like personality, for he is "crafty" (although I really prefer the old term "subtle", for it makes him sound like a lawyer). He talks about YHWH Elohim only as "Elohim", for a start - I don't know what meaning there is in that. It's not that the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) had become sacred, for it is spread through Genesis and you'd expect it to be elided by the Redactor…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching debates about how you can tell if you're dreaming, or whether we are all brains in a matrix-style vat. But there are local issues, as it were, that reflect these general concerns of philosophers.
[Part 1, Part 3]
Metaphysics covers many things
Metaphysics is a hard field to define. It is named after the book of Aristotle, which…
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2007
This three-part series is a talk I gave a while back to some ecologists and molecular biologists. It is a brief overview of the aims and relationship between science and philosophy of science, with a special reference to the classification wars in systematics, and the interface of science and the broader community. I will present my own overview of the elements of science - as a dynamic evolving entity of knowledge gathering rather than as a timeless methodology or as a purely social movement.
[Part 2, Part 3]
It isn't often that an ornithologist gets to talk to birds. It's even less…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Are you a philosopher? Then stop reading and go think about something [else].
Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Click Here to take survey
evolvingthoughts | May 26, 2007
OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing,…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I think I agree with him. Humans have all kinds of default "wild type" programs in their psyche and cognition which in a high density population will tend to fall out as religion. Does this mean that atheism is doomed? Or that secularism (which is a different thing) is doomed? I think there will be…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
evolvingthoughts | May 20, 2007
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders:
The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry. Any trait that preexists…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Now, I have never studied at Harvard, and all universities are somewhat silly in their planning, but the release reproduced below the fold strikes me as one of the better proposals for undergraduate level tertiary education. It suggests that even science students might need to understand their world, and humanities students need to understand basic science, and so on. Kudos.
Harvard Faculty Approve New General Education Curriculum For Undergraduate Students
Cambridge, Mass. - May 15, 2007 - The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a motion that sets the stage for the…
evolvingthoughts | May 15, 2007
So, Oprah is sending The Secret back to Australia. It's starting to get TV coverage here. Oy. Look guys, when we export Woo to the US, we really don't want it returned, OK?
The Secret appears to be (backed by "leading philosophers? Yeah, right) basically the idea that if you really really want something, and visualise it, it will happen. Imagine what the universe would need to be like for that to happen...
First of all, it would need to care about human desires. The universe really, really doesn't care. The universe is entirely indifferent to us, our goals, preferences and desires. Most…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2007
In a number of cases recently, I have been struck at how ahistorical scientists are about their own discipline or field. For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as if there was a rolling wall of fog following medical research at a five year remove. Some papers were cited before then - they were like distant mountains that one could see above the fog, the giants of the past.
One such paper was the paper by John Kerr and his colleagues in 1972 on apoptosis. It…
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2007
The Eight Day Adventist calendar has rotated into phase with your infidel calendar, so it is time for a sermon. Our subject today is secularism.
I noted an article about the decline in secular standards in Turkey, which of all modern societies is the one most deeply founded as a nation in secular ideals. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk wanted a society not controlled by the imams in order for Turkey to catch up to the then more secular west. But Turkey is now about to elect a Muslim leader who wants Sharia. Meanwhile, in the once-shining example of modern secularism, the United States, even the…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2007
I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication. It's a pity I can't do it as well as I ought.
But here are some thoughts about the difference between communication and "spin". Others can tell if I am dealing with framing or not.
For a start, communication involves…