General Science
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was "neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing". He had no idea of the results made possible by molecular genetic studies, naturally, as nobody did at that time, but it appears that now that it is capable of being known, it turns out to be worth the knowing. Who'd have thought?
[Updated to add links]
The Etruscans lived somewhat to the north of the Latins on the Italian peninsula, and also on Corsica. Their language is not identifiably related to any…
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 14, 2007
New Scientist is reporting that a case in Austria (not Australia - we share a love of beer, but that's about it) is set to decide if chimps have rights. They already do in Spain, and in New Zealand (which was, I think, the first country to enact rights for chimps).
They do not have rights in Australia, or America, or most of the world apart from these few countries that have what I consider are sensible and inescapable laws. Why do I think so?
Chimps, and indeed most of the great apes if not all of them, share an enormous genetic heritage in common with humans; they are capable of…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2007
The Flood is perhaps the most scientifically interesting story in Genesis, and it has, in fact, been discussed by scientists for over 400 years. Now we are taking the text to tell us of a world, not taking the world to tell us what to think of the text, but let's consider what the Flood story might mean for a world in which it occurred.
First the P author gives us a list of genealogy from Adam to Noah. These individuals live very long times - in Methuselah's case almost a thousand years, so obviously the harm caused by the Fall did not take effect immediately. In fact, the collapse of YHWH…
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 5, 2007
It is also likely that if God re-issued Genesis 2, he'd do it as a comic strip like this.
Oops I forgot to link it... fixed now.
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 31, 2007
We're in the third day, and Elohim has made dry land, but no sun or stars or moon. Still, he's keen to see something growing, so he tells the land to produce, by spontaneous generation as it was later known, "seed bearing plants and plants bearing fruit with their proper seed inside". Seed here is crucial - God creates things that reproduce themselves through some innate generative power, but at first they come out of the land. Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram declared that God acted out of a secondary power here - he didn't create these plants directly, but indirectly, by putting a…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, which is a revised version of a paper in Science, May 18, 2007, which argues pretty much the same thing. I only wish the paper I have forthcoming in Synthese had got published earlier, but they have data, something philosophers must avoid according…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Denver Post is reporting that the US Army wants to use a major fossil site for bombing practice. The Picket Wire Canyonlands, in the Commanche National Grasslands, is included in a series of maps the Army has drawn up for increasing its ordinance ranges.
The landscape of southeast Colorado also crawls with history, but time may be running out on public access to the past as Fort Carson considers acquiring the land for war training.
This secluded valley is home to one of North America's richest dinosaurs finds - more than 1,300 individual tracks; 35 sites have yielded bones.
"The great…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Creationists and literalists like to talk about the book of Genesis as if it were a science textbook, which they can interpret to find anything that science has independently discovered unless they don't like it, such as evolution.
A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be if Genesis were right?" And so I started casually reading it from time to time as if the final editor of Genesis actually meant the things he allows the text to say. This is the first in an intermittent and occasional series.
Now it is clear that Genesis is a redaction (a fancy word for edited…
evolvingthoughts | May 28, 2007
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library:
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As always I just love it when someone hands me facsimile copies of ancient publications (although they have some more recent stuff too), all under a Creative Commons license.
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2007
From which this wonderful quote:
There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but whenever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or television. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even the great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by…
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
... so it looks like I'll be blogging a lot longer than I had expected.
An 81 year old woman with severe Alzheimer's apparently can still make some wicked puns.
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
Since Linnaeus' birthday is tomorrow, my time, and I stuffed up the last post, here's another little treat for you:
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1770, from 1761 Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus)
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named after him (Cain 1994; Koerner 1999; Larson 1968; Winsor 2006). In fact the so-called "Natural System" as it came to be known, was on Linnaeus' own view an artificial one (Cain 1995), and it did not spring forth fully formed from his brow, no matter how much he saw himself as a "second Adam". His…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
First, having dumped on the Smithsonian in the last post, let me cheer them for putting over 6000 images on Flickr... most of which are public domain. There's a wicked Dunkelosteus skull and nearly 800 of Muybridge's motion photographs (cyanotypes).
Second, let me note the good work of Andrew Bartlett of the Australian Democrats, in raising awareness of the Queensland lungfish that is being threatened by the Queensland government's plans to build a probably useless dam. Thanks to Jason, who Has Connections, for the links.