Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | February 19, 2007
A recent report noted that studies that rely on evolutionary processesto explain, say, antibiotic resistance among pathogens, tend not to use the "E-word" in medical journals, instead using terms like "emerging", "spreading" and "increasing". The reason appears to be the bad connotations "evolution" has in American contexts.
There is much misunderstanding of this term, and people often pack a lot of differing concepts under it. Consider this rant by a creationist in The American Spectator: there are "six types of evolution" according to him. They are cosmic evolution, chemical evolution,…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
A paper out in Nature 15 February, uses a novel technique devised by one of the authors, Dan Faith, called Phylogenetic Diversity (PD), to assess the biodiversity and conservation value of endangered species and regions in terms of how unique they are in evolutionary history.
The summary article says this:
When seeking to preserve biodiversity, simply trying to count and protect every species may not be enough. A new study suggests that conservationists should also consider the extent to which the mix of species in an area has the genetic potential to adapt to change.
In the past, many…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
I get notifications of the incredibly bigoted and stupid comments at Town Hall.Com via Google. I usually ignore them - that's PZ's domain. But this has to be commented on.
Some idiotic ignoramus named Mary Grabar attacks Sam Harris, who most likely knows three orders of magnitude more than she about the history of both science and religion, thus, in a column nicely titled "Letter to a Stupid Atheist":
You have a degree in philosophy, I see, but were you aware that science as a mode of thought came about through monotheism? You see, the idea of a single creator made it possible for human…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
This announcement of an essay competition at Inter-Research, a German-located research group, may be of interest to students:
Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics
Ethics of Climate Change
CALL FOR ESSAYS
Major consequences of climate change are now predictable to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. Many of these consequences will be experienced within the next 100 years - on time scales relevant to emergency preparedness, medical responses, infrastructure alteration, financial investments, treaty negotiations, etc. These changes will impact the globe, geographically,…
evolvingthoughts | February 17, 2007
I'm late to this party, no doubt, but courtesy of Nobel Intent, here is a number of interviews with scientists and philosophers discussing the Evil Undead Zombies of creationism and intelligent design.
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
As everyone is tired now of hearing, Intelligent Design booster Michael Behe has argued there is an "irreducible complexity" in some biological processes that means they cannot have evolved. The basic logic is pretty simple - if a system needs all its parts, then the lack of any part means it would be nonfunctional. This means, he says, that for it to have evolved, those other parts would be twiddling their thumbs evolutionarily, until all the parts are in place.
The incredibly smart, handsome and active Ian Musgrave has a piece on Panda's Thumb on Behe's key example, the clotting cascade…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
At last, my grant application is in. I reckon there's about the same amount of work in a grant application as in a good size novel paper, which is to say a paper on a topic you haven't published before. To add to that, I finalised a paper for final submission - which I hope meets the exacting standards of the editors.
So I am able now to work on other stuff, which includes more on Darwin and species concepts. When I began this, I hadn't read David Stamos' Darwin And the Nature of Species, in which most of the source material is covered. Stamos, like me, thinks Darwin was a species realist…
evolvingthoughts | February 15, 2007
Theory: A word that gets used a lot in discussing science, or attacking it.
Theories are only verified hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best, but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed. [Claude Bernard, 1865, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.]
The term comes from the Greek for "viewing" or "contemplation". It used to be used to mean something along the lines of "laws of nature" + "methods" for a particular domain, or subject.
The term was used extensively from the beginnings of the…
evolvingthoughts | February 14, 2007
Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years?
"The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth" (Patrick Wyse Jackson), gives a nice and comprehensive account of the project to date the earth, and the means used to do it, from early modern theological approaches like the famous Ussher's (and Jackson has some corrections to make to Gould's essay on the topic), through to the…
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2007
One of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn’t know how to define a species. [Futuyma 1983: 152]
Comments like Futuyma's have been published in scores of textbooks and repeated ad nauseum. Similar criticisms go back to the 19th century, and in my view, they are totally wrong.
Charles Darwin was a student of some of the best geologists and naturalists in Britain at the time, when geology and natural history were regarded as being similar if not identical topics. When he set off on the…
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2007
I went to see this film because it looked like a light comedy, starring Will Ferrell. Boy, was I wrong.
It's a highly intelligent piece which deals with representations, metarepresentations, moral choices, the nature of fiction and rhetoric, individual freedom, personal responsibility, and most of all, the worth of a life. Ferrell is almost perfect as a near-autistic bureaucratic drone who discovers life only to have it threatened. This film redeems him from pretty well everything else he's done (even Bewitched). Emma Thompson plays the conflicted author beautifully. And what is more,…
evolvingthoughts | February 10, 2007
Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Science and Ethics has asked scientists what they (as opposed to philosophers) mean by "theory". I intend to write how philosophers have use the term sometime soon, when this grant application is done and a paper revised, but if you are a scientist, go visit her and comment.
evolvingthoughts | February 8, 2007
From David Hume's Natural History of Religion Sect III (found via Dennett's Breaking the Spell):
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry; where trees,…
evolvingthoughts | February 7, 2007
Sahotra Sarkar has published a book on Intelligent Design, that is rather different from other offerings. Sarkar uses the topic as a way to riff off matters of epistemology, the sociology of science and the use of science in society. I haven't seen the published version, but I read an earlier ms copy and on that basis I can recommend it as a more technical and philosophical approach to the topic.
evolvingthoughts | February 5, 2007
I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle...
A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable evidence yet. He responded "science is what scientists do", and ask my opinion about that claim...
I responded thus [names removed to protect the innocent]
[Name], you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters.
In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is worthwhile saying…
evolvingthoughts | February 4, 2007
The Biohumanities Project of Paul Griffiths, of which I am a minor part, has a page up of talks and discussions at conferences and workshops, recorded for podcasting. We have just revamped and shifted our podcast page to here. If you want to stay abreast of these, subscribe to our RSS feed.
Some of the crispy goodness: A conference on mechanism and reduction, a conference on the philosophy of ecology, and a conference on evidence based medicine, plus talks on emotion, essentialism and biological hierarchies.
evolvingthoughts | February 2, 2007
Rob Skipper has a relatively accessible post on what Fisher and others think the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection means. The old joke has it that it's neither fundamental nor a theorem, but Rob goes into more detail based on a seminar he and his students did.
One thing - "genic variance" is undefined. As I understand it, that is the amount of phenotypic variation in a population that is due to genetic differences between individuals. Thats the definition I could find, anyway.
evolvingthoughts | February 2, 2007
Canadian blogger, columnist and science fiction writer Ed Willett has a nice piece on some taxonomic jokes that have a point, entitled Lazarus, Elvis, zombies and Jimmy Hoffa. It's also a column in the Regina Leader-Post, which speaks well of Canadian media.
Willett discusses "Lazarus taxa", which are taxonomic groups that are found , either today or as fossils, long after the first instances become unrecorded in the fossil record. The star example of this is the Coelocanth. He gives a good short introduction to Linnaean systematics.
He mentions also Elvis taxa, which are taxa that look…
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2007
Species: A term which everybody thinks they understand, but which nobody agrees upon, to denote the "basic units" of groups of biological organisms.
It is sometimes said, or has been said to me, that one ought not know too much about a topic if you are to define it clearly. This is because the expert knows all the many nuances that apply in different conditions, and writes not to the beginner but to the other experts. So I must note here that my thesis and continuing work is on species concepts, and things may get a bit rocky. You've been warned.
First of all I'd like to disagree with…
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2007
Not Darwin. Not Lamarck. Not the Greeks. A French physicist and mathematician...
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1678-1759) was an interesting man. He devised what we now know as the principle of least action, and showed that the earth was flattened. Some other things he did, however, changed biology forever.
In 1735, the first edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae was published. Linneaus put out at least 13 editions of this in his lifetime, and the famous 10th edition was adopted in the 19th century as the "gold standard" - if Linnaeus named a species, that was its name thereafter…