Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | September 10, 2008Another guest post by Thony Christie
John recently provided a link to a review of Steve Fuller’s newest book by Anthony Grayling. On the whole I find Professor Grayling’s comments excellent and applaud his put-down of Fuller but then in the last section of his review he goes and spoils it all, at least for me, by seriously abusing the history of science. As I recently took Rodney Stark to task for his misuse of the history of science in the cause of Christianity I feel obliged in the interest of fairness to do the same to Grayling. Just because I think he is on the right side does not give…
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote:
The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours, with so much failed experiment of life, so much repetition and haphazard variety of endeavour to meet the challenge of passing on genes, to claim the existence and activity of a supernatural designer would be a sort of blasphemy on the latter, if it existed – are well enough known not to require the wasted effort of iteration; nor does the overwhelming security of evolutionary theory…
laelaps | September 5, 2008Last week I wrote about Cobb & Coyne's assertion that "the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism," which appeared in the correspondence section of Nature. This week there is yet another letter on the science v. religion debate, this time by Jonathan Cowie. and it unfortunately manages to conflate "faith" and "science." Cowie writes;
Scientists' use of the scientific method pragmatically includes faith. A scientist must first conceive the idea for an experiment, and then -- on the basis merely of the hopeful presumption of its possible outcome --…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2008
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2008
Sometimes it's so cool to know smart people, so you can congratulate them when they win awards. Go Kimbo! Hat tip Leiter.
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2008
For my sins, I was once a public relations guy, for an educational institution, and I held positions roughly in that domain (e.g., as public communications manager for a medical research institute, although I managed the means not the message) for the bulk of my professional life until I finally took up a position as an academic philosopher four years ago. It was not my vocation, I hasten to add, but the way I supported my book habit and fondness for eating and feeding my family.
I have been asked to address a science communication class on the failure of science to communicate to the…
evolvingthoughts | August 30, 2008
One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which institution was founded in part by my illustrious namesake, Bp John Wilkins.
Although the actual publications are online only in JStor, to which a subscription is required, the Philosophical Transactions were republished by the Royal Society in the early 1800s, and they are online…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2008
Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's TV show Catalyst recently showcased these, and interviewed my friend Chris Nedin as well as his colleagues Jim Gehling and Diego Garcia. Chris is the guy shown on the preview of the video. You can view the report on video, or read the transcript, courtesy of the ABC.
Here's a pic of Nedin showing us where the Ediacaran period…
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points us at a paper in a new journal, Review of Symbolic Logic, which appears to be Open Access, by the redoubtable Graham Priest, on whether existential quantifiers imply existence. Why this matters is a deep issue in metaphysics: on the one hand we have the noneists, following Meinong, who hold that a quantifier in a formal sentence (and…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right
2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…
evolvingthoughts | August 18, 2008
One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is that in the latter, people are all related closely enough to be sure to whom to offer assistance in hard times with the expectation of mutual support later. The crucial role of religion proper, I think, is to mark out those who one can expect aid from, because they have demonstrated the "costly signaling" religion requires (a view of Richard Sosis and colleagues…
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2008
Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of Social Epistemology. He is also the guy who wrote several hundred pages of "expert" opinion for the creationists in the Dover Trial for money. Never one to waste work, he has revised it as a book. Save yourself the $20 and read Sahotra Sarkar's review in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I particularly like the final sentences:
These excursions into fancy allow…
evolvingthoughts | August 10, 2008
A chance link to my blog has led me through an ego search to find Will Thomas' most excellent Ether Wave Propaganda blog. Will is a historian of science post-doc, I think, and he has an engaging style.
Coincidentally, John Lynch lists various links to history of science, including a number of bloggers (your host included). It looks like the beginnings of a Mexican wave of historians.
I recommend Will's post linked to at the start of this post as a discussion of the role and justification for doing history of science.
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright's initial metaphor and ideas and how they changed (it hadn't occurred to me, but should have, that the landscape metaphor fails to deal with new mutations, which change the landscape itself (although I did say something like this in my 1998 paper). Anya Plutinski discusses the iconography of Wright's…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to semantic strip mining, and discuss the species concept that Jason Bond ("Bond. Jason Bond") and his collaborator Amy Stockman used to identify and discriminate these species. But first, here's the interview (or "sketch", as the Colbert writers call it) between Colbert and Bond (which I can't access…
evolvingthoughts | August 6, 2008
Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David Hull's view of science as a semantic conception of theories. In the light of problems such as suboptimality in evolution, many people decided that science could not be just an evolutionary (in the sense of selectionist) process because science did not require the sort of random wanderings in order…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold with abstracts and my comments...
Evolution of reproductive isolation in plantsHeredity advance online publication 23 July 2008; doi: 10.1038/hdy.2008.69
A Widmer, C Lexer and S Cozzolino
Reproductive isolation is essential for the process of speciation and much has been learned in…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of intellectual history to historians. Maybe it will add something to this debate. It is from the preface to my book. I hope the history of science is worthwhile, but it is interesting that the people who most wanted my book to be published are scientists working in the field on which I am writing, so I think it…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2008
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation.
Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with…