Social evolution
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
From J. B. S. Haldane's 1932 The Causes of Evolution:
... I must ... discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which has been written on ethics in Darwin's name, especially in Germany before the [first world] war and in America and England since. The fallacy is that natural selection will always make an organism fitter in its struggle for the environment. This is clearly true when we consider members of a rare and scattered species. It is only engaged in competing with other species, and in…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?
Similarly to the general classification I gave before, there are several things that seem to need explaining.
1. The sociological explanandum: the existence of organised religion
Religions are salient objects in modern and historical societies. All of them have social structure, and it is that which calls for explanation. There are basically two approaches here, one tied to Weber's sociology and the other tied to Durkheim's. Weber believed that religion was symbolic, and founded…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2007
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional stance". That is, we ascribe intentions to non-agent processes. In earlier terminology, this was called "anthropomorphism", or the treating of non-human things as if they were human.
One will often read explanations of religion as the anthropomorphisation of natural processes like spring, rain,…
evolvingthoughts | September 30, 2007
Thinking some more about PZ's latest comedic act, I think I see what the problem is.
People do not change their beliefs just because someone offends them. They change their beliefs because opponents offend them. If someone is a Muslim, they won't become an Islamist because another Muslim teaches something different, but because that Muslim is a member of an opposing sect. The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
There is not exactly a continuum of ideas between theism and atheism, because there is not a single dimension or variable along which a continuum might be drawn as a spectrum. But…
evolvingthoughts | September 27, 2007
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his own kind of threat and problem, and comparisons to past dangerous individuals don't resolve or enlighten anything. As Time Magazine clearly noted, he has no power over the things that he is being demonised for, and is incompetent and hated internally for the things he does.
But it seems to me there is a wider issue here than the internecine politics of an…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2007
On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism.
Then today my various feeds identified this rather excellent essay (more of a review paper, really) on strong reciprocity (the idea that we humans will behave reciprocally even if there is no individual payoff) by Benoit Hardy-Valée, of the University of Toronto. In this paper, he challenges what he calls "The Collective", a group of conservative…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution in order to bolster their religious agendas.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of…
evolvingthoughts | August 27, 2007
So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such a good job in Stranger than Fiction to my surprise.
But why angst over a remake? The 1950s version was wooden, didactic and naive. Michael Rennie played it like a cheap TV actor. Sure it was fun and imaginative in its premise, but whoa, dude, it ain't art. So I say go for it. There are only a dozen or so SF plots anyway, so there's no harm in redoing it.
But then, I also thought…
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2007
Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It's one of the few blog posts in which you'll read of petrified testicles...
[HT: Afarensis]
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy of progressives and anti-evolutionists alike. Ever since Richard Hofstadter fingered him as the source of rough individualism and eugenics in his Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1943, Spencer has been the evil demon of philosophy, political thought, and evolution. But a recent article in The New Yorker occasioned by a new book Herbert Spencer and the Invention…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I've been pretty quiet of late. In part this is because I've been travelling with little internet access, but also it's because I'm teaching a subject I haven't studied in years, and because I was asked to write a popular essay for a magazine.
It's COSMOS Magazine, an Australian popular science magazine, and what the editor wanted was something like my posts on philosophy of science as the ornithology of science. It takes effort to write clearly to a word limit (which is why I blog - I'm fundamentally lazy), but with the help of the editor, Tim Dean, I managed to say one thing rather than…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2007
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid.
One thing that I came back fired up over are the unfinished projects I have running. So I intend to finish them. They are, in no particular order:
1. Denying that genes have information [heresy #1] Status: Written and needing to be submitted.
2. Denying that functions in biology exist outside models [heresy #2] Status: Written but badly in need of a rewrite.
3. Denying that essentialism ever existed in biology [#3. Four more and I get a free auto…
evolvingthoughts | July 30, 2007
Sorry to bother you all with internal Australian politics, but this has to be discussed. Now the minister for immigration is saying that the Australian Federal Police intercepted a chat room conversation in which Haneef was told to leave Australia by (they say) his cousins before his knowledge of the bombing plot was uncovered.
Kevin Andrews also says that critics are soft on terrorism. And here's the nub of the matter. We aren't soft on terrorism - that is a (excuse my French) fucking stupid thing to say. Does Andrews really believe we critics want a bombing in Sydney? We aren't soft on…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…
evolvingthoughts | July 12, 2007
It occurred to me as I was chatting to a friend (KiwiInOz) that I actually have a philosophical method. It comes as a surprise. I thought I just meandered along, but as I yet again did a semantic space diagram to outline the issues (in this case in biodiversity measures that my friend and I are working on) it hit me that this is my method - analysis of issues in terms of axes determined by the active variables in a given situation, discourse or debate.
This led me to think of why it is my method, though. And the answer is to do with the nature of explanation.
My first paper (1998) came…
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2007
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
A very thoughtful and interesting, dare I say almost philosophical, discussion of the Manichaean nature of the Bush Administration is in the present Salon here. A quote:
The power to order people detained and imprisoned based solely on accusation is one of the most extraordinary and tyrannical powers any political leader can hold. One of the core rights established against the British king by the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century was that the king could not order subjects imprisoned except upon a finding of guilt arrived at in accordance with legal process. The Military Commissions Act…
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…