Some stuff while I’m in DC

So I have discovered that I’m not really a travel writer. I do not seem to get myself into the mindset of writing long, interesting (i.e., boring) posts while I’m overstimulated by tourism and meeting interesting people. Yesterday I met two more: Lynne Parenti, curator of fishes at the Smithsonian, and Kevin de Quieroz, curator and research herpetologist (he likes cold things). I don’t think I convinced either of any of my special heresies and obsessions, but I had a lovely lunch with Lynne and a good hour with Kevin.

Kevin thinks, probably rightly, that I misread his species concept in my book. I should revisit the literature, but the thing is, everyone I have spoken to who has a species conception thinks I have misread them, and I am not sure that I have. Of course, being at the edges of empire, I have not been involved in the verbal discussions that occur at conferences and in talks, that many who are engaged in the debate know directly or indirectly. I am restricted to what has been published, so that might account for it. I don’t know the tacit knowledge.

Beneath the fold are some links and short comments to keep you all awake until I can next bore you silly.

Here’s a paper in Science from April about using mathematical methods to get some “freeform laws” from data sets. I don’t know why my RSS reader just saw it today.

Olivier Rieppel in Cladistics has a paper responding to Thomas Reydon on the metaphysics of species. I am not sure that the use of terms like “natural kind”, “universal”, “individual”, “part-whole relation” and the like are all that helpful. Species are objects, and as objects they are like all other objects. What we need to know about them is what they are as objects – are they systems, are they phenomenal objects, or are they conveniences? Rieppel writes:

If ‘‘species’’ is taken to be a theoretical term it follows that the ontological status of species flows from evolutionary theory. This in turn requires evolutionary theory to make an ontological commitment to the world, for which reason it has to be allowed to inform our metaphysics about species

but that is, in my opinion, precisely the question: in what theoretical formal model are species theoretical terms? I hold they are not. Instead, when “species” is used, the objects are populations, genes, organisms, ecological roles, and the like. Species were identified and named before there were any biological theories to speak of. They are not theoretical terms.

Another study finds that in one species pair of Drosophilids, heterochromatin mismatches inhibit hybrid fetuses from developing. An interesting result, but NOT some globally generaliseable result that provides, as the headline has it, “A solution to Darwin’s ‘mystery of the mysteries’”. There are as many such solutions as there are mechanisms that inhibit hybridisation.

In an interesting study in social dominance psychology and physiology, it was noted that males who voted Republican in the American presidential elections last year had lowered testosterone levels after defeat (while the women who voted Republican did not). This matches many previous studies about social dominance causing lowered or raised testosterone levels in male primates. We are apes, after all. Sir Humphrey knew this, of course.