Alexandre Girault, a maverick taxonomist.
Various “Religious Authorities” discuss whether evolution and faith are compatible. The only two who say no are the biblical literalist and the imam, both of whom strawman evolutionary theory. The Bahai position is not discernibly different from the Catholic.
The Unpublishable Philosopher has more to say on Midgley, making, en passant, a thoughtful comment about communication.
Steve Jones critiques Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. You have to love a review that begins with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Germany, who beat Australia 4:0, was beaten by Serbia 1:0. Heh. That’s not a link, but reflexive Schadenfreude. Feetball…
Friends don’t let friends run Windows [on a netbook].
Apparently the National Academy of Sciences is Atheist Dominated. This is because of corrupted mindsets or hard disks or something.
Reviewer 2, in my experience, is a philosopher and knows all about experimental design. They are therefore well qualified to tell me that the experiments I cite are flawed. My recent one: “no doubt the results here are a product of the order in which the questions were asked”. Right. If only they had you to advise them on methodology. They might have done something to avoid this problem. Like maybe vary the order in which the questions were asked. They could call it something fancy, like, I don’t know, counterbalancing. Oh wait.
Re the one about atheiwsts in the National Academy of Sciences…
(1) You shouldn’t look at that website; it’s bad for your blood pressure.
(2) The article starts with an alarming sign that the teaching of evolution isn’t all that’s involved: Since the NAS are evolutionistic atheists, the argumment seems to be, you shouldn’t listen to them about global warming and oppose the (inadequate, token) steps the Obama administration wants on that issue.
(3) More interestingly, they say:
“The NAS writers turn the time-tested scientific method on its head. Instead of beginning with a hypothesis, they begin with Darwinian evolution acclaimed as fact. Working backwards, against the grain of true science, they attempt to develop a theory to legitimize the “fact” of evolution.”
—-> Therre’s more tha a grain of truth here. Darwinism (to give the belief in evolution by natural selection a name) is more than a theory: it’s a framework that sets research agenda. (So, with a nod to the late T.S.K., we can speak of a “Darwinian paradigm”: precisely because it’s more than a theory, does more than a simple theory does in defining how the science of biology should be conducted.) It suggests questiona and research programs. A non-Darwinian would never be moved to ask how feathers could enhance the “fitness” of a non-volant theropod: the question (and the combination of experiment and theoretical activity devote to answering it) only arises because it is assumed at the outset that birds evolved from such critters. … Only thing I see wrong in the quoted passage is that this is a departure from accepted scientific method.
Wow. Human Events! I had subscribed to their e-mail updates for a while, but their weekly call for more subscribers because the liberals at the post office were raising their rates rapidly moved from amusing to increasingly tiresome.
@ Allen Hazen, pt. (3) [and everybody]:
I’m coming across something similar to your distinction right now in my own work (which is neither philosophical nor biological), and make the following distinction:
Evolutionary theory is the framework for making up hypotheses about organisms, environments, etc. to be tested; if the hypotheses agree with observation, and are thus validated, they in turn validate the theory; if not, the theory ought to be changed (or else it could be made more parsimonious).
Obviously in this scenario there are many evolutionary theories, depending on which hypothesis-generating (and hence potentially explanatory) paths for research projects they direct. That’s where things like *Darwinian* evolutionary theories etc. come in. These terms designate subtypes of the broader type/taxon of scientific theory.
Sounds sensible? (I’m not trying to dislodge well-established philosophy of biology here, just trying to find a way to describe the theory landscape of biology between about 1850 and 1910 in Germany.)
I was very favorably impressed by the opening sentence from BALPREET SINGH BOPARAI, especially considering that he “works in legal counsel”:
“Evolution, or the change over time in the genetic composition of populations, is a scientific reality.”
Ben Breuer–
I don’t know enough to be able to tell whether it’s sensible or not.
Certainly the “Darwinian” part is important: just thinking that change occurred doesn’t give you much guidance, but when you have at least the outlines of an idea about the mechanism (“natural selection”), then the framework of evolutionism can suggest questions & so shape research programs.
Obviously, when a proposed answer (“scenario”) turns out to agree with fossil (etc) evidence, it is confirmed and so, to some infinitesimal degree is the general theory of evolution. But my sense is that confirming that evolution by natural selection has occurred isn’t something most paleontologists are really interested in when they talk to other professionals: that’s “old business,” assumed as part of the framework of their work, and it’s the details that are really at issue.
Obviously, in writing for the public, the confirmation of evolutionary theory in general can be stressed. But the “conclusions” section of the paper in a technical journal won’t mention that.
Popper famously called evolution by natural selection a metaphysical research program, by which he meant that it guided research. I think he was quite wrong in that. There are levels of theories and models involved. We test one theory, say, a phylogenetic hypothesis, on the basis the hypothesis of common descent, and that on the basis of homology and development, and so on. Part of the trouble is that we fail to distinguish between the scope of the various theories that are under test.
I think that there is a reciprocal influence too, a kind of confirmation of the broader theory as more of the subsidiary hypotheses are found to be adequate.
“Germany, who beat Australia 4:0, was beaten by Serbia 1:0. Heh. That’s not a link, but reflexive Schadenfreude. Feetball…”
We both know what it means to be of a burning German heart. It’s best if it stops now. But it won’t. The English know this. Suffer collaboration.
It won’t stop until all the relevant national humiliations have been handed out. I hope Ghana wins.
Re: Popper and what guides…
I guess I tend to think the distinction between science and metaphysics is fuzzier than some people do: let a scientific theory get general enough and I’ll be happy to call it metaphysics.
But, yes, certainly, there are levels (and levels and levels) of theories involved. PART of what’s wrong with the way our creationist friends approach things is that they have an oversimplified idea about how science ought to work.
Thanks, Allen Hazen and JSW, and sorry for the delayed response.
On importance of mechanism: I’d say that “Darwinian” becomes important only once you have credibly established evolution (change of character states, or population composition, over time). So argument about the main mechanism was still raging in the later 1800s but the factuality [ugh] of temporal change of natural kinds established. (This itself had been argued in the early 1800s but pretty much laid to rest by Darwin.)
On Popper and levels: I wasn’t implying that evo is a “metaphysical research program,” more that at each historical stage of evo theory (stages here defined by successive confirmation through evidence) some confirmed hypotheses become basis for further hypothesizing. This seems more like the levels, or bases of different scope, that JSW was talking about. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of such levels when they’re historically unrooted. How well-defined are they?
[Unrelated related question, probably best for a different time: How historically dependent/rooted are taxonomic ranks? Can we associate, say, phyla with the Cambrian transition, and [talking out of my ... erm ...] classes (or classes in some phyla) with the Ordovician-Silurian extinction?]
On soccer: While I keep half an eye on the WorldCup, I cannot get too excited about whether or not any particular team wins. If the Germans play well and win, fine, but same goes for the Ghanaians.
Final remark: I usually keep track of the threads I commented on “by hand,” i.e., checking every day or so. Is there a means to do this via the browser, in my case Safari? (I don’t want to use e-mail notification.)
Ben Breuer–
Just about taxa: I think I have seen elsewhere the suggestion that it would be nice if distinctions at a certain level of the Linnean hierarchy corresponded to age of separation, but in practice the correlation is very very VERY poor. It may be approximate for lower levels (subspecies-species-genus) WITHIN some chosen taxon (rodentia, say), but in comparing unlikes with unlikes… I think there are insect GENERA that have been dated back to the Mesozoic, whereas it’s a debated question whether Mammalian ORDERS diverged that far back.
… My guess is that Phyla were named on some such basis as “these are so morphologically distinct from anything else that one guess about who they are most closely related to is as good as another!”
Allen Hazen on June 22:
Yeah, I suspect that iff there’s any correlation between taxonomic ranks and historical-period boundaries (extinctions) it would be per-supertaxon. So, genus x (in family blah, order bleh, class bloh, or somesuch) diverged from its sister genera at the same time as, say, class y (in superclass feh, subphylum fuh, or somesuch) did from its sisterclasses. I just wonder about the theoretical possibility. [I guess nothing beats being an amateur evolutionist, except of course data?]
On the origin of “phylum”: I think it’s a Haeckel term. Actually, a nice twist since it means something like a stem group, and Haeckel was trying to establish correspondences between larger groups of organisms (like bee castes in a bee colony) and larger groups of Linnean classes (like Cnidaria, all containing cnidocytes). [FWIW, I think those who defined these taxa used development as a guide.]
OK, back to Germany vs. Ghana now, and excuse my jabbering!