As soon as somebody asks the question “what is a ____?” we get into trouble. Not because we do not know about the thing in the blank, but because we tend to have the wrong idea about how to answer that question. Since the Greeks, the general feeling is that to answer a question about such matters, one must define the shared and unique features of the type of thing. Continue reading “What is special about humans?”
Good faith, bad faith and no faith in reasoning
We are hearing a lot of calls for there to be public debates with climate deniers, the alt-right (that is, modern fascists), creationists and antivaxxers, and this has led to people marking the so-called “paradox of tolerance” named by Karl Popper in his epochal 1945 Open Society and its Enemies: Continue reading “Good faith, bad faith and no faith in reasoning”
The wealthy are often sociopathic. Why?
I have been encountering, in these days of political “incorrectness” (i.e., bastardry), more and more well-to-do folk who treat other folk as if they were lesser beings. Ranging from stepping over homeless people (literally) to failing to give way when you drive a Korean car and they a European one (or some varieties of Japanese).
What was Darwin’s Origin actually called
So, I got caught parroting half-remembered factoids, to Down House no less, that the Origin dropped the “On” from the start of the title with the fourth edition. In my defence, I was making use of Darwin Online, the Cambridge University site that collates all of Darwin’s publications and a whole lot more, in their list of editions of the Origin in English. So I got called out, and rightly so. If you’re going to be a pedant, at least be an accurate one.
Superstition and the fossil record
Superstition is not without value. Generally held beliefs give apparent order and coherence to human communities, qualities that are valued by some persons, especially those with a vested interest in the order and coherence that might prevail during a certain era of human history. Without apparent order and coherence, there would be no conventional wisdom, and no place for professors of it and the academic institutions that hire them to profess it. Whatever else they do, paradigms in Kuhn’s sense function as superstitions within the scientific community These superstitions, in their guise as conventional scientific wisdom, Singer (1959:125) recognizes, in more colorful terms, as “Idols of the Academy“: “Their worship involves the fallacy of supposing that a blind though learned rule can take the place of judgement.” Within the scientific community concerned with phylogenetic investigation the fossil record has often been, and still is, worshipped as an Idol of the Academy. But, like all Idols, it is vulnerable to criticism, falsification, and eventual demise. Before it can undergo that process, however, it must be framed in a rational form, as an “argument”; hence the “paleontological argument.”
In its most general form, the paleontological argument holds that the fossil record shows the course of evolution because it shows actual ancestor–descendant sequences (actual phylogenies). This, most general, form of the argument has been widely discussed of late, and it is generally conceded to be fallacious, that is, generally falsified.
Nelson, Gareth J. 1978. “Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Paleontology, and the Biogenetic Law.” Systematic Zoology 27: 324–345.
In defence of taxonomists [plus ça change]
I sympathize with the physiologist or ecologist, who after he has written a luminous paper on a Cratoegus or Viola, or Rosa, or Opuntia, endeavors to ascertain the proper name for his plant; but I do not sympathize with his objurgations against the whole tribe of species makers. There is a deal of pseudo science, unripe science—were it not undignified I would characterize some of it by an expressive monosyllabic word suggesting decomposition—published about species by the taxonomists, but I suspect that there is also a large deal of like obnoxious material lying at the doors of the physiologists and ecologists and morphologists. But that fact does not make taxonomy or ecology anything less of a science, nor the work of able men in either less valuable. I am a little weary of hearing from narrow specialists in other departments of biology constant condensation of the taxonomist, and I have been hearing such for the past fifteen years from men who should know better.
“What is a Species?”, Samuel W. Williston, 1908. The American Naturalist, Volume 42 (495), 184-194.
Launching Species
12 Days to Species publication
An Agnostic’s Apology
From Sir Leslie Stephen’s 1903 book. “Apology” here means defence (from apologia).
AN AGNOSTICS APOLOGY
Religious exceptionalism is undemocratic
This is my submission to the government’s “review”. As usual, I get contrarian. Below the fold…
Continue reading “Religious exceptionalism is undemocratic”