Darwinism results 5 May 20145 May 2014 Here are the results of the survey. Since we had such a small response size (n=104) I do not know what can be taken from this. The results were pretty much as I expected – Selection is the main, but not only, key idea of Darwinism, a substantial minority think Darwinism does not exclude religion (even though close to all were not religious), 40% or so include genetic drift under “Darwinism”, but most think it means “natural selection” overall. Comments? 2. Age of respondent Evolution Philosophy
Biology Book review: Understanding Evolution 15 Apr 201415 Apr 2014 I posted this on Panda’s Thumb, but I thought I would repeat it here. I occasionally get books for review unsolicited, and many of them are not worth noticing. However, Kostas Kampourakis’ Understanding Evolution is a wonderful resource for students of all kinds, including biology students. Kampourakis, a philosopher at Geneva, has… Read More
Cognition Are emotions 2D? 7 Oct 20137 Oct 2013 I recently became aware that there is a new development in emotion classification. Previously, as far as I knew, emotions were thought to be human universals, give or take some variation (such as the emotion “metagu” among the Ifaluk islanders, see Linquist 2007) and researchers like Paul Ekman, who works as… Read More
Epistemology On the suspension of belief and disbelief 9 Nov 201127 Nov 2011 I have often addressed the distinction between atheism and agnosticism but I haven’t said a lot about what agnosticism involves, apart from it being a suspension of judgement about belief claims. So a few remarks are in order, prompted (but probably misreading) a recent paper by Jane Friedman, “Rational Agnosticism… Read More
Question 8 answers are so weird. Over 40% does not think that adaptationism is a key idea of Darwinism?! Adaptation is a key idea of natural selection. Does adaptationism mean something else than adaptation, perhaps?
Or there may have been varying ideas, including none at all, about “adaptationism”. I’m projecting here, I suppose. I know what adaptation means, or think I do; but I’m not anywhere near so confident when it’s an -ism. I tend to see the latter, because of a certain amount of usage I’ve seen, as a pejorative applied by some people whom the world would see as Darwinists to Those Other Guys (whom the world would also see as Darwinists) who consider adaptation all-important in evolution (ignoring genetic drift and cockeyed spandrels and so on). So, anybody who perceives the word in this way, if there is anybody, would see the question as not asking whether adaptation in an essential point in evolution but rather whether one agrees with the critique I tried to describe here.
The most natural interpretation of “adaptation” as a word in English is as an active process. But natural selection produces adaptedness of species by a passive process in which no individual or gene is deliberately adapting. So until someone defines it otherwise, I would say that the most natural interpretation of “adaptationism’ is as another word for Lamarkianism.
I would have said “Common descent with modification” but even after the bug with the “Other” option was (mostly) fixed, I still wasn’t able to use that for #6, so I chose “Natural selection”. As for the ” correct answers” – I’d be interested to know who you think best represent evolution, John. I’m not familiar with several of the names, so I (think I) chose Ernst Mayr.