Lynch’s challenge to the Orang crowd 7 Jul 2009 Further to the claim I mentioned a while back, on orangutans being the closest species to humans, not chimps, John Lynch has a post up on the phylogeny of ERV sequences in the great apes which show, independently of the methods that Grehan and Schwartz criticised. He asks how they might respond. Allow me to play devil’s advocate: Endogenous retroviral insertion is not constrained by phylogeny, as studies of host race parasites has shown. So ya boo sucks. Of course I don’t believe this for a minute, but I can see how this is going to go. It’s another Birds Are Not Dinosaurs… Evolution Systematics
Ethics and Moral Philosophy Morality and evolution 2: Moral facts 1 May 201422 May 2014 [Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] In a forthcoming paper, “Evolution and Moral Realism”, Kim Sterelny and Ben Fraser, of the Australian National University, have argued that there can be moral facts that evolution by selection tracks. Their argument is that moral reasoning is complex, and relies upon rapid judgements (what Daniel… Read More
Evolution On the origins of creativity 25 Sep 2010 I’m not a very creative guy. I had an idea back in the 1970s, but I managed not to do anything about it in time for someone else to do something with an almost identical idea. I think I dodged a bullet: once you come up with one great idea,… Read More
Cognition Eww, I stepped in some evolutionary psychology and other crap 4 Dec 201218 Sep 2017 *Sigh* I try and try to stay out of the muck, but they keep pulling me back in! I saw what I thought was a careful and rather overly-documented critique by Edward Clint of a talk by Rebecca Watson against evolutionary psychology (EP). It was full of references and arguments, devoid… Read More
You could at least have the decency to link to my post 🙂 Actually, you could also have the decency to explain why the Devil’s Advocate position is wrong 🙂 I’ll stop grousing now.
Oops. Fixed now. Actually there doesn’t seem to me to be a general argument why the Devil’s Advocate position is wrong. It’s a matter of specific details, like why we would think that erv sequences are in general more likely to be apomorphies than homoplasies, and so it doesn’t actually have a knockdown (or rather, no more than the use of traditional morphology and molecular data would knock it down). I find that curious.
It would have made Robert Wokler rather happy. He had particular views about the Orang in the enlightenment.