Short sharp definitions

Comments (32)

1. Biology is the study of the universal common ancestor and all its descendants.

   Right there your presuppositions are showing. Biology is the classification of the living part of God’s creation. Evolution and the presupposed common ancestor thus are not part of biology. QED. Next time I’ll get snarky with you godless types. You’ve been warned.

   How about this?
   Procrastination, because only fools rush in.

   1. Not wishing to split hairs, but there was almost certainly biology around before the universal common ancestor (assuming you mean the most recent one). And doesn’t the definition of the universal common ancestor then create problems, if you are going to define it without using the concept of biology?

      1. Actually, ignore my first point: it’s bollocks. But my second one stands.

2. Einstein, I think, said that if you can’t explain it in simple words you don’t understand it

   That has the ring of truth to me. But so does this:
   If you can explain it in simple words, you don’t understand it.

3. Einstein, I think, said that if you can’t explain it in simple words you don’t understand it,…

   I’ve seen something similar attributed to Richard Feynman, to whit: “If you can’t explain your research to your grandmother, then you don’t understand it yourself.”

4. Science is the attempt to forestall surprising experiences with calculations.

   Mathematics is the art of finding the least obvious necessary conclusions.

   1. Oh I like!

5. Modeling on a definition for my own field*:

   Biology is the study of what scientists call life and its modes. [“Mode” leaves open interpretation as “processes,” e.g., inheritance/evolution/digestion, or their entities, like species, organisms, biochemical etc. Life is of course a bit broad, too. 🙂 Boundary issues rear their head, but that should keep the definition flexible.]
   Science: explaining phenomena in the most cohesive and comprehensive way allowed by their diligent observation. [Observation, by oneself and others, is the critical limit, with comprehensiveness and logical coherence necessarily lagging.]
   Mathematics: I like snarkyxanf’s, perhaps with a “logically” between “obvious” and “necessary.” Obviously, math does not have to worry about observation so much.
   Philosophy: the detection and evaluation of concepts useful for thinking.

   I didn’t count my characters. I guess the usefulness of these types of definitions would be their versatility in expanding them (and expounding upon them). Non?

   *Musicology is the study of what humans call music and musical, and why that is so. [Non-musicologists, feel like offering a definition? And sorry if this drags the thread off topic.]

6. Philosophy:
   So many Truths,
   Such little merit.

   Cynical, moi?

7. An old joke, I know:

   Psychology: the organised study of psychology undergraduates.

8. I’ve been following your posts in an RSS feed and had not visited the site itself in a while, so I don’t know when you changed the page design, but I think the new design (pink background, green logo) is hideous.

   1. Yeah. How’s a lemon background look?

      1. It’s an improvement over the pink, but I still think the old design was more elegant.

      2. How’s that banner? A bit more textured I think.

      3. Yes, I think the picture banner looks much better. However, the ape silhouette on the right seems not to belong there: it does not clearly belong either with the background or with the lettering. When I started to write this comment, you had your title in two places—within the banner and above it. I was going to recommend deleting the plain lettered version above it and moving the motto or whatever it is called below the banner; but at the moment you seem to have deleted the plain lettering altogether. I will only add that I think that the menu would look better below the banner.

         1. I’ve pretty much exhausted my ability to tweak this. The menu has to be where it is; I have no access to that to date. And I wanted the ape to look out of place: he’s the ghost in the natural historical machine (i.e., the philosopher whose thoughts are evolving). I can do without the motto: it’s in the window title anyway.

9. Regarding the new layout, I don’t mind the colour, but is there any rhyme or reason to the order of widgets in the right sidebar?

   In general, I notice that widgets pertaining to “stuff on this blog” are near the top of the right sidebar, and widgets pertaining to “stuff elsewhere” are near the bottom. But in that case, the “social networking” widget should be further down, at least below the archives/categories/stats widgets. (I’d suggest putting it at the very bottom, because – being more-or-less static – it’s not a widget people will often want to scroll down and check for updates in.)

   I’d be happier if the “recent comments” widget were nearer the top, because I routinely check it to see if you’ve posted a comment on one of your own threads recently (believe it or not these are often worth reading). This is easier if I don’t have to scroll down so far. Maybe either the comment policy could go underneath the recent comments, or the “recent posts” widget could come down a couple of notches. (Or be removed. For my part, I find “recent posts” one of the least useful widgets in any blog, because I figure people can look at the main column to learn what posts are recent.)

10. Your command is my wish. Better?
    Wordpress changed the theme and it opened up a whole lot of options, so I’m playing.

    1. Yeah, I like that ordering.

       BTW, thanks for the fun I had the other week reading all the blogs in your blogroll in search of new blogs to add to my own. Ended up pinching The Thinking Meat Project.

11. To grasp philosophy, learn its vocabulary. Especially words like is, of, and for.

    1. “Philosophy” is a use-mention distinction?

12. This lemon-colour background is extremely irritating and tiring. Can you change that please?

    Flippant content: Philosophy tries to clean up other disciplines’ messes without awareness of its own.

    1. Adult Child, there have been several changes in the page color and other elements in recent hours. See my exchange with John, above.

13. Easier to read. Well done.

14. philosophy = love of wisdom
    (duh)

15. Science is the attempt to accurate predict the future and, so, to learn what is and what was.

    Philosophy is the study of about and is.

16. “Biology is the study of the universal common ancestor and all its descendants.”

    I think that this is too narrow. I’m guessing that you limit this to the UCA because there is no way to know anything about separate occurrences of life (if they ever existed). I don’t think that biology is so limited.

    Here’s my take. Biology studies a lot of topics. Some topics can be studied thoroughly, others can only be studied superficially. Existing life is amenable to thorough study — let’s set this as the gold standard for “strong biology” and give it a value of “1” (strongest possible biology). We can make inferences about historical life forms — but we can’t study them to the same extent that we can study existing life… so the study of historical life-forms is weaker, let’s say our study of recent ancestors has a strength of 0.9 (based on the study of their descendants), but our study of the LUCA is very weak — a strength of 0.000001. You may think that the study of anything prior to LUCA has a strength of 0, since we cannot use comparative techniques to infer the physiology of those organisms.

    However, this is where systems biology comes in — in a very crude example, we look at the functional relationship between proteins and RNA and infer that RNA catalysis predated the genetic system that we see today. More sophisticated studies examine theoretical issues of what sort of activities are necessary or sufficient to create a living organism (template replication, cell integrity, metabolism, etc). This culminates in attempts to create artificial life, or identify life on other planets.

    Just as there is a general theory of chemistry that applies to molecules that we have yet to observe (perhaps on other planets), I believe that there can/will be a theory of life that is more fundamental than just the life that we happen to see.

    So, are Artificial Life and Xenobiology not really biology?

    1. Because whatever you study when you study xenobiology or AI, it is not the study of the historical object that we call biology. Life is, as I am fond of saying, what physics does on the outer shell of one planet on Wednesdays. The general processes and properties of life have a name already: chemistry and physics. If something evolved (say, using methane and ammonia) on a cold planet somewhere that reproduced, we might call it “life” in an honorary sense, but not Life in the sense of being connected to all living things here on earth. Life as a proper name is a historical individual on earth only.

       AI is not life for several reasons, but the most important is that the sense of “reproduction” here is entirely abstract. What evolves in Avida or Tierra are abstract patterns, not physical reproducers.

       1. By “artificial life”, I mean the attempts to create molecular systems with the basic properties of life, such as J. W. Szostak’s work.

          http://eurovision3.feedroom.com/?fr_story=eba2b8c450cea2bc4ecbd73bdd2046b5173e2a29&rf=bm&skin=showcase

          The work at the Venter Institute approaches artificial life from the opposite direction (I’m not saying that they have created artificial life, or are even close to it).

          Computer simulations help to build up the theory that differentiates life from all other chemical reactions.

17. I think simple is best, for papers. I can always remeber the first anthropology paper my early med. tutor gave me it concerned segmentary lineage systems.

    When he asked how I got on, a said fine once I had translated it, why the hell do they write like that?

    His response was “because they like to pretend it’s a science”.

    Anthropology Robin Fox said was a subject that often mistakes terminology for thought. I would agree in many cases. I would hope to avoid the language of Social science at all costs.

18. A Science is any teachable art of making accurate predictions.

    Philosophy is the art of explaining how the last person who said exactly the same thing got it wrong.

    Religion: Large scale manifestation of human drive to identify domains of trust by doing silly things together.

19. Anthropology is Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz

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