Some of my recent talks 30 May 201222 Jun 2018 I just discovered SlideRocket, a Google app that displays slides, and so I thought I’d put up some of my talks. Here goes. I hope they work. This is a talk about whether God could create a world in which Darwinian accidents occur. It ended up as a paper in Zygon: This is a talk about the philosophical origins of biological essentialism. Several chapters and papers are coming out about this in various books and journals, and this will also become a later paper. This is a talk on changing how we look at the idea of biological species, in conjunction with Brent Mishler, director of the Berkeley Herbarium, which I gave to a botany conference late last year: And finally, a talk I gave with Neil Thomason and Lewis Murray on the evolution of argument maps, both recently and historically (I did the historical bits, of course): The transitions and animations are a bit screwed up, and some of the images didn’t come through, and of course you miss out on my handsome face, dulcet tones and witty repartee, but the gist is there. Enjoy. Epistemology Evolution History Logic and philosophy Philosophy Religion Science
Cognition 50 words for snow 3: what are phenomena? 27 Sep 20171 Mar 2019 Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena If experienced observers are trained to observe natural phenomena in their environment, pace the “interference” of cultural accidents, what is it they observe? As I mentioned before, we are not… Read More
History The first biological species concept 10 May 200918 Sep 2017 Before this text in 1686, the term species just meant some sort or kind of organism. It was a Latin word in ordinary use without much meaning in natural history, but then arguments began whether or not there were one or more species for this or that group, and so… Read More
Humor A cactus wearing a hat, and Jesus swordfighting 5 Apr 2010 You have undoubtedly read this already, because I am the last guy to find out about these things, but this is the exchange I wish I could have had with my kids’ school chaplain… [via Ed Yong’s tweets @edyong209] Read More
Though mind maps are ubiquitous and argument maps should therefore be an obvious idea, it took your post to prompt me to try doing them. Thanks. Used some freeware instead, however, in order to produce argument maps for an evolutionary paradox. Though the results are a bit primitive (might have been achieved with PowerPoint or the Open Office equivalent as well) they may nevertheless do the job of getting some philosopher of biology addressing the issue. P.S.: As my blog does not link back or I’m to stupid to know how to make it do that, here’s the link given the pedestrian way: Argument maps for the paradox of sex.
So far I’ve only watched the first one (intend to watch the others, but you know what Time can be like). Here are a few notes in response. * I find the Darwin quote on slide six nearly incomprehensible. It doesn’t help that English has changed since Darwin’s day (e.g. implicatures of the word “admit”) , but in the second half of the paragraph I really think Darwin was having a bad day and not writing clearly even by his own standards. * On the general subject of intelligent design vs theistic evolution, I take intelligent design to be a claim about evidence, whereas theistic evolution is a claim about the world. Therefore we can define four quadrants with acceptance or rejection of intelligent design along one axis and acceptance or rejection of theistic evolution along the other. For example, back when I was a Christian, I was a theistic evolutionist because I believed that God influenced evolution to some degree and used it as a method of creation, but I was never an intelligent design theorist because I would not have agreed that the complexity of biological organisms constitutes evidence for divine involvement. (My mother, on the other hand, would be both a theistic evolutionist and intelligent design theorist by this definition.) * Some theistic evolutionists might believe God micromanaged everything, others believe God only intervened in human evolution, and there are a variety of other positions. My own position as a Christian was that expecting to know precisely how much God intervened in natural history is itself somewhat heretical, as it isn’t something we as humans are entitled to be told, and not likely to be discoverable by rational enquiry. I might have suggested a lower bound (enough to ensure that something like humans evolved, capable of religion) and an upper bound (little enough to keep the fossil evidence consistent with purely naturalistic Darwinian evolution) but maintained an agnostic position between these. * Re slide 32 “tell your flocks”, that’s a very Catholic way of putting it, and my Protestant background makes me wince at it a little. Jesus allegedly described himself as a shepherd but there’s nothing in the book about authorising priests to do the same. * There are some bugs in the slideshow. I may have missed some things as a result of these.