Posted in Philosophy, Evolution at 7:51 pm by nemo
Dennett and Wilson.
I think that philosophy of science has actually become much better. We had our early period, which was very programmatic and was quite prepared to just figure out where science should go and where it shouldn’t. And that was brave and foolhardy and it had some great moments, but people saw better, and now people in the philosophy of science have to be well-trained. You quoted Bertrand Russell. Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don’t know. I’m actually content with that, because I view philosophy as what you’re doing when you don’t know what the right questions are. And that’s not trivial. If you can help sort out the bafflement and controversy and smoke and battle, that’s work worth doing.
Science is what we know, philosophy what we don’t know. It therefore follows what philosophy doesn’t know science doesn’t know either.
You may want to disagree with this, but it probably isn’t too important for an entomologist to know the history of the field going back to the eighteenth century. But it really is important to know the history of philosophy if you’re going to do philosophy, and the reason is actually very simple. The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes, and the people that we study in the history of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle and Kant and all the rest—they were not dummies. They were really smart people and they made stunning errors. These are very tempting mistakes. So you really have to learn the history of philosophy if you’re going to do it well. Or you have to learn some of it. Because otherwise you just reinvent the wheel. You end up falling in the same old traps
What exactly are the tempting mistakes of Plato, Kant, and Aristotle?
Given the monumental blunder of Darwinian theory and its attendant positivistic methodology, the ‘mistakes’ of these three might actually give us the clue to where science is going wrong on evolution.
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
Permalink
Posted in Philosophy, Evolution at 7:44 pm by nemo
Wilson our synthesizer?
In 1998, Wilson came out with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, an attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge is intrinsically linked, both within the sciences and between science and the humanities. Reduced to such a summary it can seem obvious, but the idea of consilience is radical. Wilson’s vision imagines absolute unity through a glorious and harmonious logic between fields as seemingly dissociated as musicology and neuroscience, physics and consciousness, genetics and culture.
The notion of consilience seems great on paper, but of all the unifying perspectives that of Darwinism is the worst, because it takes a universal generalization of dubious empirical foundations and tries to rewrite everything in terms of that. It flunks the test almost at the first step.
This article is a considerable eulogy, has everyone forgotten the sociobiology wars?
Permalink
Posted in Evolution at 4:55 pm by nemo
RSR suffers from wishful thinking here, no doubt.
The Demise of Intelligent Design–Monday, October 30, 2006
When was it, exactly, that proponents of intelligent design gave up their larger ambitions?
But it would be nice if we could get back to the original Darwin debate: the problems with Neo-Darwinism, without the ID scam interjected into the argument.
Permalink
10.30.06
Posted in Science & Religion, Evolution at 8:18 pm by nemo
Dawkins on morality.
I am no fan of traditional religions, but the dilemma here is that the ‘religion’ of Darwinism is grotesquely worse, and totally unable to rightly account for issues of morality and ethics. The question of altruism, one of Dawkins’ starting points via Trivers, thence the whole absurdity of its phoney account of ethical evolution, is too much for Darwinists.
On this basis Dawkins gets into his indignant snit about the place of ethics in religion.
These tactics are a godsend for religionists and are disarming for true secular critics of religion.
And behind all this nonsense lies the well-concealed college course mentality laced with Nietzsche tidbits and a ‘genealogy of morals’ far worse than the myths of Sinai.
The worst thing about this is that the Dennett/Dawkins cult has managed to get away with the label of science and is granted the media power to simply repeat with challenge ad infinitum. The results are going to be a catastrophe as the reaction rises to counterattack this sophmoric howlerfest.
You have to wonder at all of this. Since the issue is science, scientists could at least sit down and try to study the historical phenomenon of religion. If you have any time left. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 7:27 pm by nemo
From Nature mag review of Dawkins’ God Delusion (from Evolutionblog)
Dawkins the preacher is less seductive. And make no mistake: this book is, for the most part, a well-referenced sermon. I just have no idea who the intended parishioners might be. In his preface, Dawkins claims he hopes to reach religious people who might have misgivings, either about the teachings of their faith or about the negative impact of religion in the modern world. For these people, Dawkins wants to demonstrate that atheism is “something to stand tall and be proud of”.
I found this slightly puzzling. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I am not particularly proud of it. Indeed, I am rarely, if ever, proud of not believing in things. More generally, I think the strategy of focusing on telling people what not to believe is less compelling than positively demonstrating how the wonders of nature can suggest a world without God that is nevertheless both complete and wonderful — an argument that Dawkins reserves for the final few pages of the book. And while there is a lot to complain about in the ubiquitous facile piety so prevalent today, complaining can nevertheless start to get tiresome. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (Headline, 1996) likewise too often mirrored Sagan’s frustration at all those who over many years have continued to confront him with their superstitions, but it also conveyed his sense of awe and wonder about nature in a way that Dawkins elsewhere has so craftily displayed.
Permalink
Posted in Science & Religion at 7:09 pm by nemo
Religion courses at Harvard: an initiative to broaden education to include some knowledge of religion is obviously going to backfire as the bogus ‘reason and faith’ substitute brings in religious indoctrination.
What should a properly educated college graduate of the early 21st century know?
A Harvard curriculum committee proposed an answer to that question this month, stating that, among other things, such a graduate should know “the role of religion in contemporary, historical, or future events — personal, cultural, national, or international.”
To that end, the committee recommended that every Harvard student be required, as part of his or her general education, to take one course in an area that the committee styled “Reason and Faith.”
Permalink
Posted in Evolution at 6:43 pm by nemo
Haldane on life. ID proponents continually coopt all the ‘intelligent dialectic’ of the Darwin debate with insinuations about design.
The question of the origin of life is thus made to seem a plus in their favor. But the mystery here deflates both sides. And Dembski’s universal probability bound demands a loud ‘So what?’. Highly improbable events clearly don’t fit into the natural selection rubric. It doesn’t follow they fit into the design rubric.
It is noteworthy that Haldane’s “minimum” of “500 bits” is the same value (but presumably independently arrived at) as Bill Dembski’s “universal probability bound” of 10-150, beyond which something would have to be the product of intelligent design (see his “Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information” and also `tagline’ quote below).
Now here is Denyse’s quote. This is another show-stopper for a naturalistic origin of life, showing that “half-live systems” (even if there were such things) would be worse than useless because they would not be “capable of reproduction” and would prematurely catalyse reaction which would then “have made conditions less favorable for the first living organisms”:
“I may be converted in the course of the meeting, but when writing this paper, I am by no means attracted by the theory of a period of many million years of biochemical evolution preceding the origin of life. It seems to me that any half-live systems-for example, catalysts releasing the energy of metastable molecules such as pyrophosphate or sugar-would merely have made conditions less favorable for the first living organisms, by which I mean the first system capable of reproduction. A protein capable of catalyzing such reactions would not multiply in consequence, any more than an enzyme does.” (Haldane, Ibid., p.15).
That is, “the first living organisms” i.e. “the first system capable of reproduction” would have to arise from non-living chemicals complete in one single-step jump, as Richard Dawkins himself admits in the quote below when he says that “life began when both DNA and its protein-based replication machinery spontaneously chanced to come into existence”!
Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol).
Permalink
Posted in Science & Religion, Evolution at 6:05 pm by nemo
Dawkins reviews:
The reviews of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion are coming in, and they are mostly negative. That was predictable. Everyone knows, after all, that Dawkins is just one of those fanatical, frothing at the mouth atheists, who doesn’t understand that religion is a beautiful and complex thing, despite the excesses of many of its practitioners. He’s one of those silly people who believe logic and reason should be brought to bear on “The God Question,” despite the fact that sophisticated theologians gave up that approach long ago.
Maybe there is a real problem with Dawkins’ approach to the question of religion. First as to atheism. Atheism is not exactly front page news any more. It arises in the Enlightenment as an honest critique of traditional religion. It is the peculiar way Darwinists have of associating that with Darwinian theory that spoils the whole game and produces the chronic ‘Dawkins delusion’, one shared, apparently, by a whole generation raised in dogmatic scientism.
These students have graduated into technical expertise and cultural idiocy, and this is producing the crisis that generates the comeback of traditional religion.
Beyond that, students of science are exceptionally tone-deaf to the complexities of religious history and create a straw man version of the subject they can reduce to nothing with silly Darwinian arguments or junk science about the ‘god gene’.
The clock is ticking as the prestige of science erodes around this morass of bad science thinking, mixed with stereotypes of theology.
Permalink
Posted in Evolution at 9:17 pm by nemo
Dawkins on Einstein
There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.
Maybe (pantheistic) God does not play dice in evolution? Maybe randomness doesn’t lie at the heart of evolution.
Permalink
Posted in Evolution at 8:51 pm by nemo
Science education cure for fundamentalism?
The problem here is that it was science education that lead to the resurgence of fundamentalist attacks on the education system.
And related to this is the fact that this ’science’ is bad science, a point noone who graduates from current ’science’ education on evolution, more like indoctrination, can seem to grasp.
Dawkins is right, however, when he insists that all of us need to be informed about standards of evidence and need to subject our positions on actions that affect others to the most rigorous and critical analysis of which we are capable.
What we need most is better science education so that voters can learn to make the most rational choices possible about policy and medicine, not a most-certainly futile attempt to stamp out religion. Done properly– emphasizing how science works and the way it weighs and rejects evidence– this will undermine credulity and unquestioning certainty, wherever they may appear. Done properly, this will allow believers to take the positive moral creeds and ethical codes of the great religions and apply them without succoring the fundamentalist absolutism that can cause such harm.
As Darwin himself put it, “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that directly arguing against Christianity and theism produces hardly any effect on the public and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science,”
Permalink
Posted in Evolution at 7:25 pm by nemo
Evidence for Id?:
Recently, an ID-friendly scientist assured me that intelligent design would easily be accepted if only the ID guys would come up with evidence. To my mind, that shows the difficulty people have in understanding what is at stake: the very question of what may count as evidence. Here is how I replied:
Bench science, like book editing, is independent of content under normal circumstances.
But as Thomas Kuhn points out in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms determine what counts as evidence.
The thinking of Kuhn is of little value here. We can’t invoke Kuhn to change the rules.
The plain fact of the matter is that all theories of evolution suffer from evidentiary limits. Examine ID, then Darwin’s natural selection (a design term!). Each is stuck with the problem of verifying complex transitions in deep time. There is no way out of this dilemma. Hence the temptation to propose a thesis according to one’s prior metaphysics.
In fact, some evidence would help to distinguish the variants of ID. Teleological processes in nature are bound to mimic design. Just because science rejects teleological thinking doesn’t mean a naturalistic account of ‘design’ is impossible. In fact the overall feeling of the situation strongly suggests it.
Permalink
« Previous entries