Last week I quoted from a 19th century article by Chauncey Wright, mentor of the Harvard-based Metaphysical Club, concerning the beginnings of self-consciousness in humans. He compared it with flight in birds. I'll try to elucidate. "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one." The bracketing is mine, the parenthesis is Wright's. Our observing angel presumably is aware of mental activity in a range of animals -- stimulus is followed (often after some gap in time as if for deliberation) by response. Monkey sees some food out of reach. Monkey looks around, sees a long stick, uses it to extend his reach for the food. But then a particular "naked ape" appears who ha...
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In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year. It makes, I think, an impressive list. But it will naturally raise questions.... 1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36. Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole. 2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense? This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those ...
Yesterday, I offered my summary of two powerful-seeming arguments against mind-body dualism in any form. My plan was today, to give my reasons for concluding after a lot of deliberation on the point, that neither argument is as powerful as it appears -- and as it HAS appeared, historically, to many powerful minds from whom I have learned a great deal. But on further deliberation, that has come to seem too ambitious for a single blog post. I will wrote today about just the first of them ... here we go. About continuity. TL:DR version: The emergence of an intangible mind out of evolving life is not a violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree we actually need and (upon reflection) want such a principle. It is no more of a violation than a variety of other emergences of which we make no such commotion. One intriguing and I think under-noticed fact is that the argument from continuity against the development of an intangible min...
I admit I had a suspicion that I would complete and read over my master timeline and say "aaaaah." But the timeline is complete (see yesterday's posting) and what I feel now is mostly a sense of relief. No Big Zig-Zagging dialectic suggests itself, no from-status-to-contract big picture. No world cycle. No "aaaaaah." So is life just one damned thing after another? Maybe I should make up a timeline of the efforts to answer THAT question. For now I will just note a couple of obvious features of the Big Timeline: Events crowd together because of presentism. Early in the timeline, I skipped past millions of years from one post to the next -- then it was just thousands of years, then an approximately one-post-per-century pace. Finally it was a year-to-year listing. Of course I have several recent month-by -month timelines for recent years on this blog, but I decided not to include those. The impression conveyed by a sufficiently detached alien reading yesterday...
Basic timeline for the development of primates -- with highlights selected from an intentionally anthropocentrc point of view: up to three million years ago. The earliest primates, called the Plesiadapiformes, are said to have speciated out of the Euarchonta very soon after the dinosaur-eliminating Comet struck, about 66 million years ago (MA). Soon after (63 MA) the Plesiadapiformes differentiated into the so-called wet-nosed and the dry-nosed primates. We will ignore the wet-nosed in what follows. The dry nosed are represented on today's earth by both the Great Apes and us humans. One distinctive feature of the dry-nosed branching? It can't metabolize vitamin C. We, and millions of years of ancestors, have had to include fruits bearing that vitamin in our diets. We then skip forward to 30 MA. Around this time some of the dry-nosed primates made it to South America. Perhaps the area was connected with Africa here: but on one hypothesis that wouldn't have been necessary...
There was a time in the history of life on earth before predation. Scientists talk about an Ediacaran period in the history of our planet. It is named for the Ediacara hills in Australia, where some of the key fossils were found. Also, for the phonetically curious, the proper pronunciation is Ee-dee-ac-aran. Rhymes with Me - he- wrack -Iran. Anyway, the creatures of the Ediacaran did not eat each other. They were without eyes, claws, or antennae: no means for watching, seizing, or evading each other. Beginning around 635 million years ago, continuing until 542 million, Ediacaran biota had simple lives as they crawled along the sea floor, eating such organic matter ("the mat" as Peter Godfrey-Smith calls it) that had built up there. Eventually dying and contributing to that mat. Ediacaran biota did have nervous systems. The fact itself indicates that nervous systems aren't entirely about sensing and reacting to the outside. The biota didn't have to react to ...
Back in 2003, an intelligent-design advocate named Francis Beckwith wrote a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education, published by Rowman and Littlefield. Although Beckwith was clearly out of sympathy with Darwinism, the point of the book wasn't about biology. It was about the establishment clause of the first amendment of the Constitution. Beckwith's view was that "intelligent design" was an alternative scientific hypothesis, and that accordingly it is appropriate -- and not even remotely an official establishment of religion -- to teach that hypothesis as one distinct from Darwinism within public schools. That book might have gone unnoticed -- like lots of other books saying the same thing -- had it not been taken up by an enthusiastic review (technically a "book note,") in the Harvard Law Review for January 2004. The reviewer, one of the student editors of the HLR, was Lawrence VanDyke. The note, appearing in such a high-visibility periodical...
I've recently discovered a new phrase, the "Gish gallop." It seems to me to fill a valuable vocabulary gap in discussions of argumentative styles, fallacies, etc. So I'll preserve my discovery here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop The term refers to the debater's tactic of throwing out a lot of (individually weak) arguments in quick succession. It can be a devastating trick because it takes a lot less time to make any one claim than it does to do a careful dissection of its weakness. So, if I were arguing the "pro" side of the proposition, "do pots of gold exist at the end of rainbows," [a deliberately ridiculous example], and I and my opponent each had five minutes for an opening statement, I could say: 1) It is arrogant to claim that such pots of gold don't exist, since it is impossible to imagine that the 'gold deniers' have personally visited both ends of any large percentage of rainbows; 2) something ha...
There is a phenomenon much discussed among biologists called "genetic load." It refers to the reduction in the mean fitness of a population caused by some genetic process. Perhaps most important is mutation genetic load Most mutations are deleterious, even if only slightly, and over geological time the effect on a gene line of the build-up of a lot of these mutations along the strands of DNA becomes serious. You might consider genetic load the biological equivalent of entropy. A population can only tolerate a certain load before going extinct, though it is difficult to quantify load and that maximum acceptable level. On a prior principles, there ought to be a highest sustainable level of mutation load. Some creationists (intelligent-design theorists, if you prefer) contend that the deleterious nature of most mutations, and thus this "load," is fatal to this damned Darwinian nonsense. They see "Darwinism" as the position that life has been gradual...
A fellow who shall remain anonymous here, whom I encountered on Facebook, made what appears to have been a theistic argument about the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. I reproduce it in full below. Doesn't it strike you as ridiculously unlikely that that asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago was so incredibly (and unlikely) propitious, fortunate and lucky for humanity, that it was ENTIRELY NATURALLY OCCURRING?....To me, it screams, "ARTIFICE!!!". Many other posters replied. Since this is my blog dammit, I'll reproduce only my own reply to that. (Recall that I'm a theist, though not one who allows that fact to drug my critical reasoning faculties entirely). Are you trying to use this as an argument for a supernatural designer and/or providential force? Or an idle statistical exercise? Or something else (maybe involving space aliens treating earth as a protected reserve or laboratory?) If this is intended as an argument for theism, a...
A recent anthology by philosophers of science challenging the "modern synthesis" in evolution draws an intelligent review from NDPR, here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/challenging-the-modern-synthesis-adaptation-development-and-inheritanc/ What had to be brought together was some sort of Darwinian account of evolution on the one hand and Me ndelian genetics on the other. The late 1930s and early 1940s were key, and the gelling of the synthesis involved a seminal book by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, and another by Ernst Mayr in 1942 The term "modern synthesis" was attached to such work in the subtitle of a book by Julian Huxley, also in 1942. I'll quote the review directly for some institutional history: During this period significant institution building was taking place, coupled with theoretically significant gate-keeping. The Committee on Common Problems of Genetics, Paleontology, and Systematics, supported by a United States National Res...
As I said in yesterday's entry, Wade argues that the human race has continued to evolve subsequent to its spread across the eastern hemisphere. When it had spread, it was in effect divided into three habitats: Africa, east Asia, and 'the rest,' that is, all Eurasia west of the Himalayas. The geographical barriers were great enough to make further evolutionary (genetic) change a matter of divergence. From this situation arose distinctions among races/subspecies that are not "social constructs," but genetic facts. As the result of a period of climate change and melting ice caps, rising sea levels cut Australia off from East Asia, though allowing for a lot of "stepping stones" between. This allowed for the divergent development of the Aborigine people of Australia. Later, around 15,000 years ago, the northernmost east Asians, Siberians, crossed into the Americas. Some genetic divergence has arisen subsequent to that crossing, too. Thus, by the time...
My recent reading has included A Troublesome Inheritance (2014) by Nicholas Wade. Wade is an experienced science journalist -- he is a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, was deputy editor of Nature , and before going freelance he was both a reporter and an editor at The New York Times, where he wrote frequently about scientific and environmental matters. His book has the subtitle "Genes, Race, and Human History," which suffices to reveal how fraught is the subject matter. The point he wants to make is that biological evolution continues to change the human genome, and does so at time scales which are relevant to an understanding of history, not just dim pre-history. Evolution by natural selection isn't just about the fossil "Lucy" and her peers. It's about the fellow or gal in the mirror this morning. Evolutionary psychologists, he says, commonly "teach that the human mind is adapted to the conditions that prevailed at the end of the...