Species and systematics
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2009Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is often criticised for his racial classification and supposed racism, but in this work, published in 1775, he not only argues for the unity of the human species, but in other passages for their general equality of intelligence, contrary to the use his ideas were later put to.
And now we must come more closely to the principal argument of our dissertation, which is concerned with this question; Are men, and have the men of all times and of every race been of one and the same, or clearly of more than one species? A question much discussed in these days, but so far…
evolvingthoughts | March 18, 2009Most bloggers know that it is hard to write interesting entries (curse PZ Mnhyrs!), but just occasionally, one writes itself.
In one day we get three items about taxonomy: one about real taxonomic disagreement, over whether whales are more closely related to hippos (the whippo hypothesis) than either are to other groups; one about a self-publishing snake [oil] researcher who is meeting the criteria of the ICZN for published species names, although his work is highly suspect, and one on how the UK government has banned Councils from using a bunch of obfuscatory terms, including "systematics"…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2009Homer: "Oh, I just love it here! So many things, and so many things of each thing!"
From here (go look!) via here.
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2009A while back I excerpted some Whewell on classification by types. Here is John Stuart Mill disagreeing with him, and, I think, starting off the modern literature on natural kinds.
Kinds are Classes between which there is an impassable barrier; and what we have to seek is, marks whereby we may determine on which side of the barrier an object takes its place. The characters which will best do this should be chosen: if they are also important in themselves, so much the better. When we have selected the characters, we parcel out the objects according to those characters, and not, I conceive,…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2009Taxonomy - the science of classifying organisms into putatively natural groups - is often treated as a kind of necessary bit of paperwork without much theoretical import by some biologists. Others think it is the single most important thing to do, usually justifying it in terms of conservation biology, but sometimes in terms of foundational knowledge. One thing that has become clear to me is exactly how foundational taxonomy is. Now, historian Polly Winsor has published a paper in the leading taxonomic journal, appropriately named Taxon, in which she argues, I believe correctly, that Darwin's…
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2009Archetype is a blog on stuff I like, including taxonomy and entomology. It's by Roberto Keller, a graduate of AMNH and Cornell. Go check it out. Some nice stuff on homologies in insects.
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2009Darwin's Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as "Darwin's theory". But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection.
First off, let's say this again: Darwin did not think that evolution was due to chance. His mechanism of evolution was not "random chance", as Behe and others have asserted. He believed that variation was not correlated with fitness, yes, and occurred in ways that are statistically distributed (a conception not available until Galton came up with the…
evolvingthoughts | March 1, 2009William Smellie wrote The Philosophy of Natural History in 1791, and it remained in print for over a century. It's a lovely and explicit expression of the Great Chain of Being view that all things grade insensibly from simple to perfect, and all classifications are arbitrary. This was effectively the last time in which someone could argue that from within natural history itself. I transcribe the whole chapter below the fold (it's a great way to engage the text in detail):
From Smellie, William. 1791. The philosophy of natural history. Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, pp463-469.
CHAPTER XXII.
Of…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2009This is a kind of note to myself, an aide memoire to remind me of the fact that much of the modern narrative about classification in biology before Darwin is not correct. It's also interesting that Whewell defines systematics, but most interesting is the reinforcement of the prior note that Whewell did not support essentialism. Elsewhere, in the History, he famously said that species do not transmute because they have a real existence in nature - but in context he means that they are adapted, and if they varied would cease to be. Again, no mention of essentialism. Whewell is turning out to be…
evolvingthoughts | February 19, 2009This myth has more to do with what people thought their own views contrasted to, than anything Darwin said, but like all myths, there's a hint of truth underlying it.
The problem with this myth is the ambiguity of the term "gradual". It is a weasel word, which can mean one thing at one point and another when the first meaning has no purchase. This is referred to the fallacy of ambiguity in logic: when attacking terms in science, one must make sure the terms stay the same form beginning to end.
"Gradual" can mean one or more of the following things:
Steady: the rate of change is constant…
evolvingthoughts | February 17, 2009Once upon a time, I made mention, simply a mention, of a paper by one Matts Envall, which I said I would later comment on. I did so because a friend of mine, Malte Ebach, told me about him and the paper. I have yet to appropriately thank Malte. My gratitude involves a water balloon, I think.
This alone was the trigger for Envall to come along to my blog and start comment bombing. I have in my spam folder over 350 comments, most of which are cut and paste. Independently of his views, of which more anon, his behaviour - spamming, using fake email addresses and changing IP numbers to avoid bans…
evolvingthoughts | February 10, 2009We are going to hear a lot about Darwin this year, especially this month for his birthday (happy 200th, Chas. You don’t look a day over 150) and in November for the sesquicentenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. And you will hear or read repetitions of a number of common myths about Darwin’s ideas and theories. I thought, being a fecal disturber, that I would try to clarify one of these below the fold, in celebration of his birthday. I'll do the others when I can. If you can think of any more, let me know.
Myth 1: Darwin did not believe in the reality of species
Myth 2:…
evolvingthoughts | February 3, 2009
"Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution" (Mark S. Blumberg)
This book came to me well recommended, and as far as the content goes, I am very impressed. The writing style, however, and the intended audience, are at odds with each other.
Blumberg is a developmental biologist who has a real grasp of the topic, is enthusiastic about it, and has a clear target in his sights. That target is sometimes misleadingly called "The Modern Synthesis", although a better term might be something like "gene centrism"; the view often expressed in words like "genes are the…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have…
evolvingthoughts | January 20, 2009From Evolution: Education and Outreach comes a nice introduction to the concept of homology.
Late note: OK, not so good. I saw only the cute pix, and presumed the author understood paraphyly. But as I didn't have an entirely functional computer at the time I leapt in too soon. See Malte Ebach's and David Williams' takedown here. Their point is that paraphyletic groups are formed by what hasn't evolved, and so they are fundamentally antievolutionary groupings.
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009One of the enduring mistakes made in science and philosophy is to confuse how things seem with how they are. In biology, the conjunction "pattern and process" has been around for decades, at least since 1947 in ecology, when Alex Watt used it as a title for an essay on plant communities. In 1967, Terrell Hamilton published his Process and pattern in evolution, and the phrase sort of took off from there. But patterns are relationships that are salient to the observer, while processes account for the patterns, and many other kinds as well. In the ontology of biology, it is common for theorists…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
evolvingthoughts | January 7, 2009I'm away from what serves as my computer these days for a while - off to Sydney to find a place to live. Also, the Seed Masters (whom I for one welcome) are upgrading Moveable Type from 3 to 4, so we can't blog for a few days anyway. But I would like to announce that my paper with Gareth J. Nelson on a possible precursor to punctuated equilibrium and the biological species concept, Pierre Trémaux, has been published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. The full details are:
Wilkins, John S., and Gareth J. Nelson. 2008. Trémaux on species: A theory of allopatric…
evolvingthoughts | January 6, 2009I make no secret that I admire Darwin as a historical figure very much, but I recently submitted a paper for an open access journal for science teachers at secondary level named Resonance, entitled "Not Saint Darwin". I was motivated by some of the rather uncritical, unhistorical and unnecessary examples of Darwin worship, and its obverse, Darwin demonisation. Here are some examples.
Darwin worship:
Charles Darwin was crazy about dinosaurs (MSNBC) [He also liked roast beef]
Yale Center for British Art to Present Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (Artdaily.org…
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2009I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism
Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners
Why are there still monkeys?
Can a Christian accept natural selection as true?
Does religion evolve?
The heat of religion
The religious we have always with us
Agriculture and the rise of religion
The origins of agriculture now extended
Darwin, God and…