Mating ritual?

If David Barash’s series on the female orgasm showed anything, it is that when it comes to evolution it is human beings on people’s agendas. It always was this way. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an 18th-century evolutionist and he made it clear that it is Homo sapiens that counts.

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

In the Origin, Darwin said little about humans, but at the end there is no doubt who is a big (albeit unspoken) theme in the book, and in the Descent of Man published some 12 years later, we have a starring role. And coming do…

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I never saw or heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in person, but he–along with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – has been part of my life since I was a teenager. First on LP’s, then on tape, and more recently on CDs. He was born too young to be a real part of the Nazi shame; she unfortunately was seriously compromised. But as interpreters and performers of German vocal music, they were and are beyond compare. Above all the lieder and above all lieder the lieder of Schubert. I write with tears in my eyes as I listen once more to Der Winterabend and to Die Forelle and Der Erlkönig.

I do not believe in God or Heaven. It does not matter. We humans–we humans stained so deeply by original sin–have won. We have created such transcendent beauty that future promises are worthless. Why wait for eternity when this life of ours is touched with such greatness? I am truly grateful to these two great…

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NASA photo via Flickr/CC

My good friend Elliott Sober, perhaps today’s leading philosopher of science, is being roughed up by the New Atheists. Recently in a book, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?, and then in a lecture that he gave at the University of Chicago, Elliott argued that if mutations are guided by God down at the quantum level, science cannot lay a finger on this claim. I should say that I don’t think that Elliott thinks that this claim is true and also that it is not original with him. Physicist-theologian Robert J. Russell has been pushing something like this for some time now. Elliott is simply making a technical point. He wants to show that science is not all-embracing. There is room for claims of a non-scientific nature.

Jerry Coyne, the biologist, for one, and Jason…

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Some years after I first came to Canada in 1962, the country changed from using the Imperial system of measures – pounds, gallons, miles – to the metric system – grams, liters, and kilometers.  As you can imagine, there was lots of grumbling from older people, with one or two garages defying the law and refusing to change. Then, some years later, with a new party in power, a move was made to switch back to the Imperial system.

It couldn’t be done.  No one under 20 had the slightest idea what was being talked about.  And when they learned, they recoiled with horror.  Sixteen ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, and gosh knows what number of stone in a hundredweight.  Certainly not 10.  The move was quietly dropped and Canada measures things in the sensible way, like the rest of the world, with one notable exception.

History repeats itself.  For me, the most…

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Over the years, I have heard a lot of silly things said about Darwinian evolutionary theory and why people don’t accept it – that it’s a tautology, that it’s unfalsifiable, that it contradicts all religion, that it leads straight to Hitler, and so forth – but I think the prize for the barmiest has to be the claim that it just doesn’t tell a good story!

This seems to me to be such a daft idea that I had to double-check, although given what I have seen coming from my side of the campus in the past 20 years, I had a nasty suspicion that it had indeed been made. There it was, reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education no less. Apparently some chap who is into something called “narrative psychology” is moaning that “you can’t really feel anything” for natural selection. The Genesis story of creation, however, has everything – God, man, woman, nudity, and so forth…

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Probably not. But hey, what if they were. You have a problem with that? (Still at starpulse.com from New Line Cinema's "Mr. Woodcock")

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” This is the reported judgment, by the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, on my lifelong profession. It is a sentiment shared by other scientists, most recently the physicist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss. Taking extreme umbrage at a severely critical review of his most recent book by a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, he described his tormentor as “moronic” and lit into the whole area from which the negative judgment had come.

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that…

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Kuhn (photo at Wikipedia)

“History, if used as a depository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” This opening sentence, of one of the most important books of the twentieth century, is undoubtedly the reason why I emoted so irritably on reading my fellow philosopher Alex Rosenberg’s approving quotation of Henry Ford’s opinion that “history is bunk.”

The book of course is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and this year we are celebrating its 50th anniversary. I first read it in 1966, and I still remember how forcibly it struck me. Suddenly studying the nature of science had a whole new exciting dimension and I was not going to miss out on it. At once, I was led to reading…

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Right at the moment I am reading a very interesting book, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation, by a colleague, Amanda Porterfield. She is tackling a problem that has long puzzled me, how was it that a nation founded by deists (even those ostensibly Christian tended to avoid taking communion and that sort of thing) could become so fervently evangelical by, let us say, about 1840 (although in fact it happened earlier than that).

I will talk about the book itself at a later date, but now I want to puzzle about the hold that this idiosyncratic form of Protestantism still has on so many Americans. I am tempted to say simply that religion ruins everything. I know that that is not true. My Quaker childhood was surrounded by people who sincerely tried to do good because of their Christian faith. But when I see the nastiness – hostility to women, to gays and …

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user s_w_ellis)

In science, as I pointed out in my last piece, progress is the name of the game. What comes later is better than what comes before. Copernicus was right in a way that Ptolemy was not. Einstein was right and Newton was wrong. Darwin was right and the evolution deniers were wrong. And so the story goes. One interesting question provoked by my “Is Philosophy a Science?” series is about whether philosophy ever makes any progress. Do our thinking, our theories, get better? Or are we simply going around in circles, endlessly?

As I noted in my first piece on this topic, in a way the question is a bit unfair. Parts of philosophy do start to lend themselves to regular empirical inquiry and progress. At which point they usually branch off, forming disciplines of their own…

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Actually, I had two hypotheses, both of which started with the additional fact that, although 18th-century evolutionary speculation may have been impregnated with thoughts of progress, the same is not true of today’s professional evolutionary biology. If you go to a journal like Evolution, you simply don’t find speculations about monad to man and that sort of thing. More than that, evolutionists tend to be very jittery about notions of biological progress. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the idea: “a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history.”

So here were my two hypotheses. First, that over the 300-year history of evolutionary thought, the idea of progress got expelled from evolutionary theorizing. Why? A number of philosophers, notably the late Ernan McMullin (about…

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How can philosophy be done like a science? Again, obviously, I am going to rely on my own experience and I want to tell you about a project I had some 20 or more years ago. For us philosophers of science, the big problem back then was the extent to which science can be said to be a disinterested picture of objective reality and to what extent it is a “social construction,” an epiphenomenon of the culture or society (especially the values) of the day.

Karl Popper, in a felicitous phrase, referred to science as “knowledge without a knower,” meaning not that scientists don’t do the knowing but that science is value free. The anatomy or sexual orientation or religion or race of a scientist or whatever his/her culture is irrelevant to the science. The Nazis were not so much wrong as conceptually confused when they talked of Jewish science. Following Thomas Kuhn, and infused with …

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A couple of people have asked me to follow up on my “Is Philosophy a Science?” post, so here we go. In this one, I will try to show how I think science can inform and help solve philosophical problems. In the next, I will show how I think a scientific (or naturalistic) approach to philosophy can pay dividends. And then perhaps to finish, I will tackle the perennial question of whether philosophy, unlike science, never gets any sure answers or makes any progress.

For today, take ethics – moral philosophy. There are two big questions: What should I do? (This is known as substantive or normative ethics.) Why should I do what I should do? (Meta-ethics, to do with foundations.)

As far as substantive ethics is concerned, from David Hume via Charles Darwin, I argue that ultimately what we should do is what we feel we should do – there is no higher court of appeal – and what we…

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user Marco Raaphorst)

Is philosophy a science? A couple of my fellow philosophers have just been disagreeing on this issue. I am not surprised. It is a question that often comes up and there rarely is much agreement. For what it is worth, I don’t think philosophy is a science nor do I think it should aspire to be one. But the connections with science should be deep and influential.

The key figure is Aristotle, and specifically his Physics and his Metaphysics. The former deals with empirical matters – the nature of the universe – and is science. The latter deals with matters about science – the nature of causation – and is philosophy. For many years, no one took huge efforts to separate the two – the old name for science is “natural philosophy” (as opposed to the…

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"Just like last Easter, Zira. The cousins don't look at all happy to see us." (Photo by Flickr/CC user PopCultureGeek.com)

In 1981 I was living in Guelph, Ontario, a small town about 60 miles west of Toronto. In the middle of the year, I got a call from an attorney in New York City. He was working for a law firm assisting the American Civil Liberties Union. It was about to launch a challenge against a new law that had just been passed in Arkansas. The law required that teachers in public schools in the state, if teaching evolution, give also “balanced treatment” to something known as Creation Science, not discriminating against answers given on tests or other assignments.

Since Creation Science is Genesis taken literally, the ACLU was challenging the constitutionality of the law – they claimed…

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Today is Easter Monday, the last day of the Aldermaston March. This was a demonstration, in England, organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that ran from 1958 to 1963, protesting the nuclear arms race. It was a four-day event, and in the years from 1959 to 1962, the demonstrations I marched in, one walked from Aldermaston in Berkshire to Trafalgar Square in London, a distance of just over 50 miles. Starting on Good Friday, it was not a strenuous affair. I am not sure about the numbers, but it started with a few thousand and over its short life grew immensely. Indeed that was part of the reason why the event came to an end, because it just got too big for the organizers to handle.

The beginning point and the end point were both significant. Aldermaston was where the British nuclear weapons research was carried out. Trafalgar Square is just down the road from the Houses of…

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One of the big sporting events in Britain, like the (soccer) Cup Final and the (steeplechase) Grand National, is the annual Boat Race. This pits rowers from the two ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge for a twenty-minute competition on the Thames, the great river that flows through London. You don’t have to be at Oxford or Cambridge to find it thrilling and even though a grump like me rather deplores the quasi-professionalism – very few of the rowers are genuine British undergraduates, being rather hearties (enrolled in education diplomas and such things) pulled in from the US or the Colonies – it really is a bit of tradition we all enjoy thoroughly.

Until yesterday that was. At about the half-way point in this year’s competition, the two boats were almost neck and neck, suggesting that this really was going to be one of those struggles for the ages. Then it all came …

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Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play:
“Tiddely-om-pom-pom!”
So just let me be beside the seaside
I’ll be beside myself with glee.

In England, you are never very far from the sea; so, last week, having flown to the country of my birth to attend a conference, I took advantage of the opportunity to make a couple of trips to the coast. I should say that some of my happiest memories are, as a child, spending Augusts in Wales camping beside the sea. That it usually rained non-stop and that we kids would spend countless damp hours under canvas playing vingt-et-un for matchsticks in no way detracts from the memories. I do remember that the moment the sun came out we would dash down to the sands, get the most dreadful sun burn, and have to spend the next week being coated …

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The ruins of Rievaulx Abby in Yorkshire, torn apart by Thomas Cromwell and his minions as part of the destruction of Catholic England

I don’t think I ever met a Jew when I was a kid. If I did, I didn’t know it. It was not until I went away to (Quaker) boarding school as a teenager, where there were many Jews, that I first became aware of the casual anti-Semitism of the British middle-classes. Often combined, paradoxically, with a fanatical pro-Zionism. After Britain alone faced Hitler, we could empathize with the Jews surrounded by hostile Arabs.

Catholicism was another matter. Although Quakers preach tolerance and love and although my closest childhood friend was a Catholic – we still exchange birthday greetings and bemoan the fate of the Wolverhampton Wanderers – from the first, I…

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Ruse of the rutabagas

Sometimes in life you have to face up to uncomfortable truths. I realized last night, at supper with my wife Lizzie at a favorite little Mexican restaurant, that she really is not an enthusiast about vegetables. Carefully, she picked through the food on her plate, moving the green peppers to one side. What I had hitherto noted subconsciously came to the fore because, at lunch the day before, she had carefully picked through her salad, moving the tomatoes to one side.

I don’t mean that Lizzie hates all vegetables. She likes beans and loves asparagus. She is sound on peas. But after that, it is a bit downhill. Cabbage is not a favorite. Brussels sprouts are heartily loathed. Beets – well let’s just say that when I bring them home, I have to wait until she is out…

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Jerry Coyne is just about the most interesting evolutionist active today. He has done top-notch work on speciation (with his student Allen Orr), he has written devastating critiques of some of the most popular ideas in the field (notably the shifting balance theory of the late Sewall Wright), and more recently he has ventured into the public field with his terrific Why Evolution Is True.

Now he writes a blog of the same name, and almost every day he comments perceptively on some new finding or theory. He is an ardent Darwinian, thinking natural selection is the key to causal understanding, and I should say that his cool but highly informed common sense on these matters is altogether admirable. For instance, he recently wrote a piece on human races that struck me as balanced and sensitive, but at the same time fearless in going where the science leads.

Coyne has another string to…

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