Elliott Sober Quotes
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Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.
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The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.
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I have spent a lot of time arguing that the theory of group selection is not the stupid, pernicious doctrine that many biologists once claimed it to be. The theory is not just conceptually coherent; there are adaptations out there in nature (like reduced virulence in some viruses) that evolved because there was group selection.
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Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.
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What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God’s existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument.
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The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.
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Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work.
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The indispensability argument seeks to assimilate the epistemology of metaphysical statements to the epistemology of statements that are obviously empirical. I think it fails to achieve this goal. The argument does not refute the Carnapian thesis that scientific theories and metaphysical claims differ epistemologically - observations can provide evidence for the former, but not for the latter.
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I disagree with those who argue that evolutionary biology and the existence of God are incompatible.
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Evolutionary biologists often avoid using the term "race" because there is so much racist baggage that comes with the term. However, they are often okay with the idea that the genealogy of human groups within our species can sometimes be inferred in much the same way as the genealogy of different species.
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I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.
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I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.
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I think that some "interventionist theisms" are compatible with evolutionary theory. (By "intervention," I don't mean that God violates laws of nature; I mean that God affects what happens in nature in ways that are additional to the ones that deism recognizes.)
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Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.
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Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.
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"Simpler is always better" is an overstatement.
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When I was in high school I found literature and history interesting, but science not at all. Literature and history obviously involved thinking, but science seemed to be all about memorizing facts and doing mindless calculations.
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Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).
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Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.
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Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.
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If you have evidence that C1 is a cause of E, and no evidence as to whether C2 is also a cause of E, then C1 seems to be a better explanation of E than C1&C2 is, since C1 is more parsimonious. I call the version of Ockham's razor used here "the razor of silence." The better explanation of E is silent about C2; it does not deny that C2 was a cause. The problem changes if you consider two conjunctive hypotheses.
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I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.
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Another way to test hypotheses about adaptation is to consider trait variation across a group of species instead of focusing on the trait of a single species. Rather than seeking to explain why polar bears have fur of a certain thickness, one tries to explain why bears in colder climates have thicker fur than bears in warmer climates. The former problem is hard to solve, since it is hard to say exactly what fur thickness polar bears should have if natural selection guided the evolution of that trait.
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If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!