Elliott Sober Quotes
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Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.
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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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Deism claims that God creates the universe and the laws of nature and then is hands-off, with everything that subsequently happens in nature being due to natural processes.
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Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.
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One influential philosophical position about the use of probability in science holds that probabilities are objective only if they are based on micro-physics; all other probabilities should be interpreted subjectively, as merely revealing our ignorance about physical details. I have argued against this position, contending that the objectivity of micro-physical probabilities entails the objectivity of macro-probabilities.
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Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.
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Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.
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It is an interesting fact about model selection that the evidence at hand can indicate that a model known to be false will be more predictively accurate than a model known to be true. This opens the door to a kind of instrumentalism.
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It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).
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Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic; defenders of the theory do the theory no favor when they agree.
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Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.
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When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.
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"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.
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The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality.
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This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.
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Some philosophical arguments (e.g., in connection with the mind/body problem) look pretty good, while others (e.g., those that criticize moral realism) do not.
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Unfortunately, philosophers of science usually regard scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as monistic doctrines. The assumption is that there is one goal of all scientific inference - finding propositions that are true, or finding propositions that are predictively accurate. In fact, there are multiple goals. Sometimes realism is the right interpretation of a scientific problem, while at other times instrumentalism is.
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In the history and literature courses I took, epistemological questions came to interest me most. What makes one explanation of the French Revolution better than another? What makes one interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" better than another? These questions led me to philosophy and then to philosophy of science.
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The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of "in virtue of" relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties.
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In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.
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Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.
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The rabid opposition to group selection has now considerably subsided. In the process, the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory has become clearer, as have the relationships that connect different theoretical approaches.
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From the fact that E is evidence for T and the fact that T entails M, it doesn't follow that E is evidence for M.
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Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an environment that has properties E. The theory of natural selection is filled with statements of this form.