marshall0i.bsky.social
Philosopher of science and occasional scientist. Mainly philosophy of evolutionary biology, philosophy of probability, implications of modeling and statistical inference. Book: Evolution and the Machinery of Chance. https://marshallalmostsurely.com
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I'd add that a number of philosophers for whom I have great respect would disagree with parts of what I've said.
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So although it's valuable to clarify possible answers to foundational questions, biologists get a lot of valuable work done without resolving those questions. That doesn't mean they don't care about those questions--some of them do. But they don't need to most of the time.
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I think think because of this, biologists need to have workarounds and heuristics, or they'd never be able to get any work done. And they need to be able to adjust concepts and theories as they find out more about more organisms and more populations, more cellular processes, more genetics, etc.
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Maybe one reason biology is different from some central parts of physics is that biology is pervasively messy and complicated in multiple ways and levels. It will never have the systematic elegance that parts of physics have or aspire to. Evolution is too opportunistic, and keeps things messy.
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It's valuable to try to systematize fitness concepts (I do some work on that in my book), but biologists have been doing fine without this help.
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But biologists define specialized variants for different contexts and purposes, and they usually understand what they are doing and why, even though they don't have a systematic theory of fitness for all cases. They figure out ways to work around what is not entirely clear.
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Philosophers and some biologists are interested in foundations, but biologists find ways to get work done even when they are problematic. For example biological fitness is defined many ways that might appear inconsistent. A number of philosophers and a few biologists view this as a problem.
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@seanmcarroll.bsky.social
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This article describes a number of areas outside of physics where philosophy of science matters. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
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There are questions about biology whose answers don't interest most biologists. The questions are no less important for that, imo, and some biologists care about them. (Others don't, but might, if they saw that there were interesting possible answers, I suspect.)
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I agree with Arvid. I think there's a difference, thfhough. Sean M. Carroll is a physicist who argues that fundamental physics really needs philosophy. I think he may be right, but much of biology doesn't need philosophy of biology; that doesn't diminish the importance of phil bio.
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Me, first time ever. I'm a philosopher of biology, and I'm very excited to attend.
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Thanks--that's plenty for me to go on. I'll look in Science as a Process. I'll let you know if I find it. (That was my first guess, but I thought it might be in an article.)
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Hi Greg—can you give me a pointer toward a source for that quotation? Might be useful for a project. A title would be enough, or I can chase references. Thanks.
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Oh, and I see from this PDF that there's a concert afterwards in The Ellipse, i.e. in front of the White House.
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According to this map from the US Army website, it starts across from the Lincoln Memorial and ends in front of a press area at The Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument. Here's the PDF map: api.army.mil/e2/c/downloa..., from this page: www.army.mil/article/285249
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“They took my cousin. He informed them he is a US citizen and his passport was in his pocket. We don’t know where they took him.”
This isn’t about deporting undocumented immigrants this is about going after people who are not white!
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This URL should work for everyone for the Choice Reviews review, though the process is annoying:
choicereviews.org/review/10.58...
It will send you to a login page, but I think anyone can create an account. Then once you create an account and log in, you can use that URL again to find the review.
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Or go into Choice Reviews through your library, and then search on the book title in quotes. It's a quirky interface--took me a while to find it on my own.
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Oops, sorry. Blazer is from my university. I'll work on that. The publication is Choice Reviews. It's a paragraph. If you're interested, contact me separately and I can give you the text.
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It's so easy for unsophisticated readers to pick up and promote articles without noticing the qualifications. I do see the value of keeping bad articles around, but if so maybe they should have a big red translucent "RETRACTED" bar across each page, or should require going into a special area.
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And here's a short review for librarians by a historian of math, but it's obscure (for non-librarians) and paywalled: choicereviews-org.uab.idm.oclc.org/review/10.58...
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Samir Okasha, Evolution 77(12), 2023, academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
Charles Pence, BJPS Review of Books, 2024, www.thebsps.org/reviewofbook...
Michael Ruse, Quarterly Review of Biology 99(4), 2024, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
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No, but that would be interesting. Not sure whether it would interest mathematicians and statisticians--it's mathematical, but not *that* mathematical--but I would love to see reviews by philosophers of probability at least. Here are reviews by philosophers of biology, two serious about probability:
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(Btw if you want to order from publisher, UCPNEW is a discount code.)
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And I argue for a conception of the nature of #probability in population-environment systems that doesn't depend on indeterminism.
[I hope this very brief sketch is at least intriguing. Happy to answer questions, discuss further.] 9/9
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Some fitnesses can be measured on individuals and used to infer trait fitnesses. The latter reflect actual/possible future organisms, other elements in population-environment systems. I argue that researcher interests specify what count as real population-environment systems and thus selection. 8/9
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e.g. seeds with soil microvariation. This view treats an individual in its microenvironmental as a trial of a chance setup, but leaves out too much about natural selection. Population-environment systems add what's missing. Distinguishing roles for fitness concepts helps in justifying the idea. 7/9
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The probabilities are objective, not Bayesian, but not mere frequencies. Some say "propensities": dispositions like fragility but indeterministic. This view implies clones can have different fitnesses (not= offspring), even in the same environment, due to different environmental circumstances, 6/9
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Philosophers of biology focused on fitness difference as cause of evolution. A common philosophical view treats fitness as probabilistic property of each particular, actual individual organism in its environmental circumstances, with trait fitness as e.g. mean fitness of organisms with a trait. 5/9
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If natural selection is survival of the fittest, what is it to be fitter? Not actually having more offspring; that's survival of what survives. Stearns said fitness is "something everyone understands but no one can define precisely". I clarify different roles that useful fitness concepts play. 4/9
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A central thesis is that the probabilistic nature of selection is rooted in "population-environment systems": a population in its environment, understood as a trial of a "chance setup", a complex analog of tossing a pair of dice. I argue that the way empirical research is done supports this idea.3/9
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@uchicagopress.bsky.social's gives a good overview: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Central arguments use roles of #popgen, #quantgen, modeling, statistics in empirical research & theory, but provide context for #evodevo, #nicheconstruction, and organisms. 2/9