Category: Biology and the biological
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Last week, Jerry Coyne gave a talk at my university, UC Davis. Coyne is one of the "new atheists," people who believe that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises" (Simon Hooper). In his talk, he argued that science and religion were…
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Many philosophers of science are understandably excited about Neil deGrasse Tyson's reinvorgoration of the TV show Cosmos. After all, most of us are pretty excited about science and anything that improves the public's scientific literacy. Thus, it is extremely disappointing to hear him articulate the comments that he does at about 1:02:46 of this video.*…
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Over the weekend I came across this hoax piece of ‘news’, 'reporting' that a boy who had been raised by orangutans has been recaptured so as to live a ‘normal human life’ again in Malaysia. Despite (or perhaps because!) the phoniness of the ‘article’, it did get me thinking: in such a hypothetical scenario, would…
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Philosophy of biology is pluralistic, or so my friends tell me. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that many philosophers of biology believe that biology is pluralistic. One friend recently used the phrase "irreducibly pluralistic." But I am not so sure. There seem to be at least two sources of this pluralism. …
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The review, in BioScience, is available here. I highly recommend it for its cool, judicious treatment, as well as for the glimpse into Evan's own approach, near the end of the review: Nagel neglects another important body of work closely connected to theoretical and experimental models of the origins of life. This work concerns complex or…
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A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…
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Rebecca Jordan-Young and Cordelia Fine (to name folks working in neurofeminism who will most likely be familiar to New APPS readers) are among the co-authors of this open-access article, "Plasticity, Plasticity, Plasticity … and the rigid problem of sex." The article points out two disconnects. The first is the most obvious, the disconnect between contemporary…
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