Category: philosophy

Relativity in Biology notes from 2005

It’s always interesting to see the start of ideas. Although I don’t have anything from the Spring of ’04 when I recall realizing biorelativity for the first time, I have found a file with a ‘last modified’ date of June12, ’05, the contents of which are below: Quantum Biology biology: the study of the physical attributes of life. the rate of mutation is constant, much as the speed of light organisms mutate. light shines. hence […]

Thanksgiving post

I am blatantly stealing a post from Fark Yaralar? because it is just too cool to pass up. Go To Fark’s site and support this awesomeness. And happy Thanksgiving! ————————————– Monday, November 19, 2007 ‘das kapital’ song by Lyapis Trubetskoy Here is a song about capital & Marx by Lyapis Trubetskoy (????? ?????????) [from Belarus] translation of lyrics: For dinner I devour gold bars Diamond desert, oil cream My name is Baalzebul Owner of the […]

Why Evolutionary Principles Cannot be Used to Support Racial Prejudices DRAFT

Evolutionary principles are sometimes used to justify racial prejudices. While no rigorous scientific study has yet proven one race to be inferior to any others it should be recognized that it is in principle impossible to prove racial superiority/inferiority and hence no study ever will. Firstly a note on the meaning of ‘more evolved’ and ‘less evolved’. Every species on the face of the earth today has been evolving for the exact same amount of […]

Evolutionary Drift, revisited yet again

With my recent paper on Measuring Fitness I realize that my previous responses to evolutionary drift, though not incorrect, may have not stated the solution particularly clearly. When fitness is defined and measured as described in the aforementioned article, evolutionary drift is irrelevant. The method of measuring the fitness of an organism or species makes no reference to any mutations whatsoever. Therefore evolutionary drift is no problem for the theory of fitness described here. If […]

Measuring Fitness

The basic premise is to measure fitness in a conceptually similar way to how we measure mass.  To measure mass we can use a scale to compare the effect of gravity on a test object to an object with an agreed upon mass, or we can compare the test object’s resistance to acceleration as compared to an object with an agreed upon mass.  These methods measure the ‘gravitational’ mass and ‘inertial mass’ respectively. Gravitational Mass […]

GroundReport: Citizen Journalism (and some Rogue Philosophy)

GroundReport.com is a website dedicated to citizen journalism that I have co-opted. But this is not something you should hold against GroundReport. Its mission is to provide ordinary people an opportunity to report on news that the mainstream media does not pick up on. For instance you can find people reporting on the major news stories of the day, local news from just about anywhere in the world, and every so often a scoop that […]

‘Gone Baby Gone’ is worth watching

Go see ‘Gone Baby Gone‘.  It’s got good acting, some twists and good ol’ fashion moral ambiguity.   The kind of ambiguity that was around before everything started feeling like a politically correct press release and is going to be around once again when we come to our senses.   And nothing against PR departments and carefully crafted images but I happen to like the areas in between what we we are comfortable with: when […]

Blogged by The Philosophers’ Carnival #55, Sweet!

The Philosopher’s Carnival picked up my Relativity in Evolutionary Biology! Completely cool. And I won the shortest description contest- take that all you people who write things that can be summarized. And hyphenation to boot. Props to the editor who used an archaic device to help me out in lieu of delving into unruly philosophy of science sure to scare people. It’s all relative Noah Greenstein has written a well-worth-a-peek post on ‘Relativity in Evolutionary […]

General Relativity in Evolutionary Biology DRAFT

EDIT, July 2015: See the full draft at the phil-sci archive: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11557/ Also check out my other Research. Below are old notes: —- I’ve discussed relativity in evolutionary biology with regards to uniform change but, as with the Special Theory of Relativity in physics, we want a theory that covers all change. This means that insofar as relativity applies to biology under uniform motion, i.e. when a species is reproducing in a regular fashion, we […]