Rewrite of Evolution

New theory of evolution!  Hooray! Patched a bunch of things together to make a nice story.  Fixed the little issue about fitness being circular.  Expanded natural selection to apply more generally.  Causal structure.  Epistemological foundations.  ooOoOO0Ooooooo. And it’s good fun.  I swear.  Epistemology, history of physics, evolution… makes me happy.  You should really read it. Download here. [pdf, 304kb]

bah humbug

I haven’t done a link roundup in a while, so be assured that all these links are awesome. [via information aesthetics] . Animal of the Month: Immortal Jellyfish ‘Immortal’ jellyfish swarming across the world – Telegraph . In second place is: Giant meat-eating plants prefer to eat tree shrew poo – BBC – Earth News . A Softer World: 395 . [via Don’t Panic > Magazine > Desire > THE BLACK HEART GANG] . Beautiful […]

Aesthetic Highs of Soccer

I love soccer as a sport.   I played it growing up and only quit when it started getting serious (too many elbows to the head in one game and I figured it just wasn’t what I was looking for any more – it gets nasty in the box).  So it concerns me that here in the good ol’ US of A many people do not seem to appreciate it. What I started thinking about was […]

Disrespect

If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II x Interesting that there is no significant first person present indicative of self disrespect.  Consider, with Moore’s Paradox in mind:  ‘I disrespect myself by sitting here, but I am doing it anyway.’ * * * * * Considering disrespect”s relation to Moore’s Paradox at issue here, it begs the question, ‘What is […]

Revision and Hypothesis Introduction

Say we have some theory that we represent with a formula of logic.  In part it looks like this: [1] …(∃z) … Pz … This says that at some point in the theory there is some object z that has property P. After much hard work, we discover that the object z with property P can be described as the combination of two more fundamental objects w and v with properties R and S: [2] […]

Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo

Newton famously wrote [1] [2]: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses…  It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. as a response to those who challenged him to provide causes of gravity.  He said, […]

Against Physics as Ontologically Basic

1.  Biology is epistemically independent of physics: Let’s assume that biology is not epistemically independent of physics, i.e. to know any biology we must first know something about physics.  However, consider evolution as determined by natural selection and the struggle for survival.  We can know about the struggle for survival and natural selection without appealing to physics — just as Darwin did when he created the theory — and hence we can fundamentally understand at […]