Tag: science

Are Paradoxes Meaningless?

Aaron Cotnoir has suggested that people think that paradoxes are meaningless.  I think they are lucky that they hadn’t suggested that to me unless they wanted to see me freak out. It was my good fortune to have my first real exposure to the work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein be from Thomas Ricketts.  I can’t remember verbatim what he said, but this is close: No one knows how long it took Frege to understand […]

On The Scientific View of the World

Many people have a “scientific” view of the world. This means that the world operates according to the laws of science, i.e., there are no mysterious forces that cannot be explained by some combination of physics, biology, psychology, economics etc. It is a mistaken view. The scientific view of the world can be summarized by this formulation: S) The world is governed by science if and only if, given a specified way things are at […]

Positive and Negative Biological Time

In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation. Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending […]

The Logic of Biological Relativity [draft]

How can we represent biological relativity in logical notation? Organism a is adapting relative to organism b Aab Organism b is adapting relative to a Aba Organisms a and b are adapting relative to each other Aab & Aba This schema is unsatisfactory because it describes the situation from an indeterminate outside perspective: a and b are said to be adapting relative to each other without regard to the observer describing the situation. Relativity applies […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]