Paul Griffiths on cost-constrained optimality, natural selection, the evolution of cognition—and the search for truth.
And a critique of modular sociobiological explanations by Richard Boyd.
Evolución
The Human Family Tree
FreeOK 2013- Lawrence Krauss, "The Greatest Story Ever Told"
domingo, 17 de noviembre de 2013
FREEOK 2013 - Lawrence Krauss: "The Greatest Story Ever Told"
The title made me think for a minute of my own lecture earlier this year on "The Story Behind any Story".
Lord Martin Rees: What Does the Future Hold?
Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?
Cost-Constrained Optimality
Contra la excepcionalidad humana
viernes, 8 de noviembre de 2013
Contra la excepcionalidad humana
Contra "el mito de la humanidad", un nuevo libro de Henry Gee, La especie accidental:
Henry Gee, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.
Aquí una reseña en Forbes.
Nuestras falsas reconstrucciones, normalmente pensadas para favorecer nuestra imagen, dependen de la falacia retrospectiva que Gee llama "the Beowulf effect", basado en la carencia de información y la sobrevaloración de la existente:
‘The Beowulf Effect’: The tendency to build a pleasing narrative history out of what is actually a very small sample. By analogy, he points out how utterly dependent the existing literature of Old English is on the sparse number of written lines that have survived.
The few fragments of Old English literature that have come down to us from that remote yet immense period have survived thanks only to blind chance. For example, 30,000 lines of Old English poetry are known to us–all that’s left of more than six hundred years of poetry and song. For comparison, Shakespeare’s plays total some 150,000 lines, written over a period of twenty-four years. What’s more, almost all Old English verse is found in just four surviving manuscripts, all written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English around the year 1000—which does not mean that we knew who originally composted them, nor in what language. [p. 59]
Y termina el libro, claro, con una meditación (à la Stephen Jay Gould) sobre las consecuencias éticas de la gratuidad humana, y de nuestra implausibilidad. Nuestra libertad y capacidad de autogestión.
Lo que desde luego es excepcional es plantearse el problema de la no excepcionalidad como tal—y el de la gratuidad de la existencia, perspectiva atea y ateleológica. No se hace tanto como se dice. Debe ser que, como dice Gee, asusta no tener certidumbres, y asusta... no tanto ser como los demás, sino saber que se es como los demás. En lo de saberlo, sí que hay una excepcionalidad, me parece, aporética si se quiere.
Y es que nos gusta ser la excepción, porque ser la medida de todas las cosas.... no es excepcional. Es la regla.
Segre Lecture - How Did the Universe Begin?
viernes, 25 de octubre de 2013
Segre Lecture: How Did The Universe Begin?
Andrew Lange nos habla, desde la física, de las leyes que ordenan y generan el universo. En el minuto 30 se detecta alguna coincidencia de vocabulario con la versión del Big Bang—evolucionismo cristiano—que nos narra Abraham Cowley en Davideis, un poema épico escrito en la década de 1640. Este es un pasaje sobre la creación del cosmos, la música de las esferas y el orden en el universo.
Tell me, O Muse (for thou or none canst tell
The mystic powers that in blest numbers dwell,
Thou their great nature knowst, nor is it fit
This noblest gem of thine own crown to omit),
Tell me from whence these heavenly charms arise;
Teach the dull world t'admire what they despise.
As first a various unformed hint we find
Rise in some godlike poet's fertile mind,
Till all the parts and words their places take,
And with just marches verse and music make,
Such was God's poem, this world's new essay;
So wild and rude in its first draught it lay;
Th' ungoverned parts no correspondence knew,
And artless war from thwarting motions grew;
Till they to number and fixed rules were brought
By the eternal mind's poetic thought.
Water and air he for the tenor chose,
Earth made the base, the treble flame arose;
To th' active moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,
To Saturn's string a touch more soft and grave.
The motions straight and round and swift and slow
And short and long were mixed and woven so,
Did in such artful figures smoothly fall,
As made this decent measured dance of all.
And this is music: sounds that charm our ears
Are but one dressing that rich science wears.
Though no man hear't, though no man it rehearse,
Yet will there still be music in my verse.
Quizá conozca este pasaje el físico, y de ahí su uso de los términos "bass" y "treble", y la analogía musical. Si no, se trata de una coincidencia, digamos, natural. Y sumo este pasaje de Cowley a mi colección de nociones protoevolucionistas.
El orden natural y la complejidad: Paley, Lamarck, Vico, y el Génesis