How human do you think you are?

 My essay on the Post-Human body, now freely available online at Public Philosophy Journal 'The Philosopher' thephilosopher1923.org

My favourite things that I taught this semester: Fiona Woollard

 

 

Last semester I had my 'Feminist Philosophy' students read Woollard's prize-winning 2021 paper, 'Mother knows best: Pregnancy, applied ethics, and epistemically transformative experiences.' 

Day 22: Biological substances (success at last!)

With massive relief I can report that Chapter 7 has been defeated. I slept on it, and conferred with my wonderful ex-student, Dr Will Morgan, and I've found my way to a conclusion I'm happy with. Now I need readers!

The chapter explores the following question: Do concepts of Biological Individuality provide identity conditions for the objects they apply to, or are they defined by 'mere' properties?

Day 2 Group selection for Maynard Smith and Sober

 

So yesterday went really well. To my surprise, i did everything i'd planned!  My brain was working, i made some good headway on the talk.

Today - meh. I often find that a good, smart day is followed by a dip. And i didn't even get drunk! I just woke up and couldn't face going back to the notes i'd finished the evening before. It's not the end of the world because i was in and out of EPSA talks and meetings today anyway. 

But then this book arrived in the post and has saved me. It's a book that's kind of hard to get hold of. At least, libraries rarely have it,  and pdfs don't seem to circulate online, so i had to stump up and buy it. Which is another reason why scholars without much cash - say early career folk who pay for a lot of childcare - are disadvantaged in academia. But i don't have eye-watering childcare costs anymore, so worldofbooks got my money.

It was so worth it! For a random edited collection from 1987, its pretty widely-cited, and now i can see why.  Chapter 5 'How to Model Evolution' by John Maynard Smith, and the ensuing back and forth he has with Elliott Sober, is gold.

I think i can build one of my chapters around it (not the one i was meant to be working on, but hey)  so i'm going to put my initial thoughts about it down here.

University of Leeds History & Philosophy of Science Seminar Series (online), Semester 1 2020-21.

 

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

 History & Philosophy of Science Seminar Series

 Semester 1, 2020-21

Wednesdays, 3.15-5pm UK time

                                             All talks will be live streamed over TEAMS.

Email Dr Ellen Clarke e.clarke@leeds.ac.uk  to get the link.

 

14 OCTOBER 2020

Ruben Verwaal (Durham): ‘Fluid Deafness: Earwax and Hardness of Hearing in Early Modern Science’

 28 OCTOBER 2020

Hayley Clatterbuck (Wisconsin-Madison): ‘Darwin's causal argument against creationism’

 11 NOVEMBER 2020

Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval):

‘Beyond Foucault’s Grip: Making Sense of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life’

 25 NOVEMBER 2020

Lena Zuchowski (Bristol): ‘What Kind of Models are Deep Learning Algorithms?’

 

9 DECEMBER 2020

Jimena Canales (Illinois): ‘Science and the History of Non-Existent Things’

 

Abstracts below

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

14 OCTOBER 2020

Ruben Verwaal (Durham): ‘Fluid Deafness: Earwax and Hardness of Hearing in Early Modern Science’

Abstract: This talk discusses hearing disability in early modern science and presents Enlightenment medicine as part of a profound shift in thinking about deafness. Scholars have already described changes in the social status of the deaf in eighteenth-century Europe, pointing at clerics’ sympathy for the deaf and philosophers’ fascination with gestures as the origin of language. Yet few historians have examined the growing interest in deafness by physicians. From the seventeenth century onwards, natural philosophers and physicians researched varieties in ear wax, discovered fluids in the Eustachian Tube and cochlea, and developed new theories about the propagation of sound waves via so-called fluid airs. This paper proposes that the renewed focus on the fluids brought about a new understanding of auditory perception, which reconstructed hearing and deafness not in terms of a dichotomy, but in terms of a grading scale.

 28 OCTOBER 2020

Hayley Clatterbuck (Wisconsin-Madison): ‘Darwin's causal argument against creationism’

Abstract: In the Origin of Species, Darwin vacillates between two incompatible lines of attack on special creationism. At times, he argues that functionless traits are evidence against special creation, as we would expect a designer to create traits that are useful for their possessors. At other times, Darwin argues that special creationism is explanatorily vacuous, for any possible observation is compatible with some putative intention of the designer. However, in later works, Darwin turns to an argument against creationism—and indeed, against the possibility of design in nature more generally—that he finds much more compelling. He argues that the variations which arise are random with respect to fitness and hence there is no designer. I will examine why Darwin found this argument much more compelling than the ones in the Origin and will suggest that it is because it can be made from general causal principles alone, rather than having to reason about the intentions or capacities of a creator. I will use tools from today’s causal modeling frameworks to examine whether and why this argument from random variation succeeds.

 11 NOVEMBER 2020

Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval): ‘Beyond Foucault’s Grip: Making Sense of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life’

Abstract: With a few notable exceptions, commentators have systematically observed striking similarities between French geneticist François Jacob’s The Logic of Life – A History of Heredity (1970) and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). There are grounds for thinking that Jacob was indeed influenced by the work of his colleague at the Collège de France: rejecting a linear view, Jacob proposed a discontinuous framework whereby each historical period is delineated by profound transformations in the nature of biological knowledge itself. He further attended to the “various stages of knowledge” he identified and how they enabled the study of new “objects” in biology, thanks not only to the development of instruments but to new ways of looking at the organism. Unsurprisingly, Foucault praised The Logic of Life as “the most remarkable history of biology ever written” and even used it as a confirmation of his own archaeological approach. This Foucauldian reading, although pervasive, is far too simple and is at best incomplete, however. But if Foucault isn’t the main intellectual source behind Jacob’s best-selling book, then who is? And why did Jacob – a Nobel Prize winner – suddenly turned into a historian of biology? In this talk, I advance a new narrative in order to make sense of The Logic of Life. Drawing on archival material from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, I will argue that the book is best characterized as a response to Jacques Monod’s biological vision of scientific growth. According to Monod, ideas in science follow a logic of mutation and selection, a view rejected by Jacob on the grounds that it takes evolutionary principles beyond their rightful domain. This crucial difference between Jacob and Monod, I will show, can shed new light on the opposition between “history of ideas” and “history of objects”. I will further argue that Jacob’s change in laboratory organism in the late 1960s was an important impetus in writing the book. Only in loosening Foucault’s grip and in situating The Logic of Life within its own cultural context can we hope to critically assess the promises and the limitations of Jacob’s historiographical legacy.

25 NOVEMBER 2020

Lena Zuchowski (Bristol): ‘What Kind of Models are Deep Learning Algorithms?’

Abstract: I will introduce a novel conceptual framework for the analysis of scientific modelling. The framework will be used to distinguish and comparatively analyse three different ways of model construction: vertical from covering theory and empirical knowledge about a given target system; horizontal through the systematic variation or transfer of existing models; and diagonal through a combination of vertical and horizontal construction steps. I will then apply this framework to analyse the construction of Deep Learning Algorithms and will argue that they can be interpreted as the automated, vertical, bottom-up construction of a sequence of scientific models. Furthermore, I will maintain that the practice of transfer learning can be interpreted as horizontal model construction.

 9 DECEMBER 2020

Jimena Canales (Illinois): ‘Science and the History of Non-Existent Things’

Abstract: What does not or does not yet exist plays a predominant role in science and technology. Discovery, either when considered as a process of uncovering or of creation, involves the bringing into existence of the new. As scientists search for answers and solutions, they are often confronted with problems and paradoxes that seem to escape from the realm of reason. The cause of such mischief is often anthropomorphized, called a demon, and given the last name of famous scientists, such as Descartes, Laplace, and Maxwell. The antechamber of discovery is not, as is frequently thought, an inscrutable “private art” marked by punctual “Eureka!” moments. It is a rich cultural, social, economic and political space filled with imaginary perpetrators with recognizable characteristics that have remained fairly constant throughout many centuries.  A study of the half-empty glass of scientific research reveals certain patterns in the search terms that drive discovery.

 

 

 

 

 

Moral Progress?

Hello world! It's been a while.
I have just published an article that I'm quite pleased with, in Analyse & Kritik. It is a review essay of Buchanan & Powell's stimulating recent book 'The evolution of moral progress' which attempts to reconcile evolutionary naturalism with the view that humans are getting better, morally speaking. I don't normally write about morality, but i'm pleased with how my review came out because it gave me a chance to rant about machismo in evolutionary psychology, and also to reference a Tracy Chapman song in my title.

It's behind a fat paywall, but you can access my shareable copy here.

It's called 'The space between', and I wish you the pleasure of now having the song stuck in your head all day.............................

Alex Byrne responds

Alex Byrne has kindly sent me a response to my post on his article, which I here reproduce in full, with his permission and his original emphasis preserved.

* * * 

"Ellen, thanks very much for this thoughtful engagement with my article. Here are some comments/replies. I’ve put the relevant pieces of your post in quotation marks.

“I'll assume Byrne recognises that the idea of defining sex by genitalia as birth, with chromosome testing as a back-up, is problematic, because he doesn't consider it. One problem is you might get people who have ambiguous genitalia and whose chromosomes are ambiguous as well - such as if they have XXY or XO chromosomes. Another problem is that people's genitalia can mismatch with their chromosomes.”

I agree completely with this. Being female or male cannot be equated with having a certain kind of genitalia, or having certain chromosomes. That is obvious if you widen the focus beyond humans. Of course, genitalia at birth are generally a very reliable sign of a (human) baby’s sex, but a sign or indication of X should not be confused with X itself. 

“Byrne argues instead that we can turn to a standard biological definition of sex to show us that sex is binary.  He suggests we use the standard biological, multi-species sex distinction which says that the female of the species is the one that produces the largest gametes. Then we can say that "females are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of large gametes - ie ovarian differentiation has occurred, at least to some extent." A male, meanwhile, is someone who has advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of small gametes - sperm.

Byrne argues that if we use this definition then there will be no humans who are neither female nor male, thus proving that sex is, after all, binary.”

But I do not say that. Here’s what I wrote:

The existence of some unclear cases shows that it would be incautious to announce that sex (in humans) is binary. By the same token, it is equally incautious to announce that it isn’t — let alone that this is an established biological fact. And even if some people are outside the binary, they are a miniscule fraction of the population, nothing like the frequently cited 1–2 percent figure, which draws on Fausto-Sterling’s earlier work.

“There are several problems with Byrne's argument.

First of all, the definition  wouldn't be easy to apply - we would have to come up with some rules about exactly which developmental events constitute the right amount of ovarian differentiation, for one thing.”

You’re right that it wouldn’t be easy to apply. But I never suggested that we adopt it as a way of telling whether a baby is female or male. Observing the genitals is a cheap and effective way of telling (although, as you point out, it won’t work for every case). I was simply interested in whether sex is binary, rather than in finding some especially reliable test for someone’s sex.

“And Byrne would have to accept that any fetus younger than 6 weeks has no sex at all, which flies in the face of normal intuitions about sex.”

Quite right. I do accept it. But surely you don’t think that biological questions should be decided by “normal intuitions”! Since I think I existed at one week after conception, I think there was a time when I was sexless. Here’s some support: “Sex is never determined at conception” (Beukeboom and Perrin, The Evolution of Sex Determination, OUP 2014, p. 17).

“Second, Byrne allows that there will still be humans who count as both male and female, because they have advanced some way towards production of both types of gamete (such individuals have standardly been called 'true hermaphrodites' but the Intersex Society of North America is campaigning for such genital-focused terms to be avoided). This, he says, is in line with the fact that definitions in biology are never perfectly precise, but always admit of exceptions. I agree, but I fail to see why his desired conclusion - that sex is binary - is not threatened by such exceptions just as it would be threatened by cases which are neither male nor female?”

You’re right that if there are humans who are both female and male, then this would refute the binary thesis. But I never allowed that there are such people. I wrote:

…there are some other rare cases (arguably 1 in 50,000 births or even rarer) that are hard to decide, but there are no clear and uncontroversial examples of humans who are neither female nor male. (A similar point goes for supposed examples of humans who are both female and male, although here things get more complicated.)

Here things really do get complicated! It would have taken much too much space to treat the (exceedingly rare) cases of so-called “true hermaphrodites”, so I had to leave that out.

“And there are women who likewise fail Byrne's definition of a female…Such individuals [XY people with (Complete) Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome] don't constitute difficult cases for Byrne's definition - they are classified unproblematically as male. But Byrne's definition would pose a problem for these individuals - at least some of them get hurt by being classified as male. Patino was hurt because she lost her career as an Olympic hurdler. Some are hurt because they feel like females. Some are hurt because they feel like neither males nor females.”

I am certainly not suggesting that everyone who is male should be socially treated as male, or barred from female-only sports, or called ‘male’, or have ‘male’ on their birth certificate, or anything like that. Cases of CAIS prove that that would be ridiculous. 

“We don't have to define sex as binary any more than we have to define indigo as separate from violet.”

Here I think we have a serious disagreement. (Well, maybe not — tell me what you think.) By my lights, I am not defining sex as binary. I am, rather, reporting that sex is basically a matter of gamete size (as I might report that water contains hydrogen and oxygen), and that people who say that sex isn’t binary (in humans) are going far beyond the evidence. 

Suppose sex is binary. We can’t change that, any more than we can change the fact that we are mammals. (Or that indigo and violet are different colors; indigo may be a kind of blue, but whatever it is it isn’t violet.) What we can change (if we like) are our practices of classifying people as female or male. We could even agree to drop that social classification altogether — remove it from government documents, tear down bathroom signs, mandate unisex clothing, and so on. I simply wasn’t concerned (in that article) with these issues. 

Consider this analogy. Let us say that northerners are those born in the northern hemisphere, and southerners are those born in the southern hemisphere. That is a binary distinction (assume no one is born exactly on the equator): every human is either a northerner or a southerner, and no one is both. Suppose that these are socially significant categories. The northerners oppress the southerners, and the different groups are supposed to wear differently colored hats. Some people feel trapped by the “hemispheric binary”, perhaps not “identifying” as a northerner or a southerner, and refuse to wear a hat at all (or maybe wear a multi-colored one). No doubt something should be done about this unhappy state of affairs. But denying that the northerner/southerner distinction is binary is not it.

best

Alex"

On whether sex is binary

Anne Fausto-Sterling is a developmental biologist who has spent decades exploring the biological and social factors that work together to produce maleness and femaleness.

Periods for Pence

I came across this campaign on Facebook a while ago, but it's taken on more poignancy now that Mike Pence is not merely Governer of Indiana but the future Vice President. Now renamed as 'Periods for politicians' the campaign was started when Pence, a Conservative pro-life politician, signed off new laws placing various restrictions on access to abortions in Indiana.

Campaign founder Sue Magina (a.k.a. Sue My Vagina) took affront at one law in particular. This law obliged women who have aborted a foetus, had a medical termination of a foetus, or miscarried a foetus -at any stage of pregnancy- to provide that foetus with a formal burial or cremation.

Consolations of philosophy: on the ontological status of unborn children

Well there hasn't been an awful lot of blogging going on around here lately. The events of last summer just sucked the words out of me.

Brown and Heyes: Social learning and the other cooperation problem

This is the latest in my series of blog posts summarising the talks and responses that took place at the meeting 'Inheritance and cooperation'.

Unfortunately, some idiot forgot to press the 'rec' button on this one (an idiot called 'Clarke'). So i cannot make any audio available I'm afraid : (

Dr Rachael Brown is a Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney who has written about learning, its ability to act as an inheritance mechanism and its effects upon evolutionary processes. Her talk, 'Generating benefit: Social learning and the “other” cooperation problem', explored the idea of treating social learning as a cultural inheritance mechanism, and one that occurs, furthermore, in non-human animals.  

Birch and Bentley: Time and relatedness in microbes and humans

Dr Jonathan Birch from the LSE is working on a book called 'The Philosophy of Social Evolution'. For this meeting Birch drew on his recent paper 'Gene mobility and the concept of relatedness' to talk about a foundational idea in contemporary evolutionary theory - Hamilton's theory of Kin Selection - and in particular at its application in the context of what has been called 'sociomicrobiology' - the study of sociality in bacteria and other microbes.

Powers and Clarke: Insititutions and the development of human sociality

Dr Simon Powers is a member of the Lehmann group in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, although he originally got his PhD in computer science.

Powers is concerned to explain how humans have moved from small-scale, self-sufficient tribes or kin-groups, to large-scale, differentiated exchange economies, a change which has elsewhere been called the 'Holocene transition'.

Merlin and Clark: Extending inheritance

Dr Francesca Merlin from the IHPST (CNRS, Paris) gave a talk based on her forthcoming paper which evaluates recent calls to extend our notion of inheritance. She starts with a commonsensical notion of inheritance as 'like begets like' and claims that the notion of inheritance is intended, primarily, to explain the fact that organisms produce organisms that are similar to them. It grounds continuity across generations of living things, in other words. She argues, thus, that there is a privileged link between inheritance and reproduction.

Helanterä and Uller: Superorganisms as model systems

For the first guest talk of the meeting, we heard from Dr Heikki Helanterä, who is a biologist from the University of Helsinki, working on eusocial insects. Heikki is beginning a new project in which he tests the idea that eusocial insect colonies can be compared with organisms. He considers the best candidates to be those colonies in which workers are sterile - terminally differentiated - because this is when 'the cool stuff happens'. For example, the queens can mate multiply, bringing all kinds of genetic diversity into the colony, because the workers aren't in a position to do anything about it.

Helanterä is interested in establishing whether sufficient heritable variation exists at the level of whole insect colonies to support a between-colony selection process, in which colonies act as units of selection in their own right.

Inheritance and cooperation: Clarke introducing the themes

Apparently some short girl called Clarke dreamt up the idea of linking inheritance and cooperation for the focus of a conference. An audio file of my introductory talk can be found here.  Here is (roughly) what I had to say in my defence:

Morality as Cooperation

Dr Oliver Scott Curry from Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology came and gave a  really interesting talk to my reading group last week. Curry defends the claim that morality is best understood as being all about cooperation.

Here is a video of the talk.(The audio is rather low I'm afraid, but should be okay for headphones.)

The thesis was that morality is a set of instincts, customs, preferences and behaviours unified by their common function of facilitating for-the-good-of-the-group, cooperative behaviour. The morals themselves are best revealed by empirical techniques including ethnographic survey, Curry claimed, and the functions of the morals are best elucidated using game theory. When we survey moral attitudes and behaviours, we will see that we tend to consider as moral only those acts which are best for the group.

On the eco-evo-devo of cooperation

To explain the origin of any transition, it is necessary to identify some phenotypic change that brings about a new fitness benefit.

Kin selection and horizontal gene transfer

Microbiology / kin selection peeps, I need your help understanding something.

Here is a sentence I came across in a paper from the Sterelny/Joyce/Calcott/Fraser collection on Cooperation and its Evolution;

"According to Hamilton's rule, any modification of focal relatedness of genes specifying cooperative behaviors may have an effect on the stability of cooperative behaviors between interacting individuals." (Riboli-Sasco, Taddei and Brown 2013, 281).

I realise the many perils of basing a discussion on a single amputated sentence, but I think it is fair to represent the point being made as the following;

A bun in the oven, or the oven has a bun-part?

At the BSPS......

Elselijn Kingma explored  a 'fetal container view' of the relationship between a mother and her unborn offspring. Her jump-off point was Smith & Brogaard's account of the moment the human organism comes into existence.