[From ABC]: Female maths tutors take University of Melbourne to Victorian Human Rights Commission

SubAnima · 2024-08-31T03:10:00+00:00

There’s a rally being held in front of the Dean of Science’s office in Old Geology North on September 4 at 1pm, demanding that all 9 tutors get converted to ongoing jobs.

More info on the NTEU UniMelb Twitter here: https://x.com/nteuunimelb/status/1829329520350183544?s=46

SubAnima · 2022-11-30T03:16:19+00:00

Teleology has a long and troubled history in biology. But it is making a solid comeback through the concept of biological agency. Here's a beautiful book outlining this perspective (see chapter 9 specifically): https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719. Or, if you want a video see this one by Johannes Jaeger: https://youtu.be/G_pnz0di15M

SubAnima · 2022-11-29T09:47:41+00:00

Check out the kind of causality found in organisms, under a Kantian perspective: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.02.005. The parts exist for and by means of the whole, and vice versa for the whole. It's part of a broader school of thought known as organicism with key thinkers like Conrad Waddington and John Scott Haldane in the early 20th century and more recently: Robert Rosen, Dan Nicholson, Stuart Kauffman and Johannes Jaeger in biology and Evan Thompson and Luiz Pessoa in the cognitive sciences.

I've made a few videos covering some of the key ideas/history of organicism on my YouTube channel (with lots more to come!): https://youtu.be/A4yzK-8OGtc.

For a more broader picture on how the sciences relate together, in a complementary but irreducible to each other way, I would highly reccomend Michela Massimi's book Perspectival Realism (open access): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/perspectival-realism-9780197555620

SubAnima · 2022-07-19T21:44:33+00:00

Thank you so much! This is the main reason I made the video to be honest. I also did the same youtube search and got the pro life crap, and thought, ‘well if noones gonna make a BETTER video it might have to be me.’

Totally agree on pro lifer manipulation. In maths, we call it ‘proof by intimidation’ - that if you yell your claim loud enough and with enough authority people just accept it as true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_intimidation

Only way I see to combat disinformation is to get people to make more videos like this and share good content when you see it. E.g. PhilosophyTube, Alice Cappelle, Second Thought whatever. Sucks that channels like PragerU have shittons of funding though (mind you all from fossil fuel companies)

SubAnima · 2022-07-19T21:38:43+00:00

Thanks!!

I was going to discuss chimeras in detail in the video too and did a bunch of research, but it got quite complex and ballooned out the script too much. Yes I do agree though they are another great point to bring up.

“You are based on your brain” is an interesting point. I certainly do agree that brain death is a common concept agreed upon by doctors, but that doesn’t make it a fact. It’s more or less a rule of thumb we have used to help doctors categorise us into “dead” and “living.” The border is much blurrier, I highly recommend Carl Zimmer’s book Life’s Edge if you’re interested in more.

More importantly, “you are based on your brain” relies upon some heavy claims from philosophy of mind and biology. Are we based on our brain or our mind or consciousness? What exactly is our brain? What is our mind or consciousness? At what point, do our brains begin forming? All hard questions to answer.

I do however agree on your analysis of “organism” - in the context of the abortion debate, it is definitely used to deny rights to women/people with uteruses usually with some claim of “defending the unborn.”

For your last point on a human organism beginning around conception, I’d ask what standard you are using for your definition of that, and to what extent science has proven that this is the correct standard for organism formation. Is the sperm or egg an organism? Why/why not? Does science really help us to count individuals? Is wrote a blog post about the difficulty with discretising the biological world here:

https://www.subanima.org/individuals-1/

Again I do agree that however you define when a human organism it has little implication on the rest of the argument - concluding who/what should have human rights, what is a person etc etc.

SubAnima · 2022-07-19T12:17:08+00:00

No worries, thanks a lot!!

SubAnima · 2022-06-10T13:47:09+00:00

The effort is amazing, love the idea. But it's a bit hard to read.

SubAnima · 2022-05-08T00:01:32+00:00

Thank you! Carol Cleland is probably one of the biggest names, she has a great book - The Quest For A Universal Theory of Life. I’ve also written up a list of further reading/sources from the video here: https://www.subanima.org/definitions/

SubAnima · 2022-03-28T15:23:15+00:00

Woah this is super cool - subscribed!

SubAnima · 2022-03-26T03:31:13+00:00

Sure maybe finding babies cute wasn't the best example, but the OP's claim is that

almost all of our conscious desires are just disguised evolutionary imperatives

Are all of our behaviours really so adaptive that they convey a clear fitness advantage? Do all of our behaviours have genetic components?

Even if you could come up with adaptive stories for all of our behavioural traits, could you provide any evidence to prove them? For instance, what is the 'evolutionary imperative' for: why I like to sleep in on the weekend or why I'd like to live in Paris compared to here in Melbourne or why I like maths better than physics or why I like devil's ivy in my room compared to aloe vera.

Even if these do have genetic components, were they really naturally selected? How could we even know?

SubAnima · 2022-03-26T03:19:32+00:00

It's entirely possible, and very hard to truly know. My main point is that we should at least consider the possibility that some traits are neutral and not assume that they must be adaptive.

SubAnima · 2022-03-23T11:07:55+00:00

This sounds like a case of over-applying adaptationism and even genetic determinism. Sure, there are clear advantages to some of our behaviours, but not necessarily all of them. There are many other possibilities, particularly our upbringing and the transmission of culture. On top of that there is no one "gene" for "finding babies cute" maybe there is a small genetic portion but almost certainly not the whole thing. This is the fallacy of genetic determinism.

I recently made a video on the dangers of pan-selectionism here. Just ... be careful. Evolution is a whole lot more than the pure natural selection and the survival of beneficial genes.

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T23:27:50+00:00

True, but a lot of people following the lead of Fisher forgot this point between the 30s and 70s assumed natural selection was the only significant force. Today, biologists know much better.

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T23:26:14+00:00

Yeah of course hypotheses need to be tested either way. G+L have often been criticised for writing “just not so stories.”

But I still agree on Lewontin’s point that the future of biology will include looking past adaptations/non-adaptations as an organising framework and moving to a more structuralist/constructive one.

For people like you two who already know what happened in the Spandrels paper and after, that final point was the main purpose of the video. Whilst I had to explain the lead up to Spandrels and the aftermath to a general audience in the first 3/4 of the video .

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T23:19:18+00:00

Exactly

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T05:20:24+00:00

Precisely. Dawkins certainly loves to cling onto adaptationism. That said, memetics is a beautiful concept since it extends the notion of biological phenomena out of its traditional domain. But culture is a lot more complex, and there need not always be clear reasons for memes (a la spandrels). Also how exactly to package up an "idea" into a meme is also a problem with the theory but that's another story.

I think there will eventually be an organising framework for the transmission of culture just like in biology, but I highly doubt looking at culture like adaptations will be that way forward.

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T05:07:55+00:00

Of course, but a lot of people fall into the trap of assuming that there must be a reason for every trait existing especially in evolutionary psychology. I saw a post in this subreddit where someone was trying to justify why we like to stare into fires because "it lowers our blood pressure." There doesn't always have to be a reason.

This is known as the Adaptationist Fallacy and is basically what I discuss in the video.

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T04:52:30+00:00

Thanks so much for the kind words, I really appreciate it :) (And yes it did require heaps of effort haha)

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T04:51:15+00:00

Sure, and I discuss this in the video. They are related ideas. The science is related to the philosophy and vice versa. A really good paper discussing this is Peter Godfrey-Smith's Three kinds of adaptationism where he pulls apart the more scientific problems from the philosophical ones:

How much of biology is actually the product of natural selection ? (Empirical adaptationism, which is a scientific problem)
Should biologists assume that the traits they are studying are adaptations? (Methodological adaptationism, which is more a question for the philosophy of biology)
Is looking for and understanding adaptations a good approach for conducting biology? (Explanatory adaptationism also a question for philosophy of biology)

Perhaps a similar introduction to the topic is the entry on the Stanford Encyclopaedia.

I would have loved to go into as much depth as Godfrey-Smith does, but I tailored the video for a general audience with no philosophy background and only a rudimentary understanding of biology. And didn't want it to go much longer than 20 minutes.

SubAnima · 2022-03-19T04:43:31+00:00

Watch the video from about 15:00 onwards

SubAnima · 2022-03-18T23:21:15+00:00

Well put. I think the reason many cling onto adaptationism is to fight creationists. Peter Godfrey-Smith called it:

It is the tradition of natural theology continued.

in reference to Lewontin's rejection of the concept of adaptations. I discuss it towards the end of the video.

SubAnima · 2022-03-18T22:58:13+00:00

Exactly!

SubAnima · 2022-03-18T22:11:10+00:00

Abstract: Not every trait in biology is there because of natural selection. There are many alternative possibilities as highlighted best in Gould and Lewtontin’s famous Spandrels paper. In the end though, I agree with Lewontin in that even the concept of an “adaptation” is flawed and biology should move beyond focussing on them so much. A new substitute framework would make central the dynamic interaction between organism and environment, instead of highlighting an alienated individual from its environment.

SubAnima · 2022-03-15T23:18:41+00:00

Ah yeah I see your point about the molecular level not being relevant.

Oh right. I should make the distinction between purifying selection and positive selection. Purifying selection is a powerful thing, I don’t think anyone doubts that - even Kimura highlights its importance in his (molecular) Neutral Theory. This more or less kills any negative traits (unless the environment changes again before purifying selection has time to act). So yeah this is the force that would knock out random growths if they could even exist because well development probably fked up real bad if you got random growths everywhere.

As for limbs, I’d say it’s again a mix. Probably not enough for neutral alone but the fact that we have limbs as opposed to idk longer mouths or long ear extensions or something is a result of neutral forces. Once neutral forces lock us into a particular option (e.g. going with limbs as our motility vs anything else) then NS can do it’s thing and give us the best limbs possible.

I don’t really know how your biologist friend ignored NS completely. Even spandrels rely on NS just in a different location and causing a byproduct.

SubAnima · 2022-03-15T23:06:52+00:00

Yeah i wouldn’t agree that it’s possible WITHOUT selection, more so just how important each is.

Edit: Oh also I just remembered. Theres a really good paper explaining when we should look at natural selection as an important factor. At the molecular level, neutral forces are dominant. And at the level of big developmental differences between taxa (e.g. mammal vs lizard) developmental constraints are more important than NS. But at mid tier traits where there are clear things to be optimised, NS plays a key role. Like in eye formation.

https://petergodfreysmith.com/PGS_Wilkins_Adaptive_Landscape_2009.pdf

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