Re: No Such Thing As "Macro" Evolution

Walter Bushell wrote:
> In article <dn0640$20e9$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>Well this is, I think, true of vague concepts as well, only in different
>>degree. There is some slop in *any* concept, no matter how well defined
>>or circumscribed it is, in biology (and probably in every domain, no
>>matter what, with the *possible* exception of mathematics).
>
> There is no slop in the concepts in physics. The engineers or the
> physicist wearing an engineering hat may apply fudge factors etc. but
> that is strictly speaking outside the theory. In physics, there are
> ideal gas law, but physicists will state there are no ideal gasses.

Vaueness in philosophy means indeterminacy of reference. There have been, and
still remain, examples of vagueness in physics of that kind (for example, the
Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle to use a well-worn stock example). I think
that terms like "mass", "momentum", and "field" are all vague concepts, of
have been at one point in their history.
>
> In mathematics we _formally_ don't care about what we are talking.
> Thereby allowing anyone else with a structurally isomorphic situation to
> use the same machinery.

Yes, that is true.
>
>
>>A vague concept can be falsified if sufficient cases are not what the concept
>>includes. "Sufficient" varies from domain and concept to domain and concept,
>>but there is usually some region of the semantic space that is excluded by it
>>(or it's not a concept at all).
>
>
> Maybe fuzzy logic could be applied the species concept. For example, one
> might say (and here the numbers are wild assumed guesses) that a coyote
> has .1 membership in the dog species, calculated from gene flow. Some
> coyotes might have more membership in the species dog than others, given
> proximity to gene flow nexi.

Fuzzy logic is only one of several kinds of vagueness. I had it in mind once
that we might have a notion for sexual species of "reproductive reach", the
inverse of reproductive isolation. This is a multiply-realised property (it
might be genetic, it might be post-zygotic, it might be behavioural) that
admits of degrees (it might be frequency of successful crosses per million
interactions, it might be the propensity of the parental forms to interbreed,
or it might be the Bayesian likelihood of a successful outcome over several
generations given the background information we have of the biological processes).
>
>
> There you can have the sloppiness and scientific rigor too.
>

Without slop, science would come to a halt. With too much, it would evaporate.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
Nihil tam absurdum quod non quidam Philosophi dixerit - adapted from Cicero

.

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