Introduction

For the last day and a half I have been attending the Sacker Colloquium entitled In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition. Overall, it has been quite interesting, despite some disappointing talks. I intend with this post to briefly describe some of the more interesting talks that have occurred.

Opening Talk — E. O. Wilson

The opening talk of the colloquium was given by E. O. Wilson, mainly regarding the 4 great books of Darwin. The most distinctive claim he made — in addition to numerous anecdotes and facts about Darwin and other things — was that biological knowledge is now firm enough to be called a body of laws. In particular, he had in mind first that biological processes are all subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, and second that diversity and processes are the result of natural selection. While I do not know nearly enough biology to comment on the correctness of these principles, they do seem to make a lot of sense. Unfortunately (though perhaps by design) the talk did not present detailed evidence for the claims. The more important thing, however, is the directional proposal he presented. That is, he promoted focus on the question of the reason for the rarity of transitions.

An Introduction to Hominin Evolution — Bernard Wood

Bernard Wood gave an interesting talk that highlighted some of the potential pitfalls in hominin(e) taxonomy that I had not previously considered. Specifically, he was concerned about the importance of extinct branches of the tree of life for placing fossils. One such example that was recently discovered was ar. ramidus. This fossil was billed as the most recent discovered common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, but there are other things to consider. That is, there is definitive reason to place ramidus as a direct ancestor to modern humans as opposed to on a branch that left the directly ancestral track between the chimp/human split. The point of the talk was to support a more detailed study of morphology in taxonomy.

Peopling the Planet Out of Africa — Doug Wallace

In an attempt to provide a comprehensive story of what drives the evolution of biological complexity, Doug Wallace presented a story based on energy. Drawing a parallel with thermodynamics and the natural decay of complexity in the absence of energy flux, he presented a view where biological adaptation was focused on aspects of energy acquisition and use. Biological niches are basically adaptations to caches of energy, regional adaptations are adaptations to energy distribution, and individual adaptations are in response to local energy variations. In order to support this, he focused on the role of mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA. The major tool for differing scales of adaptation, he argued, were the rapid mutation of mitochondrial DNA. I wish I could provide more details of this talk, but it was very technical and very fast.

Modern Human Evolutionary History in Africa — Sarah Tishkoff

Another interesting talk regarded the application of genetic tools to understanding human history. Sarah Tishkoff presented work she was involved in regarding this, especially with regard to identifying genetic differences in groups across Africa. In particular, she focused on the history of lactose tolerance/intolerance in various sub-populations. Through a variety of techniques, she was able to identify three separate developments of mutations promoting lactose tolerance, two of which are distinct from the mutations promoting lactose tolerance in Northern European populations. The ability to identify the coevolution and spread of these genetic features was fascinating.

Population Genetic Inference in the Personal Genome Era — Carlos Bustamante

Though this was yet another very technical talk for which I do not have a proper background to relate in detail, Carlos Bustamante presented some work which was still fascinating even in a broad-strokes picture. His work was an attempt to derive historical details from individual genetics. One particularly interesting (and scary) application was the ability to identify very reliably the country of origin in Europe of someone (even within as little as 200 miles) given their genetic heritage. The basic tool for this was Principle Component analyses, but it did sound like he and his collaborators had developed some even more effective tools for similar analyses. As I said before, this was quite interesting, but also very scary in a Gattaca sort of way.

Uniquely Human Changes in Sialic Acid Biology — Ajit Varki

The second of the talks on the second day of the conference was, in my opinion, quite awesome. Ajit Varki presented work of him and various collaborators regarding an evolutionary picture of human genetics and immunology. Apparently, there are two common markers for cells in various organisms — Neu5Ac and Neu5Gc. Humans, unlike chimpanzees and most other organisms no longer exhibit Neu5Gc. However, it was this that allowed self-cells to be readily identified. Without it, many pathogens became more effective at impersonating self-cells. So the human body developed other means for identifying pathogens through marking Neu5Gc, which many still contain. But human cells are also capable of “eating” Neu5Gc, which is present in many red meat and milk products.

Moreover, the identification and eradication mechanisms based on Neu5Gc also seem to be connected with a wide variety of chronic disorders, including autoimmune diseases, cancers, and many more. This seems to be a very important discovery, and I would love to read more about it.

There are three more talks to come yet this afternoon, so I may be posting an update later today if they seem worth mentioning.

This week is currently the start of 18th grade for me and the other students at UC Irvine, so I thought I might take a moment to review what I’ll be studying this quarter and some plans for the long term.

Study List

This quarter is my first heavy foray into the game theory part of the LPS department. Not only will I be taking the perennial Social Dynamics seminar, but I will also be studying learning in games through a seminar which will be reading The Theory of Learning in Games by Fudenberg and Levine, as well as parts of Strategic Learning and its Limits by H. Peyton Young. Hopefully by the end of the quarter I will be sufficiently caught up in the game theory that might be relevant for future work I’ll be doing.

I am also taking a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and one called Geometry and Spacetime. The first I am taking primarily because I need to fill a requirement, but the second could turn out to be quite interesting. At the very least, the first four weeks or so will be some interesting math.

Future Plans

At this point, I am virtually certain that I will be trying to focus on something in the neighborhood of evolutionary game theory. The field is quite interesting, though I feel quite behind on the literature and current status still. There is a nice mixture of programming, math, and philosophy such that I shouldn’t get bored with it anytime remotely soon.

Over the summer, I also started to introduce myself to topics in philosophy of biology, which tends to crop up a lot in the neighborhood of game theory, probably due to the evolutionary nature of a lot of the work being done around here. Though it may not be the most detailed introduction, I recommend Darwin by Tim Lewens. I gave what I thought was a nice overview of many standard phil-bio topics and their relevance to Darwin’s works.

I also have been working heavily on a paper in game theory considering more in-depth the connections between combinatorial communication and deception that I was introduced to in Lachmann and Bergstrom’s “The disadvantage of combinatorial communication.” Though it is still not properly framed, I have high hopes that it may turn into a paper for my portfolio, which is due in approximately one year.

Having just gotten back from working for CTY and visiting the parents for the last couple weeks, I thought I would write a bit about my CTY experience.

Since I have had virtually no experience working with the age group CTY is targeted at (that is, 7th-10th grade, ages 12-16 roughly), I was rather unsure what to expect. I was hired to be a teaching assistant for a mathematical logic course, which really is supposed to be fast-paced symbolic logic with some mathematical connections from what I understood, so I was confident in the material I would have to explain. The real worry for me was trying to keep everyone interested. Granted, theoretically each of them had chosen the class — no one was taking it to fulfill a requirement or anything. However, as it turned out, that wasn’t exactly the case. Several of the kids were in the class by parental decision, and a couple more had not quite understood the course description, but things seemed to turn out rather well.

CTY is structured so that the kids are in class for about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week for three weeks. Effectively, this works out to a rough correspondence of a day in CTY-land to a week of a college course, meaning that about a semester’s worth of material is covered in three weeks. Although a large majority of the class I was responsible for kept interested and up-to-date on the assigned work quite well, there were others that were a challenge. If I am able to go back in the future, trying to build techniques for keeping people interested is something I will need to focus on a bit more.

Overall, working for CTY was a really good experience for me. I had the opportunity to lecture for a couple days and gained a lot of classroom management experience (in addition to recognizing a number of things on which I need to improve). I am very excited to be able to work there again, though next summer may prove quite difficult since it is the summer during which a lot of portfolio work tends to get done, historically.

Now that I am back in Irvine, I am trying to get down to work on finishing up the two papers that I did not get to complete during the last school year — namely one on Reichenbach’s notion of the a priori and one on some aspects of game theory, deception, and value of information. Hopefully I will be able to finish both before the start of fall quarter.

Edit: I’ve also started reading Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, so I should have some thoughts about that to post soon as well.

So I am still writing papers to hopefully not have to take an incomplete. One class is done, and the other is mostly done, though it seems I need to revise my thesis slightly to be somewhat less ambitious and, as a result, go back and edit and extend the discussion.

I should hopefully have some time to read and post some interesting thoughts beginning again next week.

I am still working on papers, so there hasn’t been much time to think about anything interestingly new. However, I would like to mention something that would make life much easier.

I think it would be an awesome addition to the field of philosophy to develop the equivalent of the AMS’s MathSciNet for philosophical publications. Not only does MathSciNet provide reviews of papers and books in a centralized place, it also provides for the exportation of references and abstracts. Seeing as most of my papers use Bibtex for reference management, a centralized service for philosophical papers with the ability to export a Bibtex reference would be far superior to the Google Scholar/manual entry method I have to use at the moment.

Granted, getting something like MathSciNet off the ground for philosophy would be amazingly difficult, but it might be worth it.

So I don’t have anything particularly philosophical to write about since I am still in the trenches on papers, but I thought I would give a small personal update.

Soon (as in, within the next week) I will be interviewing for an instructor job teaching mathematical logic to 7th+ graders for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth at their site in Hong Kong for three weeks this summer. Although it would be a ton of work getting prepared to actually be the instructor for the class, I think it would be a lot of fun to get to teach an accelerated logic sequence to a group of bright, motivated students. The course is supposed to cover about a week of sentential logic, a week of quantifier-predicate logic and a week of elementary set theory.

If that falls through, there is still the possibility of working for the Philosophy of Science Association doing a website re-design. I have not heard anything back from that in a little while, so I’m not getting my hopes up. If all else fails, I suppose I’ll be trying to find a local job.

So I found the following idea in the book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig (specifically at the beginning of chapter 26). The following bit on philosophy vs. philosophology doesn’t have anything particularly to do with the main ideas of the book, but being a philosophy grad student, it got me thinking a bit. Hence, I thought I would share it.

Pirsig makes a distinction between philosophy and philosophology. The former is to the latter, he claims, as art is to art history, music to musicology, or creative writing to literary criticism. I take this distinction to be pointing out something like actual creative philosophy versus historical philosophy. “It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.”(370) Having made this distinction, though, he goes on to note how, unlike artists, musicians, and writers, the ranks of pure philosophers are virtually empty. That is, almost everything that goes around calling itself philosophy is actually philosophology. New ideas that might have come up are often compared with Old-Dead-White-Guys¹ and found inferior.

However, he doesn’t just comment on this, but makes a potentially useful suggestion: figure out what you think first, and then compare it to Old-Dead-White-Guys. By proceeding in this way, you can better see the similarities and differences with other philosophers without simply getting carried away in their quite persuasive rhetoric. Furthermore, if you have strong personal views, then considering classical objections to similar Old-Dead-White-Guys may incite deeper consideration and perhaps revision of your own views instead of just abandoning a “Kant/Hume/Rawls/Quine was right” position. “You’re not limited by any dead-ends of [their] thought and can often see ways of going around [them].”(372)

I’m quite interested by this, and will be keeping it in mind as I progress through the program here. My initial reaction is that both philosophy and philosophology are taught here, but I think I need to pay more careful attention.

¹ By Old-Dead-White-Guys I simply mean already-existing philosophy.

I stumbled upon this today and found it very interesting, so I thought I’d share: TED: Ken Robinson on Creativity

Edit: Also, this reminded me of this article that someone shared with me a while back: The New Yorker — Most Likely to Succeed

Since I am still (and ever-more) involved in planning and writing several papers, I thought instead of writing a substantial post today, I would offer some interesting quotes for pondering (n.b. I do not necessarily agree with any of the views in the following).

The Quotes

When living in their original independence, [men] do not have sufficiently stable relationships among themselves to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war. (Rousseau, On the Social Contract Bk. 1, Ch. 4)

Suppose, for example, you are in the middle of a conversation with a friend who suddenly glances behind you. Furthermore, suppose that you quickly follow his gaze, but then immediately return to the conversation with hardly a break at all. Now, what if you are later asked why you turned and looked away. Most likely you would confidently claim that you did so because you wanted to know what your friend was looking at. We contend that this self-report is often not derived from propositional memories of what you had earlier known through introspection, nor from a current vivid recollection of the behavior and the mental states that purportedly attended it. Rather, we suggest that, at the time when it occurred, the behavior was generated by low-level psychological mechanisms unrelated to second-order mental states. (Povinelli and Giambrone, Folk Physics for Apes, 70)

When abstract, nonintuitive formulas, as, e.g., Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, were proposed as new axioms, physicists endeavored to make them “intuitive” by constructing a “model”, i.e., a way or representing electromagnetic micro-processes by an analogy to known macro-processes, e.g., movements of visible things. Many attempts have been made in this direction but without satisfactory results. It is important to realize that the discovery of a model has no more than an aesthetic or didactic or at best a heuristic value, but it is not at all essential for a successful application of the physical theory. (Carnap Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, section 25)

[Kant] explained… that the most general laws of nature are the principles of our knowledge or nature (as principles of the possibility of experience). In other words… he identified the self-evident general statements of natural science with the principles that constitute the objects of experience. (Schlick, letter to Reichenbach, qtd. in Coffa, The semantic tradition from Kant to Carnap, 201)

Yesterday I met with a professor about a paper I had written for a course last quarter. Although it needs a lot of work in general, I was happy to find out that it seems promising for turning into a portfolio paper. Even better, it was quite interesting to work on, and should provide something nice and engaging to work on over the summer to get it into shape. Nothing much else to write about today since I am working heavily on drafts of papers.