A recent meta-analysis on the old question of nature vs. nurture (Meta-Analysis of Twin Correlations and Heritability) concluded that overall the variation of human traits and disease is 49% due to genetic factors and 51% due to environmental factors. There is a similar question about nature vs. culture in anthropology and education. Evolutionary theory is […]
Accuracy refers to closeness of measurements to the true value. Precision refers to variation of measurements to each other. So precision is relative but accuracy is absolute. Accuracy and precision can apply to statements as well as measurements. For example, if I say, “Today is Tuesday. This is the third day of the week.” but
There is a kind of complementarity between Catholics and Evangelicals today. Very briefly, accepting the authority of the Pope is the key to being a Catholic today. There seems to be little else that unites the bewildering variety of Catholics, from Latin mass hard-liners to Marxist liberation theologians and from the superstitious to the intellectuals. Accepting
The real scientific method is the inductive method invented by Socrates and elaborated by Aristotle, Bacon, and Whewell. It is different from the hypothetico-deductive method invented by JS Mill in the 19th century which is passed off as the method of modern science. Consider Francis Bacon. He called immature concepts “notions”. Induction starts with notions
Philosophical realism, or simply realism, is a philosophy that begins where we all begin: with our common sense, our common everyday experience. When Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Berkeley’s idealist philosophy with his “I refute Berkeley thus” and then kicked a rock, he was asserting realism in contrast with idealism. There are basically two kinds of anti-realist
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has invented a right to marriage that extends (so far) to any two non-married adults, many articles have been written criticizing the Court. Some have called same-sex marriage a legal fiction, apparently using that as a simple pejorative rather than a legal term. I’m not a lawyer but I
Same-sex civil marriage has become legal in various jurisdictions and states. What should those do who do not recognize the moral validity of these marriages? This has become an issue for people personally and in business. Consider the latter first. There have been cases of a photographer and a baker: what should they do if customers
Ancient Greek astronomy distinguished the ordered cosmos of the superlunary world from the disordered chaos of the sublunary world [see Remi Brague’s book The Wisdom of the World, English translation 2003, University of Chicago Press]. Isaac Newton undermined this distinction with his laws of physics published in 1687 by showing that universal gravitation accounted for
The problem with evolutionary theology — theology that accepts universal evolution — is not that it denies the creation of the universe (it doesn’t) but that it minimizes the role of the creator. From the evolutionary position that’s exactly the point: explain as much as possible without reference to God, the supernatural, or the miraculous.
Creationism in a philosophical/scientific context was first propounded by Socrates (David Sedley, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, 2007). Socrates did not provide specifics but it is often said that Plato and Aristotle did: biological species were like logical species and so did not change — species were fixed — and purportedly this is what creationists have
