Logic and intuition

«Logic forms a narrow channel through which intuition flows with vastly augmented force.»

Jordan Ellenberg, How not to be wrong, Chapter How to be right

So why does evolution does not explain everything, and especially culture

Here is summarized the conclusions drawn by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto in his book "A Foot in the River":

Basic to entente biology and history is the acknowledgement of three facts: that culture is not uniquely human; that the existence of culture depends on evolution in the sense that we can only do anything with the physical and cerebral equipment evolution has given us; but that culture also changes independently of evolution, which should not be expected to have infinitely elastic powers of explanation.

(Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes") Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto goes on:

The mutations that make for a multiplicity of culture are different from those that kick off organic changes: they are capricious, but not random; they are devised by minds, not spontaneous; typically, they do not replicate according to the incidence of any advantage, nor does their success or failure respond necessarily to environmental constraints or opportunities.

(Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes")

See this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Uncertainty in science and the bridge to humanities

Felipe describes in his book "A Foot in the River" how, because so-called hard sciences opened the door to the possibility that there is a limit to our knowledge, it also built a bridge toward humanities, the so-called soft sciences:

At least two positive effects have ensued. First, it no longer seems realistic to demand a predictable cosmos, ruled by definitive, unbending laws and bound by links of cause and effect. The causes may still be there, but are often untraceable. The effects may still there but are often untrackable. Second, science has come to seem more approachable and more intelligible from the perspectives of other disciplines: less hard-edged, more yielding; less cocksure, more flexible; less definitive, more open-ended; less confident of solutions, more entranced by problems. After a long period in which humanities and social studies have tried to be more scientific, science has begun to look more like art. Science has let its hair down and become more arty.

(Chapter 8, "Toward the planet of the apes")

See this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Achieving a human understanding

A quote from Marie Curie referenced by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto in his book "A Foot in the River":

"There is nothing to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Another by Isaiah Berlin who explains why we should accept and adopt pluralism:

There is a plurality of values, which men can and do seek...And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding."

Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto goes on:

This position differs from cultural relativism. It does not say, for instance, that all cultures can be accommodated. One might exclude Nazism, say, or cannibalism. It leaves open the possibility of peaceful argument about which culture, if any, is best. It claims, in Berlin's words, 'that the multitude values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men's subjective fancies'."

(All quotes are from Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes")

See also this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Additional quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"There is no reason for God and Darwin to be rival deities--except in the minds clouded by passion"

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

The effort to invoke biology to explain history has failed because it is basically ill conceived. History, to quote a collaboration between an eminent scientist and an eminent historian, is 'too generally messy' for scientific treatment. Societies do not change by transmission and inheritance, but by acquisition and acculturation. History seems unDarwinian precisely because it is a story of the survival of the unfittest. The societies we class as least evolved, least complex, least developed, with fewest parts, last longer--while elaborate civilizations become playgrounds and photo-ops for romancers amid ruins. Culture is just too different from organic life to invite the same kind of explanation. Cells are self-organizing systems that adapt to survive and resist permeation by hostile intrusions from outside. Cultures, by contrast, are built for chaos and as prone to self-destruction as to survival.

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

Quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

"Maybe there no causes to know, or, at least, maybe much that happens is uncaused. Anyone who thinks that everything is explicable as the result of something else--who sees causation as the 'cement of the universe', making each event adhere closely to the next--may be the victim of an unwarranted assumption. 'Just-so' explanations may be the only true ones." (Chapter 3)

A quote from early in Chapter 3 where the author starts to develop his theory that future human events might not be predictable, a theory that goes opposite to that of Pierre-Simon Laplace but is in line (albeit for different reasons) with that of Karl Popper.

"Empathy is the heart of understanding" (Chapter 3)

 A quote that summarizes, according to the author, a principle of anthropological field work as well as of life followed by Franz Boas.

A golden rule of classic style

Below is one of the advice to write a good English classic style according to Steven Pinker in his new wonderful book The Sense of Style:

"keep in mind the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader's gaze to something in the world. [...] Classic style is not the only way to write. But it's an ideal that can pull writers away from many of their worst habits, and it works particularly well because it makes the unnatural act of writing seem like two of our most natural acts: talking and seeing." [italics are mine]

Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style, end of Chapter 2

 

Anne Lamott on Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[…]

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some instructions on Writing and Life.

Thanks for the always informative Brain's Picking Weekly for this quote.

Acting on climate change?

The following is a quote from Sherwood Rowland he made after receiving his noble prize in 1995:

"What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?"

Sherwood Rowland

Poem by William F. O'Brien

Better To Try And Fail Than Never To Try At All

Some say risk nothing, try only for the sure thing,
Others say nothing gambled nothing gained,
Go all out for your dream.
Life can be lived either way, but for me,
I'd rather try and fail, than never try at all, you see.

Some say "Don't ever fall in love,
Play the game of life wide open,
Burn your candle at both ends."
But I say "No! It's better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all, my friend."

When many moons have gone by,
And you are alone with your dreams of yesteryear,
All your memories will bring you cheer.
You'll be satisfied, succeed or fail, win or lose,
Knowing the right path you did choose.

William F. O'Brien

In praise of "negative" results

It is unfortunate that a scientist is more likely to publish a "positive" result rather than a "negative" one. By "positive", I mean a result that demonstrates or supports a new hypothesis and by "negative", I mean a result that shows that a hypothesis is either wrong or incomplete. This tendency comes mainly from our human fallibility (we don't get known by publishing only "negative" results) and by the pressure on our own career (we don't hire somebody that never shows any "positive" result).

Why do I seem to insist on the importance of "negative" results? There are at least two reasons for this. The first reason is a practical one. Because "negative" results are not published and occur overwhelmingly more often than "positive" ones, it is likely that researchers are reproducing the same "negative" results over and over.

The second reason is a more fundamental one and has been advocated by the famous modern statistician R. Fischer (Gigerenzer et al. 1997). Scientists always deal with noise in the data. It is very rare to demonstrate with great certainty that a hypothesis is true from a single study because of the presence of noise. Publishing more "negative" results would enable the whole scientific community to get closer to the Truth by updating in one direction or another our belief that the hypothesis is true. This attitude is very much in line with a Bayesian approach according to which you update the probability that the hypothesis is true in face of new results. A "positive" result will increase this probability, a "negative" one would decrease it, and the process would end until we reach great certainty that the hypothesis is either true or not (in which case, the hypothesis may need to be modified).

I hope the scientific community will one day follow this approach.

Reference

Gigerenzer et al. 1997, The Empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life. University of Cambridge.

Quotes from astronauts on seeing the Blue Marble

These quotes were given in the EOS issue of Dec. 4, 2012, published by the American Geophysical Union:

Astronaut Russell Scheickhart, in describing his experience from space on the Apollo 9 mission said, “When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing. And that makes a change. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the Earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?’”

Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan has reflected about his experience on that flight: “You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you’re looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens—the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and we know, it’s home, it’s people, family, love, life—and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up, and it’s moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.”

See this post on my own impression of the "Blue Marble" picture shown above.

Popper's falsification expressed in Bayesian terms

Popper's idea that there is only falsification and no such thing as confirmation turns out to be incorrect. Bayes' Theorem shows that falsification is very strong evidence compared to confirmation, but falsification is still probabilistic in nature; it is not governed by fundamentally different rules from confirmation, as Popper argued.

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem.

A quote from Horace

Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

Courir au-delà des mers, c'est changer de climat, mais non changer de cœur.

Those who hurry cross the sea change their sky but not their soul or state of mind.

Horace, Epistulae I, 11 v. 27.

Chance and free will

To defend free will was not, of course, to insist on the operation of pure chance. Most thinkers still saw objective chance as virtually impossible, and few were prepared to identify the rational will with it. But at least the connotations of chance had changed. Previously it had seemed impiuous to allow chance a role in the world, as if God did not attend to every sparrow. Now chance stood for the incompleteness of mechanical law, for the possibility of non-material causation.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, section 2.6. This joins the defense of free will laid down by K. Popper as I noticed in this post and this note. See also this post as well as the work on incompleteness by Gregory Chaitlin.

Vagabond

"Le Vagabond ne regrettait plus rien. Il ne désirait que l'infinie durée de ce qui était."

"La tête appuyée sur son bras replié, les membres las, il s'abandonnait à la douceur infinie de s'endormir seul, inconnu parmi les hommes simples et rudes, à même la terre, la bonne terre berceuse, en un coin de désert qui n'avait pas de nom et où il ne reviendrait jamais"

Isabelle Eberhardt, Le Vagabond, in Amours nomades.

Science explaining the battle of sexes?

R. Dawkins takes notice of the comment made in a scientific paper written by  Schuster and Sigmund:

Briefly, then, we can draw two conclusions: (a) that the battle of sexes has much in common with predation; and (b) that the behavior of lovers is oscillating like the moon, and unpredictable as the weather. Of course, people didn't need differential equations to notice this before.

Schuster and Sigmund (1981), Coyness, philandering and stable strategies, in Animal Behavior, 29, 186-92. Quoted by R. Dawkins in the note of p. 153 in his 30th anniversary paperback edition of The Selfish Gene.

Self-reference, once again, once again

Another comment, this time from the biologist Richard Dawkins, that shows that importance of self-reference:

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 4, The gene machine.

See this post and this one on self-reference. See also the last line of G. Chaitin quoted in this post.

The overly importance of the reference

Il y a une quinzaine d'années, dans l'examen d'admission au volontariat d'un an, les examinateurs militaires donnèrent pour dictée aux candidats une page sans signature qui, citée dans divers journaux, y fut raillée avec beaucoup de verve et excita la gaieté de lecteurs très lettrés. "Où ces militaires, demandait-on, étaient-ils allés chercher des phrases si baroques et si ridicules?" Ils les avaient prises pourtant dans un très beau livre. C'était du Michelet, et du meilleur, du Michelet du plus beau temps. Messieurs les officiers avaient tiré le texte de leur dictée de cette éclatante description de la France par laquelle le grand écrivain termine le premier volume de son Histoire et qui en est un des morceaux les plus estimés. [...] J'ai vu des connaisseurs rire de ce style, qu'ils croyaient celui de quelque vieux capitaine. Le plaisant qui riait le plus fort était un grand zélateur de Michelet. Cette page est admirable, mais, pour être admirée d'un consentement unanime, faut-il encore qu'elle soit signée. Il en va de même de toute page écrite de main d'homme. Par contre, ce qu'un grand nom recommande a chance d'être loué aveuglément.

Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure, Chateaux de cartes.

Savoir ignorer

Dans la nuit où nous sommes tous, le savant se cogne au mur, tandis que l'ignorant reste tranquillement au milieu de la chambre.

Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure, À Lucien Blahfeld.