Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host Muslim population. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, in this episode, we're asking, what is philosophy of science good for Beaubois? Philosophy of science is subfield of philosophy that scrutinizes the overall methodology of science, what its goals are, what its assumptions are. And it also deals with questions from particular disciplines of science like biology or physics, not with the intention of actually solving empirical questions in those fields, but instead figuring out what the right questions are that we should be asking and how we should interpret the empirical findings that the scientists gather.

Philosophy of science also happens to be the domain of my excellent co-host, Massimo Puchi. So, Massimo, how is that definition? Do you want to add to it?

Oh, that sounds good. As as a starting point, actually. What brought up the topic for this podcast is an interview that I read recently with Alex Rozenberg, who is author of one of the most prominent philosophy of science textbooks out there. It's called Philosophy Science, a contemporary introduction published by Routledge. And so Rosenberg was because the new version of his book is coming out, he was interviewed and and asked those questions about philosophy, science. I mean, we obviously are not going to go through the interview, but I thought that the questions that he was asked, as well as some of the answers were sort of a very good skeleton for for this kind of discussion.

As it as it happens. I actually disagree with some of Rosenberg's take on it, but but not as much as I thought actually, the first time around when I when I read these things. So the first thing to figure out, I think, was to talk about it is probably what is the relationship between philosophy of science and science, because that is one of the bones of contention among not only philosophers but scientists and pretty much anybody else who asks me about this kind of thing.

I would call the relation Rocky.

Rocky, I think is fair description, although it varies from field to field and it varies from time to time. So, for instance, in early 20th century physics, the relationship was actually very good. Nobody who was a self respecting physicist from Einstein down was ignorant of or uninformed by philosophy of science. These days, the situation is more complicated. I mean, we're talked about in the past and in fact, pretty recently about Stephen Hawking dismissing philosophy because he hasn't done anything for science recently.

Pretty much the same position has been taken several years ago by Steven Weinberg, another Nobel physics physicist who wrote an entire essay entitled Against Philosophy.

And then there is the famous Richard Feynman quip that that philosophy of science is interesting to a scientist as ornithology is to birds, actually.

So that quote I I've always that is widely misinterpreted. So when I read that quote, I think it was a philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to. Yes, I believe.

And so people usually take that to be Feynman dissing philosophy of science. But I don't actually think he was. I mean, I don't know the exact context of the quote, but I interpreted it to be saying that philosophy of science isn't actually trying to be useful to scientists the same way ornithology isn't trying to be useful to birds. And no one thought ornithology is useless because it doesn't help birds. Right.

So I suspect it's actually misunderstood fundamentally. I tend to agree.

I don't agree. In fact, Rosenberg quotes Feynman, but immediately then and in the interview that I was mentioning, but then immediately adds and by the way, Feynman is arguably one of the most philosophical, informed fellow physicists of the 20th century. In fact, Feynman wrote an interesting book. Well, as you know, he didn't really write that many books. Books have been written based on his lectures and all that.

After he died. The guy has had more posthumous books published under his name than anybody in recent memory. But one of those books was, I think the subtitle was a thought of a citizen scientist. And the meaning of it all is the thought of it. And the subtitle is Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist.

And actually that book is highly philosophical. It talks about the meaning of science and the limits of science. It talks about the difference between science and religion. And so it's very well informed by both flavorsome. So it's hard to imagine that that Feynman actually meant that quote about our mythology that way. But of course, there are several, you know, comebacks to that quote that people have tried by more or birds don't understand ornithology because their brains are too puny.

The implication of that point is left in its reply. That's OK, because we're subtle about these kinds of things, or, for instance, that, well, birds will go extinct if it were not for ornithologists who are actually contributing to protect the bird species and so on and so forth. I mean, there is all sorts of cancers like. Imagine the five huddled together coming up with their interests. Yes, exactly. Ready for some the more convincing than others, right.

Because it's hard to imagine that physics will go extinct because philosophers are protected.

But nevertheless, I think I do think that regardless of the Feynman quote, the that sort of attitude or philosophy of science is fairly widespread in physics today. Not so much in biology.

And there may be one reason for that may be that there is actually quite a bit of collaboration between biologists and particular evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science. It is one of the richest areas of interaction between the two fields. So in part, you know, the attitude, your attitude towards something depends on how useful or well acquainted you are. Right with that.

Can I ask about the you were describing how the relationship between physicists and philosophers of physics changed over the decades and was there actually I mean, my sense is that there's a pretty clear separation now between physicists and philosophers of physics. Has it always been that way or have the fields become more distinct over time?

No, actually, I think it's that's a good question. And I think actually it's more complicated than that. It's not actually the case that there is more of a distinction. Now, for instance, if you look at philosophy of quantum mechanics, because first of all, these days, nobody does philosophy of physics. It's too broad. They tend to be people tend to be much more specialized. So, for instance, philosophy or quantum mechanics. Now, from my understanding, which is admittedly limited because quantum mechanics is definitely not my field, but I have colleagues who work in that area and in philosophy, quantum mechanics, philosophy of theoretical physics and even philosophy in mathematics.

The situation is such that often enough philosophers and physicists, theoretical physicists contribute papers, co-author papers or contribute papers to a physics journal that is essentially impossible to distinguish or very hard to distinguish, let's say, from a standard theoretical physics paper now, which means that there is quite a bit of collaboration going on there. However, the attitude still in broad field of physics remains. And I think that a good analysis of that attitude was produced by a book that we mentioned several times in the podcast, which is these moments the trouble with physics.

I think we mentioned the first time, certainly within the context of string theory, because it is one of the two major books published in the last few years that is critical of string theory. But simoleons analysis is interesting because in the first part of the book, it goes through the whole, you know, quantum mechanics and string theory of relativity issue. But the second part of the book is, is, is take on the philosophy, sociology and even psychology of science and physics in particular.

And his claim is that the current generation of theoretical physicists, physicists, unlike previous generations, tend to subscribe to the so-called shut up and calculate view of physics. That is, they're not that interested in sort of the metaphysical implications or the interpretations of their theories. They're interested in the fact that quantum mechanics works here. It is. It's a tool. And it doesn't really our job as business is not to be concerned with what it means. And that sort of things that kind of attitude would have been very strange to say Einstein, Bor or any of that generation.

I see. So one thing that confuses me about philosophers of physics, publishing, co., publishing papers with physicists is it's especially nowadays in physics.

It seems like the the topics in quantum physics string theory are so complex, so sophisticated in the math involved, so complicated that I've wondered how it is that philosophers.

Well, I actually I don't know how much training you have to have in, say, quantum physics to be a philosopher of quantum physics.

But a bit it's got to be really you're right. They do have to take the math classes or how much of the actual physics do they then the trend recently in some areas.

Now, this is definitely not across the board, but the trend in some areas of philosophy of science, particularly philosophy, physics, philosophy, mathematics, which some people consider a part of philosophy, science, some consider a separate field, but whatever and philosophy of biology, the trend is that actually, yes, we do have to take quite a bit of quite a few classes in grad school in the whatever the field is not a not an insignificant number of philosophers actually get a master's degree in that particular area and then they continue studies.

That has to be certainly the case in quantum philosophy, quantum mechanics, because it is incredibly complicated and it's highly mathematical.

So you simply can't get away with saying anything meaningful in that area unless you understand the math. Now, that said, it's also a very small field. You know, there's only a few hundred probably physicists that work in some of those areas. And this there's probably a couple of dozen philosophers work in that area. So we're not talking a huge, huge crowd here.

I mean, if there are only a hundred a few hundred birds in the world, I'm sure we wouldn't have that many ornithologists. That's right. Although. Species would be, in fact, close to extinction at that point.

Another question I had was whether so you pointed to examples of physicists like Feynman who were very philosophical and they write about I mean, and I guess Lee Smolin would also come and I'm assuming they didn't have training in philosophy.

So is there something about the philosophy of physics or philosophy of other scientific fields that makes it the exclusive domain of philosophers, or is it the sort of thing that scientists could do if they cared to?

Well, I think that goes for any field of care. If you really care about learning about quantum mechanics, you don't have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics. It's probably the best way to do it.

But I mean, Feynman actually study philosophy before he wrote that.

No, he gave those lectures or was it just sort of and I'm curious about whether the background in science is enough to make the philosophical arguments or whether you also need a background in philosophy?

I think it is. I don't think it is now. I can't talk about family specifically because I'm not, you know, already two biographies. I don't recall enough details about his background, but it's certainly for a lot of philosophy. Sorry for a lot of physicists, physicists, the early 20th century in Europe, philosophical, some kind of philosophical training was part of your studies. You would you would take philosophy classes. Oh, interesting. In fact, you still do today if you you know, when I went to high school, I took three years of philosophy when I was in college.

So that wasn't certainly not an unusual situation. Now, the other thing is when I said that, for instance, Feynman book, the meaning of it all has a philosophical bent.

It's clear that he has read in that book. It's clear that he has read some of the major philosophers. Now you can read accessible works by some of the major philosophers. I'm talking philosophers of science. Not conter, right. Oh. So you can read, for instance, the structure of scientific revolutions and you ought to be able to understand it even if you don't have a strong background in philosophy.

Well, the sociologist read it out there.

Yes, of course. Well, let's not get there now. But you're right. So it's a different kind of expertise. But that is true, I think, of pretty much anything. And outside of very few fields of science, I mean, I would wager that very few people can get to say meaningful things about quantum mechanics, but a lot of people can say even without a background in biology, you can say meaningful, meaningful things about evolutionary biology, for instance, because it is the kind of field that we're more or less difficulty.

But you can master on your own or you can master from books and that sort of stuff. Now, doing actual research in it, it's a different matter. But but being able to comment meaningfully about it, I think that's much more likely physic theoretical physics is, I think, in its own domain.

I think we should probably talk about some major examples of questions and philosophy of science. I mean, I guess you could give examples from philosophy of biology, but if you know of any other sort of major questions and philosophy of physics or other areas, I'd love to hear those, too.

Well, so, first of all, I want to step back for a second and make a distinction among, I'd say, three broad areas of philosophy of science, because some of them are actually directly related to this, to the practice of scientists, but some of them are not. And I think that failure to distinguish between these is one of the things that that brings up all these attitude, postering and resentment and all that sort of stuff. And I would say so, for instance, there clearly are areas, the ones, as we talked about so far, where physicists and philosophers of physics or biologists and philosophers of biology actually published on the same area in the same area, and they contributed the same areas.

For instance, the species concept discussions in biology or the levels of selection discussions in biology.

Those are clearly areas where philosophers and theoretical biologists have contributed.

And what are those questions? So the questions, for instance, of the species going to do well? What do we mean by species is peace is a pluralist concept. There are more is there more than one kind of species out there? Is it you know, is it a universal concept that applies to all kinds of of biological organisms? How do we define it? What are the best criteria for defining species and so on and so forth? Now, the obvious issue there will be.

Well, isn't that an empirical question? It turns out it's not because we know about it. It's not entirely an empirical question clearly has to be informed by empirical information. And if you don't know anything about saying mating habits of plants as opposed to Drosophila melanogaster or something like that, then you're not going to be able to comment. But that is not enough in the market that it's not enough. Is that demonstration that that's not enough is that we know quite a bit about a variety of different kinds of species across.

Different. And yet there's still some fairly major disagreement about among biologists themselves about what's what kinds of things species are. But there has been progress. So, for instance, there are several kinds of species that have been eliminated at this point. Almost nobody out. Nobody is left either in philosophy or in biology that considers them viable like one. Well, pretty much so.

Any any any morphologically based definition of species is out as being out of the window for a long time, having the same shape.

Yeah, and it's more than sense. There is something called there was something called the phonetic kinds of species concept, which which was the idea. This was very popular in the 60s and early 70s. The idea was that, well, if you measure enough attributes, not just morphology, but also biochemical attributes, DNA, whatever, you can get ahold of behavior and then you feed all this information in a computer. The computer will separate these these things into clusters.

And the classes were identified as well that went out the window the same and then the nice and clean.

I know it does.

That was the original plan, except that it turned out not to be nice or clean. And pretty much everybody has as agreed that this is not a way to go now. Currently, the two major contenders are some some kind of genetically related concept of species. There's more than one variety. So based on genetic information versus the standard biological species concept, which has been the dominant one in biology for a long time, which is based on reproductive isolation and want to explain what the phylogenetic.

Yeah, so the genetic came out of of of the so-called coloristic revolution, which is a whole area of study in systematic biology where people have now refined a good number of methods to figure out what a genetic tree looks like, given a certain number of species, or what are the relationships of the common descent between different species or different taxa, not necessarily species. Now, some philosophers and a good number of biologists, many biologists have proposed that if a genetic criterion is the best way to think about species, so, for instance, species could be defined as a monophyletic lineage.

There are problems there because, you know, depending on what you're talking about, different things might count as a genetic lineage, a monophyletic lineage. So it's not quite that easy, but that seems to be the one that is winning at the moment. One of the variations on the genetic basis concept is winning. The other question that I mentioned was the level of selection issues. That is, what are the targets of selection? What kind of things constitute an organism that can be a unit that can be selected upon?

So Darwin started out by essentially saying that that's that unit is the individual. So individuals are selected. Populations of individuals evolve. Dawkins and popularised the idea in the 70s due to mostly Hamilton and Williams, that, well, it's actually the gene, that real unit of selection is the gene.

So traits that are advantageous to the unit, to the gene are the ones that persist. That's right. That's right.

They're the ones that are selected. Then later on, David Sloan, Wilson and others came up with strong arguments in favor of group selection. And and then finally, in 1975, paleontologist by the name of Stanley published a fundamental paper arguing on the basis of Stephen Gould and now the theory of punctuated equilibrium that actually species themselves can be selected can be the units of selection. Interesting.

And so that group of names you just listed were philosophers.

So the Gould was obviously not a philosopher, but he was markedly influenced by both its philosophy of science. But the question is, so the rest were all biologists except that then they started disagreeing about which one was the right, the right answer. And that's where the philosophers came in, because the first question the philosophers would ask was, well, what do you mean by unit of selection? You know, how do you how do you thinking are you thinking what are the criteria to define a unit of selection?

I think 90 percent of all philosophers questions begin with the word. Now, what do you mean by. Absolutely. Yes. Which is a good thing. And it is a good thing, right?

No, no. Absolutely true. So the current I think the best work in that area has been published by a philosopher of science. A few years ago, Samuel Casher, who published a book called Selection and Evolution and the Levels of Selection. And it's a great analysis. It's mathematical informed, it's conceptually rigorous and on and so on and so forth. And now it's sort of the standard reference. So that you were asking, for example, those are some of the examples.

But there are also areas where philosophers simply do things that are not really of concern to scientists because or at least not directly. That is the aim of those things, is not to clarify the. Science is not to help the science. The aim is to study the science. So is philosophy of science as a discipline that is outside of science, that looks into science and say, well, this thing seems to be working very well. It's remarkably efficient way of discovering things about the world and all that.

How does that work? Hmm. Now, this goes all the way back, of course, to Aristotle. Or if you don't want to go that far, at least to Francis Bacon, you know, philosophers have always been interested in how science works and why. And when he fails, why does it fail? So the famous demarcation problem separating science from pseudoscience, that was Karl Popper.

Now, scientists themselves are not that interested in that. Scientists do the science. They don't really need to spend much time thinking about how is it that this thing works that well. But because science is such an incredibly important activity in in modern society, both in terms of general quest for knowledge and in terms of practical consequence, it seems like it's a valid type of question to ask, you know, how how does this thing work?

So it's been my impression that the philosophers of science looking at these general sort of inter discipline questions are interested not just in how how science actually works, but how it should ideally work to to get at the truth most effectively, most efficiently and so on.

So it seems like there at least there's at least in principle, there would be discoveries or insights that scientists could find useful about methodologies that are that are better than the ones that are sort of derrière and in their fields. Has that ever happened?

Well, yeah, insofar as that sort of. So so what you're talking about is the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive. Right. Right. So couldn't pick to pick an example was a descriptive philosopher of science that technically was a historian of science. Not really a philosopher of science. Right. Right. So Kuhn's point was, OK, I want to see how this works historically. And so the way I'm going to go about it is studying the transition, say, from the Ptolemy to Copernicus and figure out how that worked.

I'm not telling you how it should work. I'm just telling you it's a descriptive project. Now, people like Pupper, on the other hand, we're much more interested in prescriptive projects. I mean, you know, the whole idea of the demarcation problem is, well, we we need a criterion to tell the junk from the good stuff, for instance.

And of course, if you came up with the famous idea of falsification, isn't the falsification, is that is the demarcation criterion.

Now you're asking about the the consequences for science, for science. Well, Popper himself was an influential in a for a whole generation of scientists, in fact, still both Popper and still today, if you ask a random scientist what they know about philosophy of science, those are the two names that will come up. And the two concepts that will come up are associated with those two names. Falsification is more pupper and paradigm shifts. So certainly that scientists at least think about these kind of things that they are those concepts are usually introduced in introductory books about sort of the nature of science, that kind of that written by scientists.

But there is their current examples. So, for instance, there is a whole area of philosophers science that deals with Bayesian ism, with the study of Bayesian probability theory as a as a general theory of knowledge, as a general theory of epistemology, not just as a statistical tool. And that is relevant again, not it's not that any scientist is necessarily going to going to change their practice tomorrow, but it ought to be of interest to scientists. And in fact, there are some scientists who are interested in sort of the general theoretical framework of Bayesian ism and see if that makes sense to them as a way in which science itself works and not just a specific application to a specific scientific problem.

So Bayesian ism is one of those areas of active philosophy of science in terms of, well, there are discussions about, well, should science work as a is a Bayesian updater or not. And there are very good reasons to argue either way, actually, in these cases.

And when you talk about Bayesian reasoning here, you're talking about taking the taking your prior credence that you give to all the various different possible hypotheses for it to explain a phenomenon. And then looking at the successive amounts of evidence that you get and updating your sort of the relative credence is that you put in each hypothesis in proportion to the evidence.

Right.

So the famous this this actually goes back, interestingly to David Hume, who famously said that it is reasonable to proportion your beliefs to evidence, or as Carl Sagan much later put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That has to be a proportionality between these two. It's interesting. I would just read an article recently in in the Journal of the Human Human Society where somebody has actually pointed out that Hume's dictum, as it's known as ammunition, that your beliefs should be proportionate to evidence.

Can be cast in Bayesian terms, even though you did not know us, they were actually essentially contemporaneous, but the humor was not aware of by his work. But he's but our argument on miracles, for instance, has been recast essentially as a Bayesian argument. So now there are interesting questions. There now is any particular practice in science is going to change their way of doing things? No, I doubt it.

But could that science could actually improve if they pay attention to this?

You know, science is a trial and error thing is a very pragmatic thing. So scientists go about their business pretty much ignoring what what other people say about their business. Now, if you asked me in theory, could the practice of science being improved? Yeah, I think I think so. I don't think it's going to happen simply because scientists are not going to listen to philosophers when they tell him, well, really, this is not a good idea or this is a better idea than other.

For instance, let me give you a particular example of this. Recently, I read a paper that is coming out in June of history philosophy where where somebody proposed, proposed, revisited the debate between Kunt and Pupper about how science works. And so the idea that, you know, well, should science work by continuously questioning the any any theory that that would be the approach, you should always try to falsify your theory or should science work? As I said, mostly its puzzle solving.

Mostly you work within a paradigm and only occasionally you would go all the way to questioning the actual paradigm itself. Now this the other. I forget his name, but we can put a link on the web, on the webpage, for the podcast.

These others suggest that, look, what they're really talking about is two different kinds of activities that scientists really should engage and they should engage both. And the question becomes, what proportion? You know, what is the best strategy, the best balance between, you know, sort of Cuneen union scientist and opinion scientist? That is an interesting question that could actually be amenable to both philosophical investigation and even optimization modeling. But as far as I know, no science, editorial board and no science foundation.

Grant Foundation has even ever even raised the question of, you know, do we want to distribute our funding in this way? We just let it happen as it is. We just let it grow organically from the community. There may be better ways to optimize the question. And unless you even think about that as a question, you're not going to pose the issue.

So the idea is that clarify for me the difference between how a parian and Akunin would approach the problem.

The Apkarian would concentrate for Pupper. The main goal of science was to question the whatever the current hypothesis was, to try to you constantly trying to falsify their policies to see if it survives yet another crucial test. And that's the way you get more and more confident about that theory. But that is also, more importantly, the way, according to Popper, that that science makes progress by eliminating better methods.

But hypothesis four for kun, that kind of thing happens very rarely. That's a paradigm shift. Essentially, when a paradigm goes into crisis, falsifying a hypothesis is a paradigm shift well, followed by a major theory.

For example, you should try to falsify everything, not just minor hypotheses about everything. You know, general theory, relativity should be trying to to about every time.

We wouldn't try to falsify theories. No, if they do so, can you just accept the general relativity, let's say, and then you work out problems within that theory. So you trying to figure out, you know, a specific puzzle that you call them puzzles or take evolutionary biology?

You don't try to falsify evolutionary theory every time you do and expect you use that Darwinian framework to to apply to be applicable to certain specific questions that you're going to have, such as, you know, why did natural selection apparently favor this trait versus that other trait? When you're doing that, you're not testing new hypotheses. You're taking their bodies as a background condition.

So those are, in fact, two different ways of doing I'm doing science now. As it turns out, historically speaking or sociologically speaking, scientists do work mostly as puzzle solvers. You know, I don't think anyone in my practice as a scientist, I never seen anybody going around trying to falsify hypotheses right and left. Oh, twisting. Usually try to confirm hypotheses.

Not what? Not not false.

Find them interesting because that doesn't lend itself well to the standard statistical test of significance where you have your null hypothesis and then you look at your evidence and see if it is consistent with your null hypothesis or not.

And so it seems like it would. Some problems with, you know, you come up with some solutions to the puzzle that you're trying to solve. How can you be confident that you have the right solution if you didn't go through that sort of standard hypothesis testing method?

Well, the issue of testing actually is an interesting one that you raise, because that's another area of discussion both in statistics and in philosophy of science. And I'm, for instance, with my colleague Jonathan Kaplan. I've been coming out pretty squarely along on the side of people who say that we should really ditch this whole idea of null hypothesis. Yeah, because it's not very useful. And but it anyway, when people do use the null hypothesis, their knowledge base is really a straw man.

You set up an alibi because, you know, it's likely going to be wrong because if you don't, then you're wasting your time. So so, for instance, let's say that I do an experiment as I use it in my lab about, you know, genotype environment interactions in a particular species of plants and then only posits that there is no gene environment interaction, for instance, in this particular set of populations. And if I confirm the participants, I just wasted a lot of time and presumably also grant money finding something compelling and interesting.

So I set up the experiment in a way that maximizes the likelihood that, in fact, the null hypothesis is going to be thrown in the garbage immediately. And sure enough, it really fails. Right. So you're not really testing hypotheses at all. You just you just go around already trying to confirm your idea, which was there out to be gene environment action in these in these populations. Right.

So it sounds like the traditional parian method of falsification sort of has this this veneer of of philosophical rigor to it. And what you're saying is that's really it's not actually more philosophically rigorous than other ways of approaching.

Well, that which philosophy you ask I mean, if you ask Popper, I would say that that's the way you should do it all the time. He's just a scientist. Don't do it all the time. So there's a difference between what they do and what they ought to do. And on the other hand, say, no, no scientist should not do this. Not only they don't, but they shouldn't, because it makes no sense to start questioning your paradigm every every other minute.

You're never going to get any job done, any work done.

Now, before we go on, however, I wanted to mention the third area of interest, the philosophers of science, because that is particularly controversial. And that's actually more often than not, what really irks scientists. I refer to it, although I'm one of the few referring to it with that name, but I refer to it as science studies. Or you should probably more more clearly be referred to as science criticism, because science that is, has these bad reputation like women's studies or X studies of Venus or postmodern kind of thing.

On the face of it, science study sounds much more innocuous and less scientists than science criticism. Right, exactly.

But but let's stay away from the word studies because it does have that kind of that post-modern connotation, which is an endorsement. So we're talking about science criticism. In what sense here we're talking not about criticism of science as an epistemological from an epistemological perspective. Right. So, like, what a popper would say, not you really should ought to do science this way as opposed to that way.

This is science criticism in terms of the social implications of science. So, for instance, my colleague Jonathan Kaplan, who was my adviser from a PhD in philosophy, wrote an interesting book on On the Limits of Human Human Genetic Research, where he went in in painstaking detail into into how human genetic research is done and compare that. So the actual results compare that with the claims that after made either in technical journals themselves or even worse, in sort of more more popular publications about human genetics.

And he found that very often the two don't match at all. So the study finds something very, very specific. But then the authors of the study go out and claim that they found the discovery of whatever it is. It's much, much more a much broader import than the data actually suggest. Why is that science criticism? Because those things have consequences. If you start saying things like, oh, we found the gene for homosexuality, for instance.

Right. And it turned out that all you found was one variation in one Swedish population that accounts for point three percent of the variation in the behavior in that particular population. Well, no, you didn't really find the gene for homosexuality, but now you inflame the whole discussion about the genetic basis of that behavior and so on and so forth.

So that's not really a criticism of the science for no criticism of the way it's discussed. That's not the way it's used. Yeah, but sometimes that usage starts out with the primary literature. So I was at a symposium on race, for instance, just recently in San Francisco. And that issue came out because one of the presenters, in fact, two of the presenters at the meeting quoted a particular paper on. Human genetic variation that in the abstract said something on the lines, we found major genetic major differences between major genetic groups that roughly correspond to the major reasons.

So it seems to say that there is a confirmation of a genetic basis to the concept of race, as we normally understand. But you actually read the paper and it doesn't say anything at all like that. The data are not at all congruent with that. What the paper says shows is that there is there are actually hundreds and hundreds of these groups. And yes, they kind of then these groups are grouped into smaller into larger groups that are in that internal group further.

And eventually, if you go far enough, you assume far enough. You get four or five major geographical areas. But that's a whole different claim.

Right. Right. I want to bring in a comment from one of our readers named Matthew, who asked. He said, I believe that one important function for a philosophy of science is to help us distinguish between real science and pseudoscience. For example, creationism was a pseudo scientific theory used by medieval Christians to promote their propaganda. If people had had known some basic concepts and philosophy of science, they wouldn't have fallen into that trap.

So, you know, this this seems sound to me, but it brings me to one of my questions about the the role of philosophy of science, which is a lot of the concepts like the concept of creationism being not really a scientific endeavor.

They strike me as sort of common sense, like I suspect that most scientists would be able to explain to you why creationism isn't a scientific endeavor.

I could be wrong, but that's actually as I was saying, you might be surprised, really, as it's been. Yeah. As it turns out, the best defenses of, you know, of evolutionary biology from creationism and intelligent design are written by philosophers, not by scientists. And the reason for that is precisely because scientists have very confused ideas about the demarkation problem in general. I mean, there are obvious exceptions. But so if you look, for instance, at the most recent large, big trial in that area and the intelligent design trial at Dover, there were both scientists and philosophers on the stands, you know, on essentially criticizing the idea that intelligent design is a science.

But the judge took most of his arguments from the philosophers, from Barbara Forrest in particular, and Robert Pennock, because they're much more clearly explain and so forth. But I think more importantly, this is what you bring up is an interesting example, because I was still angry. Even even with that, I was still agreed that creationism is an easy one. But what about other areas that are not quite that easy? So, for instance, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychology is not a sort of science, but one can make a very reasonable argument that it's not a full fledged science either or say memetics is another good example.

Right. So those areas are much more borderline.

And actually the major criticism of memetics has been ignored largely by scientists themselves. So that's memetics is actually and quickly devolved into a dead end in terms of research. I mean, as I think we mentioned in the past, the general memetics, Foldit a few years ago. But the evolutionary psychology is alive and well, and the major criticisms of evolutionary psychology from a broad methodological and epistemological perspective are come from philosophers of science, not from. Yeah, not Scientologists.

Do the scientists disagree about the sketchiness of evolutionary psychology or do they just not pay attention, something most evolutionary biologists don't pay any attention to it.

It's a it's a song subfield. Right. And they have their own journals and their own societies and they do their own meetings. And so once you start doing that, you kind of shield yourself. I mean, I very rarely you know, when I when I go to evolution meetings, general bouchra meetings, I very rarely hear a presentation on evolutionary psychology. We go to evolutionary psychology meetings to do that.

Or we should probably explain what the actual argument is against evolutionary psychology being.

Yeah, well, briefly, the argument against evolutionary psychology is that the foundational idea is perfectly sound. So the idea, the assumption that, you know, some human behavior probably evolved by natural selection, it's perfectly reasonable because we know the behaviours in general do evolve. We know that some behaviours in animals are the result of natural selection. So why not? Why should human be an exception? But as it turns out, from a logical perspective, it is perhaps not impossible, but it's very, very difficult to test specific hypotheses about specific the evolution of specific behaviors in human beings.

And that is because of a variety of accidental circumstances. There are not there are no other species closely to compare ourselves with. We only have bonobos and chimpanzees which are separated from us by four million years of evolution. There are no other species of homo around. So the comparative analysis cannot be done, usually behaviors obviously don't fossilize with a few exceptions. I mean, we know what we do know when human beings are human ancestors starting walking up by peterle, that's a behavior.

But we know that because it's one of those few behaviors that actually leaves most of them don't. So that's the second reason. And the third reason is the other the third major way in which you can test our adaptive advantages by actually measuring natural selection in current populations, which you can do with humans. So, for instance, we know that there is very strong stabilizing selection for birthweight in humans, in intermediate vertebrates.

You don't want to be your baby to be too large or too small, which is a morphological traits, obviously not a or one, but those are pretty much irrelevant to ancestral environments for the simple reason that the ancestral human environment was both physically and socially very different from what it is now. You can measure natural selection on a human behavior in New York City today. And that's probably tells you nothing about what was going on in a small band of 100 individuals in the place.

The scene.

Right. Right. Makes sense.

You know, it's interesting, after having discussed at the beginning of this episode, the famous quote and I had argued that it was misunderstood because, you know, philosophers of science aren't trying to influence scientists the way ornithologists aren't trying to be useful to birds.

But it actually I mean, it seems some of them are. Yeah, really. It actually does seem that way.

So I'd have to say the phenomenon is not only misunderstood, but also wrong.

It's clever if clever. Definitely. If there is something that you can say about Feynman for sure, that he was very clever.

He was a clever guy. All right. We are all out of time for the section of the podcast. So we'll wrap this up and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I think a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Juristic.

Thanks, Masimo. My pick is a book that just came out. It's called The End of Discovery by particle physicist named Russell Stanard.

My review is its qualified lead positive. I just reviewed this book for a magazine, but I'll give you my nutshell version. It's basically the book is a tour through currently unanswered questions in various fields of science, but focusing especially on physics, which Stanford feels might turn out to be impossible to answer. And for each question, he explains what the potential obstacles are to solving it.

So they basically fall into two camps, two reasons why a given question might be unanswerable. The first is that we might not be able to gather the evidence.

We would need to answer it. For example, questions that rely on evidence from the moment of the Big Bang or or even worse, the existence of other unaccessible universes.

And this category also includes evidence which is technically out there that we could collect, but which lies beyond our technological capacity.

So in particle physics, we've been successively increasing the energy levels with which we can smash one particle into another by building bigger and bigger particle colliders. And so far, with each step up and in energy levels, we've we've reaped new insights about the nature of the universe. But there's a limit to how large of a particle collider we can build and there's a limit to how big the earth is.

At the very least, we think so, yes. So so there's no guarantee that all the remaining information that we're interested in learning about the universe can actually be discovered within our technological limits.

And then the second reason why Stanford argues that we might never solve all of the mysteries of the universe is that our brains might just not be sophisticated enough. So he talks about the computational limits of the brain and also about how the human brain evolved to deal with concrete phenomena at a very particular scale and in a very particular setting, our ancestral environment.

So there's no reason to expect that our brains are actually equipped to comprehend phenomena and other contexts that are sufficiently foreign, like the near light speeds that relativity deals with or the atomic scale that quantum physics deals with.

Anyway, it's a fun read. It's very easy to read, but my review, the reason my review is somewhat qualified was that I thought he was sort of overly romantic about the mystery of the unknown. And he also implied that other fields could tackle these mysteries when science wasn't up to the job. And he didn't really elaborate on that.

Oh, I was going to say, like one of the few know mystical insight. Well, the only the time in which the context in which I've heard that argument made before, it's always in the context of saying that science doesn't have all the answers.

Therefore, Religion Abortion Center didn't say that.

I don't want to put words in his mouth or anything. But, you know, my viewpoint is, even though it's certainly true, we can't guarantee that science is going to solve everything. It's still the only method that we know works.

So I thought his his interpretation of the, you know, challenges lie ahead for science was a little bit too pro pro mystery and a little bit less pro science than I would have liked.

People love a good mystery. Yes, they do. Well, my pick actually is a blog and in particular a blog, a particular entry in this blog. The blog is Developing Intelligence, which is hosted at science blogs. And it's written by Chris Chatham, who is a graduate student actually at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And I occasionally read this blog. But the reason I it really piqued my interest this time is because Chris just published a really interesting article called Ten Important Differences Between Brains and Computers.

Oh, cool. It's really nice. It's a really interesting sort of analysis. Now, he's not he's not he's not suggesting that we shouldn't be thinking of brains as sort of some kind of computational device. But he's cautioning people from, you know, sort of drawing from too much from the analogy or the metaphor. In fact, he starts out the entry with a quote by GC Lichtenberger that says, A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

There is actually a large literature about the use and misuse of metaphors in science. And there's actually a large philosophy of science in that area, as it turns out. But the article is very interesting. It's about provoking. You know, people may agree with some or all or none of the differences that Chris proposes, but it certainly is the kind of thing that that is worth reading, because even if you actually think that the the computer metaphor for the brain is a good one, it will challenge you to make much more clear to yourself.

Why is it that you think. It's a good idea. So this is a great entry and the blog in general is worth reading. It's called Developing Intelligence. Fascinating. Thank you, Massimo. This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog.

This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.