Wednesday 28 February 2018

Review: What Makes Biology Unique: Reflections on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline by Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr was a huge figure in the modern evolutionary synthesis and was referenced a ton in books I read for Schols (both negatively and positively). I have mixed feelings on him myself but was interested in the idea of the autonomy of biology in the face of physicists and chemists claiming it's within their subjects, so I read this book. 

Mayr talks about different kinds of science, and how it's not just experimental science but also what he calls 'historical science', often employed by evolutionary biologists, where you come up with a hypothesis/historical story for how things happened and see how well that matches up with the available evidence. 


He distinguishes between functional biology, which talks about how things work and in his mind can be reduced to chemistry and physics, and historical biology, evolution and ecology, which is his field. He says functional biology mainly asks how, historical biology why, and they use different methods. He mostly only defends historical biology, but some of his arguments apply to both. 

Physicalist ideas he says don't apply to biology:

  • Typology -- in biology, there aren't a limited number of things, where all things of each type are the same (e.g electrons); instead, evolutionary biologists go for population thinking, which acknowledges that organisms even within one species or population vary, and means that, to borrow a lovely phrase I got from Ridley's Evolution textbook while studying for Schols, means that even though sparrows vary in size across North America, 'all sparrows are equally good sparrows'.
  • Determinism -- even if you know the position and momentum etc of everything, you can't predict biology with certainty into the future. Physicists realized that a while after Laplace said you could, but it's especially important in biology where chance drives the variation needed for evolution to occur. 
  • Reductionism -- the idea that if you know what each component of a complex system is and what its function is you can understand and explain the whole system. Whole chapter devoted to this so read on.
  • Universal natural laws -- don't really apply in evolutionary biology, so Popper's falsificationism doesn't work. He says biological theories are based more on concepts than laws, and then showing that he seems to think all of biology is just evolutionary biology, says: 'Examples of concepts that became important bases of theories in various branches of biology are territory, female choice, sexual selection, resource, and geographic isolation.' 
Autonomous features of biology:
  • Complexity of living systems
  • Evolution
  • Open systems in regards to entropy
  • Dual causation -- controlled not only by natural/physical laws but also by genetic programs. 
Chapter 3: Teleology

He also talked about a bunch of philosophical issues like teleology (goal-directedness of something), which he resolved by splitting the broad word teleology into five types e.g. teleonomy and saying four are proven by science while the fifth, cosmic teleology (everything leading to a cosmic purpose/for god), doesn't exist. In his chapter on Analysis vs Reductionism, he talked about how physicists like to break everything down to atoms and quarks but in biology the way things are arranged is as important as their parts and is an emergent property, and often in biology it's not actually any more helpful to go below a certain level e.g. you can understand cell signalling well just from molecules and the odd atom without understanding quarks, since the link from quarks to atoms and atoms to molecules is already built by physicists and chemists. I agree with that, although he did caricature physicists and reductionism a bit. 

In Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought, he talked about how people say Einstein's relativity revolutionised how people think about the universe but it didn't -- only strong physicists really benefitted from it or felt the revolution. In contrast, he says, Darwin's theories (he says there were five, including evolution, natural selection and common descent) really did change the way the public thinks about the world. 
In Do Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions Take Place?, he argues that Kuhn's idea of a  cycle of paradigm change ('revolution') followed by a period of 'normal science' doesn't apply to biology, which has mostly seen steady progress as we gain more knowledge and understanding. He makes the important point that most philosophers of science are really philosophers of physics, which rang true from my experience. I've only read about a couple of philosophers of science (mainly in the book The Meaning of Science by Tim Lewens, review here, which discussed Popper and Kuhn among others), but their work does seem to have been based on physics, at least in the examples they gave. 


He has a whole set of chapters on evolutionary theory, which were ok but not what I read the book for. I had to force myself to read his 'another look at the species problem' after studying that as the Schols special topic, and similarly with his other evolution chapters I already knew most of it from Schols study. The 'origin of humans' chapter wasn't great bu I generally just find that topic really boring, even in lectures. 

He randomly has a chapter 'are we alone in this vast universe?' about aliens, in which he basically says we shouldn't look for them and they wouldn't be sentient, and gives out for a while about SETI. As another reviewer said, it'd have been better if he'd written something about what discovery of alien life would mean for evolutionary theory and how interesting that would be. 

General Criticisms:

  • he doesn't really introduce concepts, though he does have definitions in the glossary
  • loves sound of his own voice -- that said, the book is short, which I appreciate
  • distinctions can seem pointless, as between some of the types of teleology
  • so many squabbles in evolutionary biology! 
Overall it was a fairly interesting read, but only a few of the chapters were on what the title promised, and he only seems to view evolutionary biology biology, with molecular bio just chemistry. 

Sunday 4 February 2018

Review: January 2018

Not sure I did much this month but anyway let's go. 2018? Whew. Year-names haven't sounded real since 2012 ended. 

New Year's: Watched Die Hard with Leon and Gráinne and then spent the actual first day of the year lounging about with them. Also was impressed by the Irish show for it with people in laser suits flying around above the Liffey.

Schols: 

The first week of January was the last week pre-Schols so I spent it reading over all my Speciation, Evolution, Biochemistry and Cell Structure notes and cramming Immunometabolism 12 hours a day as was habit at this point. 

Then it was time for the exams. I'm working on a whole post about Schols so I'll have lots more detail about that shortly, but basically the exams went better than I'd expected overall in the stress of the final week of study, in that it turned out I knew sooooooo much information. Unfortunately, my downfall was that this was the first set of Biology essays I'd ever written and so my time management was absolutely disastrous. I wrote about 3 excellent (in my opinion) essays out of 8, and the others were either middling or totally messed up by running out of time. So that'll probably have decked my chances at actually getting the scholarship but it, and the fact that my exam technique visibly improved over the four days (#4 was an issue for other reasons) and my essays got much better, bodes well for my summer exams. And it's nice that I know the material. The annoying thing is that because they're essays I have zero idea of how good they're supposed to be or what they're supposed to be like, so for all I know they could be amazing or trash, but sure we'll see. 

The y-axis on the chart (should be labelled, yes) is in pages. 



It's so weird that Schols were the second week of January -- when I was thinking about this blog post I didn't originally include them because it feels like they happened forever ago. It's definitely a weird feeling to be finished after studying nonstop for them for six weeks, and to have to be a functional human again. 

College: 

Back to college for Hilary term and into Statistics, Genetics, Microbiology and Behaviour (Ecosystem Biology & Global Change and Infection & Immunity are later in the term). So far I don't like my biology subjects this term as much as I liked Metabolism (Biochemistry) and Evolution, but then I really loved Metabolism once I started studying it properly from the book for Schols. And the modules are pretty interesting. It's definitely a change from last year when I consider a module that's fundamentally interesting but has some boring lectures 'not great', when last year I wasn't interested in pretty much anything we did. Biology is cool yall. 

Also, our Genetics labs have been cool. Maybe they're collecting our samples for government surveillance with that and our Microbiology labs though -- so far we've sampled and been analysing our DNA, fingerprints, tongue and nose. Suspicious.

Lablinn:

Have been doing a lot of conceptual work on Lablinn and figuring out what our core goals are. Have decided on this: 

We aim to facilitate civic engagement with science and help people lead citizen science projects in their communities to expand the reach of science and help improve the world.

So we've got a lot of exciting work now to bring that to fruition, and have started on some means to achieve it. Watch this space. 

Reading:

In January, I read Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of EvoDevo by Sean Carroll, The Future of Life by Edward Wilson (both for Schols), and The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I also started Behave by Robert Sapolsky and What Makes Biology Unique by Ernst Mayr. 

BT Young Scientist:

I went to the Young Scientist and saw some cool projects, including a mentee and a friend I met there years ago who's now Individual Runner-Up, which was super cool. There ended up being a lot of controversy over the winner, it was weird seeing the YS actually release a statement over it, really made it seem like a big deal. 


That's about all, I think. Leon also convinced me to play Pokémon on his DS. It's quite nice. 'Til next time.