tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post4908554385055790490..comments2024-03-28T05:47:54.177+00:00Comments on Philosophical Disquisitions: Darwin's Logical Argument for Natural SelectionJohn Danaherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06761686258507859309noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-35163282916123921372022-06-08T13:16:15.326+01:002022-06-08T13:16:15.326+01:00Thank you for the meme of the moment. Refreshing, ...Thank you for the meme of the moment. Refreshing, that someone recalls the origins of the term and intention of its coinage. There are so many 'memes' flying about now, so as to render the term virtually meaningless. And, I think THAT is a cogent point. Some things, attributed to happenstance or coincidence are neither. So, is synchronicity real? That may be the right question.Paul D. Van Pelthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13508874039164282696noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-57570816985469072172022-06-08T12:44:51.108+01:002022-06-08T12:44:51.108+01:00Meme of the moment: "..if variations useful t...Meme of the moment: "..if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. ......" https://naturesalltheres.blogspot.com/Nature Is All There Is!https://www.blogger.com/profile/10738677485061196925noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-36233475481589639802022-05-19T17:01:07.418+01:002022-05-19T17:01:07.418+01:00Enjoyed your piece. Noticed that two out of the th...Enjoyed your piece. Noticed that two out of the three comments present were appreciative and complimentary. Have read Dennett, but not since Intuition... Not much to add. Question: Darwin's notions of traits across time and natural selection: would you take those as two sides of the same coin? If that is somewhat right, was Dawkins saying something the same with extended phenotypes? Just asking.Paul D. Van Pelthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13508874039164282696noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-72563765569652665202022-05-18T18:20:19.061+01:002022-05-18T18:20:19.061+01:00I really enjoyed thinking through this! Thanks for...I really enjoyed thinking through this! Thanks for the post! While not made explicit by Darwin, I think it might be the case that the conclusions of both parts of the argument (rather than just the second part) would seem to concern the preservation of traits across time. The difference, then, is as follows: the first part concerns the conditions for the differential intra-generational preservation of a traits of organisms in a relation of struggle. The second part concerns the conditions for the inter-generational preservation of a trait via replication. Additionally, that these seemingly distinct modalities of persistence can blur together in the case of non-reproductive clonal systems has been discussed by Bouchard (2011, 110); but of course Darwin wasn’t thinking about this possibility, so the reconstruction is fine in this respect. Joshua Rusthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11929951349182716394noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-86931217837930600352022-05-18T17:11:16.784+01:002022-05-18T17:11:16.784+01:00Nice piece! Bookmarked. Huxley, Darwin's frien...Nice piece! Bookmarked. Huxley, Darwin's friend, remarked (paraphrasing, I think), "How stupid, not to have thought of that myself!" And someone (Dennett maybe?) said that this was the most brilliant idea to have ever occurred to a human mind.<br /><br />But Darwin was troubled by what he saw as a problem. Blended inheritance. And always the intellectually honest and courageous thinker, he explained his difficulty. If heritable characteristics were mixed together continuously, like different colours of paint, you would end up with the paint equivalent of a uniform dull brown. All variation would be lost. Selection could not operate. It is a great pity that Mendel's work never came to his attention, showing that inherited variations are discrete, digital or quantized elements. The work of both men was spectacularly vindicated upon the discovery of the structure of DNA.Barry Desboroughhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09330662530907568399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1780806945960886534.post-44323156237775445112022-05-18T15:14:01.009+01:002022-05-18T15:14:01.009+01:00This could be a useful model for students of how t...This could be a useful model for students of how to apply formal logic (in this case propositional logic) to actual argumentation. But I don't see the basis for calling Darwin's argument a "logical" argument. Students new to philosophy and logic will, of course, describe an argument as "logical" when they mean merely that it has some minimal degree of coherence and cogency. One of the things that I tell such students is that in philosophy, the word "logical" is a term of classification, not a term of degree, and certainly not a term of praise. I can see that you are also using the term as one of classification, but I don't understand its application here. An argument whose premises appeal only to the nature of disjunction or quantification or the like would be an example of what I would understand a "logical argument" to be. Darwin's argument contains premises that, if true, can only be known to be true empirically. I don't see how the mere absence from this particular passage of empirical support for those premises makes the argument "logical" in any serious sense at all. Miles Rindhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03733605717776262840noreply@blogger.com