That’s complicated g, but the diagram is like a program written in a simple language, and the simple language is atom, element, formula, reaction, enzyme.
The big diagram is contingent, an accident of nature. The underlying ideas, and the techniques used, are simple enough that they can enchant a curious child. As I imagine every reader of this post will well remember.
There are some other simple ideas there too, that have not, I think, been paid as much attention as they deserve in medicine.
Evolution, the war of all against all, predation, parasitism, camouflage, security, identification, group selection, scorched earth defence, stability, trade-off.
And most neglected of all: Purpose.
The iodothyronines are on that diagram. What is their function? What are they for? What were they for? How did they start out? How has their original purpose been modified, step by step, into what it is today?
Yup. Is that supposed to make it not a counterexample, and if so why? (Note that, e.g., the processes affecting mood, tiredness, etc., are also contingent. You may wish to avoid stipulations that make my counterexample not a counterexample if they also make your leading example not an example :-).)
Again, I’m not disagreeing that many good ideas are simple and that simple ideas are worth pursuing even if you expect that they’re never going to be more than useful approximations that may point in helpful directions.
And most neglected of all: Purpose.
My feeling is that if “purpose” is neglected in science it’s because it’s generally been found to be more misleading than helpful. We can ask, in evolutionary mode, “what if anything gave this a selective advantage?” or, relatedly, “why didn’t this costly thing get selected out of existence?”. And we can ask “what does this actually do?”. What does talk of purpose add beyond these?
It adds something in cases where some actually purposeful agent is responsible for whatever-it-is. So, e.g., I expect it’s useful from time to time in finance where the answer to “why do these prices move in this way?” may be “because the owners of these pension funds have these incentives and are acting accordingly”, and it’s certainly useful in politics or history. But in biology? It seems to me that if you find cases where the full-blown concept of purpose is genuinely better than the alternatives, you’ve found good evidence[1] for creationism, and so far alleged cases of good evidence for creationism have tended to evaporate on closer inspection.
[1] Of course good evidence is not necessarily anything like proof; sometimes there is good evidence for false things.
Maybe this is getting too far afield, but I would say that “Purpose” is not only a useful, but an essential heuristic in science when it’s being practiced by a kind of entity (like human beings) who are hard-wired to think in terms of purposeful action. Making the first question “What is this for?” brings to bear the full power of uncounted generations of field-tested behaviors, rules of thumb, and search strategies.
It is awfully important, though, not to make it the last question. I guess that’s where I’d say yes, a “full-blown concept of purpose” in the sense of an unexplained explanation, is unscientific.
Well, I don’t think the big diagram is ‘a good idea’. ‘Making a big diagram’ is a good idea. And all the techniques used to make it are good ideas. Similarly the map of England is not simple, but the idea of map-making and the techniques of surveying are.
As far as purpose goes, I think you’re right.
We can ask, in evolutionary mode, “what if anything gave this a selective advantage?” or, relatedly, “why didn’t
this costly thing get selected out of existence?”. And we can ask “what does this actually do?”. What does talk of > purpose add beyond these?
If it were the case that talk of purpose couldn’t be reduced to those things, and it were actually implying a fully intelligent mind, or some sort of intelligence to evolution beyond ‘optimization process proceeding by local hill-climbing’, then I’d get very suspicious indeed.
However, I just like teleological thinking. It’s a bit like infinitesimals in analysis. They’re not a bad way to get out quick and dirty results, but they can mislead. The careful man goes back and does the epsilon-delta thing as well. But I don’t like to discard sources of intuition. We have so few!
And I think that a lot of the reason for mistrust of purpose is historical silliness like ‘We die so that there will be room for the young’. That doesn’t work at all for a sexual species. But that sort of thinking might be helpful for something undergoing group-selection. And pathogens, I think, often reproduce by cloning. One brave virus heading off to take out the bridge might well be genetically fulfilled by its sisters busy looting the cargo hold.
I don’t think the big diagram is ‘a good idea’. ‘Making a big diagram’ is a good idea.
That’s a very reasonable distinction. But then—bringing the analogy back to the motivating example of thyroid-y things—why not say ‘these symptoms are caused by deficiency of, or insensitivity to, thyroid hormones’ and ‘these symptoms are caused by [INSANELY COMPLEX EXPLANATION WE DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE GOES HERE]’ are not ‘good ideas’—the good idea is something like ‘figuring out what causes the symptoms’?
I mean, isn’t that pretty much the level of abstraction that corresponds to “making a big diagram”?
I just like teleological thinking
Fair enough, I guess. It does seem that our brains are designed to … ahem, I mean are pretty good at analysing things in terms of purposes, so thinking that way may be a useful hack. But you need to be awfully careful about it, as those historical sillinesses show.
(You can use infinitesimals just fine if you do it in terms of nonstandard analysis, which tells you exactly what you need to be careful about when doing so.)
I want to back off from ‘All the good ideas have turned out to be simple’, I think that was a rhetorical flourish too far, and I think you were right to call bullshit.
I bet there are good ideas that aren’t that simple, like e.g. the monster group or quantum chromodynamics. Neither of which I understand well enough to see whether they’re actually simple, or inherently complex. But either way, it seems unlikely that the degree of complexity that fits happily in a human mind is also a limit on the complexity of ideas used in the construction of the world.
But I also want to defend:
‘these symptoms are caused by deficiency of, or insensitivity to, thyroid hormones’
As a really simple idea that makes lots of predictions about real experiments that can be done.
Do you really think it isn’t, or are we just arguing about ‘All the good ideas have turned out to be simple’? If the latter, then you win. You were right and I was wrong. Thank you for the lesson!
That’s complicated g, but the diagram is like a program written in a simple language, and the simple language is atom, element, formula, reaction, enzyme.
The big diagram is contingent, an accident of nature. The underlying ideas, and the techniques used, are simple enough that they can enchant a curious child. As I imagine every reader of this post will well remember.
There are some other simple ideas there too, that have not, I think, been paid as much attention as they deserve in medicine.
Evolution, the war of all against all, predation, parasitism, camouflage, security, identification, group selection, scorched earth defence, stability, trade-off.
And most neglected of all: Purpose.
The iodothyronines are on that diagram. What is their function? What are they for? What were they for? How did they start out? How has their original purpose been modified, step by step, into what it is today?
Yup. Is that supposed to make it not a counterexample, and if so why? (Note that, e.g., the processes affecting mood, tiredness, etc., are also contingent. You may wish to avoid stipulations that make my counterexample not a counterexample if they also make your leading example not an example :-).)
Again, I’m not disagreeing that many good ideas are simple and that simple ideas are worth pursuing even if you expect that they’re never going to be more than useful approximations that may point in helpful directions.
My feeling is that if “purpose” is neglected in science it’s because it’s generally been found to be more misleading than helpful. We can ask, in evolutionary mode, “what if anything gave this a selective advantage?” or, relatedly, “why didn’t this costly thing get selected out of existence?”. And we can ask “what does this actually do?”. What does talk of purpose add beyond these?
It adds something in cases where some actually purposeful agent is responsible for whatever-it-is. So, e.g., I expect it’s useful from time to time in finance where the answer to “why do these prices move in this way?” may be “because the owners of these pension funds have these incentives and are acting accordingly”, and it’s certainly useful in politics or history. But in biology? It seems to me that if you find cases where the full-blown concept of purpose is genuinely better than the alternatives, you’ve found good evidence[1] for creationism, and so far alleged cases of good evidence for creationism have tended to evaporate on closer inspection.
[1] Of course good evidence is not necessarily anything like proof; sometimes there is good evidence for false things.
Maybe this is getting too far afield, but I would say that “Purpose” is not only a useful, but an essential heuristic in science when it’s being practiced by a kind of entity (like human beings) who are hard-wired to think in terms of purposeful action. Making the first question “What is this for?” brings to bear the full power of uncounted generations of field-tested behaviors, rules of thumb, and search strategies.
It is awfully important, though, not to make it the last question. I guess that’s where I’d say yes, a “full-blown concept of purpose” in the sense of an unexplained explanation, is unscientific.
I agree with both parts of this.
Well, I don’t think the big diagram is ‘a good idea’. ‘Making a big diagram’ is a good idea. And all the techniques used to make it are good ideas. Similarly the map of England is not simple, but the idea of map-making and the techniques of surveying are.
As far as purpose goes, I think you’re right.
If it were the case that talk of purpose couldn’t be reduced to those things, and it were actually implying a fully intelligent mind, or some sort of intelligence to evolution beyond ‘optimization process proceeding by local hill-climbing’, then I’d get very suspicious indeed.
However, I just like teleological thinking. It’s a bit like infinitesimals in analysis. They’re not a bad way to get out quick and dirty results, but they can mislead. The careful man goes back and does the epsilon-delta thing as well. But I don’t like to discard sources of intuition. We have so few!
And I think that a lot of the reason for mistrust of purpose is historical silliness like ‘We die so that there will be room for the young’. That doesn’t work at all for a sexual species. But that sort of thinking might be helpful for something undergoing group-selection. And pathogens, I think, often reproduce by cloning. One brave virus heading off to take out the bridge might well be genetically fulfilled by its sisters busy looting the cargo hold.
That’s a very reasonable distinction. But then—bringing the analogy back to the motivating example of thyroid-y things—why not say ‘these symptoms are caused by deficiency of, or insensitivity to, thyroid hormones’ and ‘these symptoms are caused by [INSANELY COMPLEX EXPLANATION WE DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE GOES HERE]’ are not ‘good ideas’—the good idea is something like ‘figuring out what causes the symptoms’?
I mean, isn’t that pretty much the level of abstraction that corresponds to “making a big diagram”?
Fair enough, I guess. It does seem that our brains are designed to … ahem, I mean are pretty good at analysing things in terms of purposes, so thinking that way may be a useful hack. But you need to be awfully careful about it, as those historical sillinesses show.
(You can use infinitesimals just fine if you do it in terms of nonstandard analysis, which tells you exactly what you need to be careful about when doing so.)
I want to back off from ‘All the good ideas have turned out to be simple’, I think that was a rhetorical flourish too far, and I think you were right to call bullshit.
I bet there are good ideas that aren’t that simple, like e.g. the monster group or quantum chromodynamics. Neither of which I understand well enough to see whether they’re actually simple, or inherently complex. But either way, it seems unlikely that the degree of complexity that fits happily in a human mind is also a limit on the complexity of ideas used in the construction of the world.
But I also want to defend: ‘these symptoms are caused by deficiency of, or insensitivity to, thyroid hormones’
As a really simple idea that makes lots of predictions about real experiments that can be done.
Do you really think it isn’t, or are we just arguing about ‘All the good ideas have turned out to be simple’? If the latter, then you win. You were right and I was wrong. Thank you for the lesson!
As far as I’m concerned, we were just arguing about “All the good ideas have turned out to be simple”.
(But if I was right and you were wrong, then you win because you’ve learned more than I have :-).)
Indeed! I am properly grateful.
[EDITED to remove now-merely-confusing comments on something JLA has now removed from the parent comment.]
edited