Lastly, on probability theory and Newtonian mechanics: I agree that you shouldn’t question how much sense it makes to use calculus in the way that you described, but that’s because the application of calculus to mechanics is so clearly-defined that it’d be very hard for the type of confusion I talked about above to sneak in. I’d put evolutionary theory halfway between them: it’s partly a novel abstraction, and partly a novel empirical truth.
I think this might be a big part of the disagreement/confusion. I think of evolution (via natural selection) as something like a ‘Platonic inevitability’ in the same way that probability theory and Newtonian mechanics are. (Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea does a good job I think of imparting intuitions about the ‘Platonic inevitability’ of it.)
You’re right that there are empirical truths – about how well some system ‘fits’ the ‘shape’ of the abstract theory. But once you’ve ‘done the homework exercises’ of mapping a few systems to the components of the abstract theory, it seems somewhat unnecessary to repeat that same work for every new system. Similarly, once you can ‘look’ at something and observe that, e.g. there are multiple ‘discrete’ instances of some kind of abstract category, you can be (relatively) confident that counting groups or sets of those instances will ‘obey’ arithmetic.
I must admit tho that I very much appreciate some of the specific examples that other commenters have supplied for applications of expected utility theory!
(Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea does a good job I think of imparting intuitions about the ‘Platonic inevitability’ of it.)
Possibly when Richard says “evolutionary theory” he means stuff like ‘all life on Earth has descended with modification from a common pool of ancestors’, not just ‘selection is a thing’? It’s also an empirical claim that any of the differences between real-world organisms in the same breeding population are heritable.
‘all life on Earth has descended with modification from a common pool of ancestors’
That’s pretty reasonable, but, yes, I might not have a good sense of what Richard means by “evolutionary theory”.
It’s also an empirical claim that any of the differences between real-world organisms in the same breeding population are heritable.
Yes! That’s a good qualification and important for lots of things.
But I think the claim that any/many differences are heritable was massively overdetermined by the time Darwin published his ideas/theory of evolution via natural selection. I think it’s easy to overlook the extremely strong prior that “organisms in the same breeding population” produce offspring that is almost always , and obviously, member of the same class/category/population. That certainly seems to imply that a huge variety of possible differences are obviously heritable.
I admit tho that it’s very difficult (e.g. for me) to adopt a reasonable ‘anti-perspective’. I also remember reading something not too long ago about how systematic animal breeding was extremely rare until relatively recently, so that’s possibly not as extremely strong of evidence as it now seems like it might have been (with the benefit of hindsight).
I think this might be a big part of the disagreement/confusion. I think of evolution (via natural selection) as something like a ‘Platonic inevitability’ in the same way that probability theory and Newtonian mechanics are. (Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea does a good job I think of imparting intuitions about the ‘Platonic inevitability’ of it.)
You’re right that there are empirical truths – about how well some system ‘fits’ the ‘shape’ of the abstract theory. But once you’ve ‘done the homework exercises’ of mapping a few systems to the components of the abstract theory, it seems somewhat unnecessary to repeat that same work for every new system. Similarly, once you can ‘look’ at something and observe that, e.g. there are multiple ‘discrete’ instances of some kind of abstract category, you can be (relatively) confident that counting groups or sets of those instances will ‘obey’ arithmetic.
I must admit tho that I very much appreciate some of the specific examples that other commenters have supplied for applications of expected utility theory!
Possibly when Richard says “evolutionary theory” he means stuff like ‘all life on Earth has descended with modification from a common pool of ancestors’, not just ‘selection is a thing’? It’s also an empirical claim that any of the differences between real-world organisms in the same breeding population are heritable.
That’s pretty reasonable, but, yes, I might not have a good sense of what Richard means by “evolutionary theory”.
Yes! That’s a good qualification and important for lots of things.
But I think the claim that any/many differences are heritable was massively overdetermined by the time Darwin published his ideas/theory of evolution via natural selection. I think it’s easy to overlook the extremely strong prior that “organisms in the same breeding population” produce offspring that is almost always , and obviously, member of the same class/category/population. That certainly seems to imply that a huge variety of possible differences are obviously heritable.
I admit tho that it’s very difficult (e.g. for me) to adopt a reasonable ‘anti-perspective’. I also remember reading something not too long ago about how systematic animal breeding was extremely rare until relatively recently, so that’s possibly not as extremely strong of evidence as it now seems like it might have been (with the benefit of hindsight).