I agree with your general principle here, Fred. It seems insane to expect a definition
by itself to do much useful work toward understanding a topic. Having different definitions obviously impedes mutual understanding and coming up with good consensus definitions is a useful activity at times. But there is a lot more than that involved in understanding a topic in order to apply and learn from the underlying principles. It is just a first step to knowledge and understanding.
It seems very likely to me that complex subjects require us to accumulate fairly sizable domain-specific knowledge bases before we understand them, and can't be argued sensibly without that, even with a good grasp of the basic definitions and formulae and a lot of general knowledge and good thinking skills and talents.
In addition, based on recent discoveries in learning theory, I think there is good reason to believe that gaining an understanding of the models in science often requires us to identify our intuitive concepts and bridge to new scientific concepts that are entirely different in explaining the same phenomena.
There is both knowledge and skill involved in applying the concept of selection to natural history and recognizing how and what it explains form and function in the modern biological paradigm. All the fuss and nonsense that some like to brew over natural selection being a tautology seems to be something that most of us think about at some point and sometimes argue for a while, but eventually get over as we understand the topic better. Just like the bizarre notion that centrifugal force is an illusion, and so on. That usually gets argued for a while in a good freshman physics class, but eventually fi the lesson is successful, people learn to see the picture in a different way, even though they still have their intuitions. One of the things that makes science interesting to me is the way it challenges our intuitions for a while.
Quote:
Vannevar Bush (1890 - 1974) :
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
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I recently came across David Stove's collection called "Darwinian Fairytales." Stove has a clever critique of Darwinism as a general explanatory mechanism, and I agree with a lot of it. The most interesting thing about it is that like Steve Gould's essays, it attacks various implications and applications of selection while acknowledging that the basic mechanism is clearly a correct scientific model. Stove accomplishes this by describing specific contexts where selection is relevant and others where it is not.
An intro to his thinking from the Wikipedia entry on Stove:
Quote:
[From Wikipedia 6/7/2006 on David Stove:]
Darwinism
In his final years Stove turned his critical glare on Darwinism. This surprised and dismayed many of his supporters who were Darwinists and thought Stove was as well, judging from the way he sometimes spoke. However, Stove's attack on Darwinism was not as radical as it appeared - he accepted evolution was true of all living things, and said he had no objection to natural selection being true of more primitive organisms. What he wanted to attack was the distorted view of human beings put about by some Ultra-Darwinists. For example, W. D. Hamilton, the Oxford biologist and (Richard Dawkins' mentor) famously said that no-one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but that everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers, a claim for which Stove thought was false, or at the very least, unverified. These sorts of strong claims are often made by hard-line sociobiologists, yet they are seldom pointed out even by many of their opponents.
Stove also pointed out that leading Darwinists were confused about altruism, often talking as though altruism didn't really exist and was some sort of sham. What they should have said was that they had explained the origins of altruism. But the damage has been done, Stove wrote: many people now share this suspicion about altruism and this has, at least to some degree contributed to the growth of cynicism and selfishness.
Darwinists have always had difficulties in trying to reconcile the supposedly universal nature of their theory with the fact that there appears to be no Darwinian fight for survival in modern times, and Stove makes sport out of the attempts to patch these holes up. What he calls the 'Cave Men' theory - a view that T. H. Huxley often resorted to - says that while the Darwinian struggle no longer occurs it did so amongst cave-men. The 'Hard Man', though, says that there is still a Darwinist struggle for survival going on all around us, only we are blind to it (Stove claimed that Herbert Spencer was a Hard Man). The 'Soft Man' on the other hand never notices the inconsistency.
Stove also claimed that the simple Malthusian view of population that many Darwinists accept is not true of humans - humans do not continue expanding in population until they have eaten up all of their food supplies which then results in massive deaths from starvation. In fact, the population growth of richer nations is typically slower than that of poorer nations. (This sort of view has been defended in more recent years by population economists such as Julian Lincoln Simon.)
His essays on Darwinism were collected in the book Darwinian Fairytales.
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