Elliott Sober Quotes

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• Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work.

  Elliott Sober

  Mistake, Past, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.

  Elliott Sober

  Hands, Live For Today, Example

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

  Elliott Sober

  Scientist, Accurate, Models

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Evolutionary biologists often avoid using the term "race" because there is so much racist baggage that comes with the term. However, they are often okay with the idea that the genealogy of human groups within our species can sometimes be inferred in much the same way as the genealogy of different species.

  Elliott Sober

  Race, Ideas, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Unfortunately, philosophers of science usually regard scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as monistic doctrines. The assumption is that there is one goal of all scientific inference - finding propositions that are true, or finding propositions that are predictively accurate. In fact, there are multiple goals. Sometimes realism is the right interpretation of a scientific problem, while at other times instrumentalism is.

  Elliott Sober

  Goal, Doctrine, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.

  Elliott Sober

  World, Facts, Theory

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think that some "interventionist theisms" are compatible with evolutionary theory. (By "intervention," I don't mean that God violates laws of nature; I mean that God affects what happens in nature in ways that are additional to the ones that deism recognizes.)

  Elliott Sober

  Mean, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

  Elliott Sober

  Ideas, Littles, Ancestry

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.

  Elliott Sober

  Claims, Theory, Circumstances

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Suggestions, Events

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.

  Elliott Sober

  Teaching, School, Judging

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• "Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.

  Elliott Sober

  Intelligent, Issues, Design

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.

  Elliott Sober

  Statistics, Ancestry, Common

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The indispensability argument seeks to assimilate the epistemology of metaphysical statements to the epistemology of statements that are obviously empirical. I think it fails to achieve this goal. The argument does not refute the Carnapian thesis that scientific theories and metaphysical claims differ epistemologically - observations can provide evidence for the former, but not for the latter.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Goal, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.

  Elliott Sober

  Simplicity, Frills, Aesthetic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.

  Elliott Sober

  Philosophical, Giving, Advice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The indispensability argument says (roughly) that if you have ample reason to accept an empirical scientific theory that makes indispensable use of mathematics, and that theory entails that numbers exist, then you have ample reason to accept that numbers exist. The argument affirms the antecedent of this conditional, and concludes that you have ample reason to believe that numbers exist. What is striking about this argument is that it seems to show that the empirical reasons that suffice for accepting a scientific theory also suffice for accepting a metaphysical claim.

  Elliott Sober

  Believe, Numbers, Use

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).

  Elliott Sober

  Pain, Mind, Different

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.

  Elliott Sober

  Groups, Evolution, Influence

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The rabid opposition to group selection has now considerably subsided. In the process, the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory has become clearer, as have the relationships that connect different theoretical approaches.

  Elliott Sober

  Groups, Different, Structure

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Ancestry, Common

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One influential philosophical position about the use of probability in science holds that probabilities are objective only if they are based on micro-physics; all other probabilities should be interpreted subjectively, as merely revealing our ignorance about physical details. I have argued against this position, contending that the objectivity of micro-physical probabilities entails the objectivity of macro-probabilities.

  Elliott Sober

  Philosophical, Ignorance, Objectivity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.

  Elliott Sober

  Games, Groups, Alternatives

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality.

  Elliott Sober

  Reality, America, Example

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Race, Leaving

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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