A different take on E.O. Wilson. Here is a Roman joke: Two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while happen to meet in the street. One says to the other: “Oh, hi! I thought you were dead!”
“What on earth makes you say so?”
“Well, all of a sudden people were speaking well of you …”
That joke came to my mind when I read three short tributes to biologist E.O. Wilson in Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2022). Wilson passed away on December 26, 2021, at age ninety-two. The tributes are by evolutionary biologist and science popularizer Richard Dawkins, evolutionary developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll, and cognitive linguist Steven Pinker. Predictably, all three portraits are very positive. Just as predictably, they are somewhat flawed. Let me first acknowledge where I agree with Dawkins, Carroll, and Pinker. Wilson, whom I’ve met a few times during my career as an evolutionary biologist first and a philosopher of science later, was indubitably one of the towering figures in late-twentieth-century biology. His expertise on social insects, and ants in particular, was unparalleled. As a science writer, he won two Pulitzer Prizes. Right there that’s more than enough to enshrine him in the history of biology, which is no small thing. For more (well justified) praise, see Ken Frazier’s in-depth biographical essay in the May/June 2022 SI (Frazier 2022). That said, some of his scientific ideas were questionable, and some of his personal ethics were borderline despicable; this ought to be acknowledged as well. After all, as skeptics we are presumably interested in the truth about the man, not in mythologizing him. … (Skeptical Inquirer)
Moral beauty. In the last post we introduced Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, and discussed his Stoic-inspired views on beauty, nature, and virtue. Today, guided by Michael B. Gill’s excellent book A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art, we’re going to pull all these strands together to look at his philosophy of moral beauty. Before we jump in, I just want to clarify why we’re exploring Shaftesbury’s ideas in the first place. One reason is that Shaftesbury has been unjustly forgotten in the history of philosophy, and it’s important to recognize his contributions. As Michael Gill says, Shaftesbury “pioneer[ed] a moral psychological approach that would become extraordinarily fruitful for Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.” … (Stoicism for Humans)
Wittgenstein: how we think. What is the self? Try standing before a mirror and gaze into your own eyes and think for a moment. Think about what is going on inside your head. You’re thinking in silence, in your brain, about you. What comes to mind? You have a name, you look a certain way that you can describe — the length of your hair, the shape of your face and eyes, the colour and tone of your skin. You have predispositions and preferences, a whole mix of things that make you unique. How self-sufficient is your brain when you’re taking account of who you are? Let’s take the example of your hair, let’s assume it’s brown, like mine. What makes it “brown”? It resembles other things that are brown, perhaps. Brown bark, brown wood and so on. … (The Sophist)
Liberalism and cultural evolution. The latest results of the World Values Survey (WVS) have recently been published. Covering the period from 2017 to 2022, the survey (which started in 1981) is based on interviews with almost 130000 persons in 90 countries. As stated on the WVS’s website, it “seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world.” Questions consist for instance in asking people the relative importance for them of institutions or values like family and friendship, about the importance of god in their life, or whether they would sign a petition. Based on the results of the survey, political scientists Ron Inglehart and Christian Welzel have argued that most cross-cultural variations in the world can be captured along two dimensions. The first dimension opposes traditional and secular values. The former emphasize “the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values,” while societies endorsing the latter “place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority.” The traditional/secular axis also determines views about the acceptability of abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and divorce. The second dimension corresponds to a survival/self-expression axis. Societies endorsing survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. Self-expression values give great significance to individual autonomy and individuality. Survival values tend to be associated with ethnocentric views with low levels of trust and tolerance, while self-expression values ascribe more importance to the preservation of the environment, the rights of minorities, and participation in decision-making in political life. … (The Archimedean Point)
Why so many Americans are losing trust in science. Dr. Mandy Cohen has been on a national tour. The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she aims to rebuild trust in that troubled agency at a moment when Covid-19 cases are rising again and the Biden administration has begun a new vaccine campaign. She has her work cut out for her. According to new survey data, 69 percent of Americans this past May said they had confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, compared with 86 percent of Americans who told the Pew Research Center in a similar survey that they had confidence in scientists in January 2019. Meanwhile, vaccine skepticism has become one of the most divisive political issues of our time. How did we get here? Many see Americans’ anti-vaccine and anti-mask attitudes as only the latest expression of a longstanding science denialism prevalent among Republicans. This anti-science mentality, the argument goes, stems from an anti-government ideology that took root in the Republican Party during the 1980s and has matured into antipathy toward not just government but science as well. Basically, the populist skepticism unleashed by Donald Trump is the logical successor to Ronald Reagan’s small-government conservatism. … (New York Times)
That was great. So Ludwig’s thoughts on private language support the notion that was is beautiful is social, and it is inescapable?
Thanks for the suggestion to read about moral beauty. I believe that studying philosophy and neglecting aesthetics is like studying architecture and neglecting concrete.