One more look at the people of the screen

Why English profs shouldn't lose sleep over the Kindle

To recap the previous post, Christine Rosen from The New Atlantis is deeply concerned about technologies like the Kindle that encourage people to read online. She fears that "the paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information." I think her intentions are good but her fears are exaggerated.

Rosen's conclusions sit on a pile of different complaints, some anecdotal and some drawn from science: Ipods and idle chatter in the British Reading Room, the failure of e-readers for young children, the "outer-directedness" of screen-readers, librarians getting jobs entitled "media and information specialist". But Rosen's most interesting worries are that screen-readers (unlike novel readers) are not submissive but controlling, and that the internet is constantly distracting. Neither of these worries is as great as Rosen makes out, I think. The first is a bit bizarre and the second is easily fixed.

Master and student

James Paul Gee, a loud advocate of video games in education, thinks they help learning because they encourage user participation. The user makes choices, acts on them, and experiences the consequences; hence they learn strategic thinking and accountability. Rosen takes this to be a "profound misunderstanding" of books and the learning process, and outlines probably the most insistent and specific (and odd) of her concerns.

[When reading a novel] you enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master.

Historian David A. Bell draws the same link between submission and learning: “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns."

This idea doesn't bear the weight that Rosen puts on it. For one thing, it is at odds with a standard argument against watching videos, which is that the user is a passive absorber of data rather than an active participant. Many defenses of literature emphasise the amount of "engagement" a book gives us, the imaginative reconstruction and moral contemplation etc. that goes on in the mind of a reader. The argument goes back at least to Plato, who preferred the spoken to the written word (and dialogues to monologues) because the former is more likely teach the audience in the best way possible: by doing. More recently, David Novitz is one philosopher of art who has emphasised the value of literature in helping people imagine new scenarios and walk through them in our heads. It's hard to see why users of video gamers are less likely to develop these skills just because they get to decide which alley to go down and where to build your next city. Since when was spectatorship a better teacher than participation?

Insofar as Rosen's objection holds weight, it is thanks to the content and verisimilitude of video-games rather than user participation. Most video games test strategy rather than empathy. You could imagine games that test the latter, but I expect they would need a great deal more detail and sophistication than they currently do -- they'ld need novelists and psychologists, not graphic artists.

David Bell puts a different slant on the notion of audience submission. What books encourage, he says, and what the internet dissipates, is the discipline of sustained reading. At best, the people of the screen are distracted readers; at worst, they make ad-hoc jumps from one bit of data to another, without trying to link them together. A standard response to this criticism is to say that our minds are in fact stimulated by the challenge of linking together disparate bits of data -- we do more "cognitive work" with The Sopranos than with I Love Lucy.

The key here is to distinguish between fragmentation and reorganisation. It's the difference between a brainstorm and an essay. The first is a set of ideas randomly gathered and displayed. The second is no less a collection of bits of data, it's just that they are deliberately selected bits of data, thoughtfully arranged.

So far so obvious (at least since Johnson made it obvious). But the bibliophile can just respond that there is still something much different in the novel. All this ideas-networking is one thing, but the quiet, sustained contemplation of a novel is altogether different. But this response is weaker than it looks. Productive book-reading is not, by and large, a simple matter of moving linearly through a long series of ordered sentences. There's lots of zig-zag and cross-reference.

*The example is taken from Boris Johnson's book Why Everything Bad is Good For You, which introduced this idea of the stimulating confusion of popular culture.

A lot depends on the genre, of course. Consider the historian or philosopher who reads a book like the internet, checking one passage against a separate one, looking for occurences of the main idea or statements of the main claim, looking up unfamiliar terms or arguments, checking the references behind claims, going back to the primary documents, considering a passage from the book alongside a critic's comment on it. This sort of cross-referencing is not the same as a random walk through Wikipedia -- it's reorganisation versus fragmentation again. But the internet makes both of those tasks easier, not just the latter.

But perhaps Rosen is worried mainly about the novel reading. This is where she gets her examples from (Dostoevsky, Little Dorrit, Middlemarch). It also seems to be a point of difference between Rosen and Johnson, the latter using computer programming and political knowledge as examples of digitally-enhanced fields. Yet most of the real understanding I get from a book -- even a novel -- is not from the first reading but from the later analysis: the search for common themes, recurring symbols, for key passages that illuminate a character. The typical University English tutorial resembles more the zig-zag of an internet search than the marathon of novel-reading. The English zig-zag is not just random flitting, guided by taste. It takes concentration and memory to search for six appearances of stained-glass windows in David Copperfield, and find their common meaning.

An electronic search can do the same. Except the internet does all the mechanical searching for you -- the student is left to do the really worthwhile bit, the close contextual reading and study of common themes of the various "hits." One might argue that the internet search is too efficient. It gives exact hits without allowing the user to go down any creative sidetracks. If you electronically search David Copperfield for "stained-glass window", you won't accidently bring up a page that has no stained-glass windows but does have a "rose window" or a scene with a sunset seen through a window. But, as Rosen frequently reminds us, the internet has no shortage of creative side-tracks....

Distraction

Here is Rosen's round-up of the problems with the Kindle:

"...the tactile pleasures of the printed page versus the screen; the new risks of distraction posed by a device with a wireless Internet connection; the difference between reading a book in two-page spreads and reading a story on one flashing screen-display after another."

Of these concerns, the first and third seem to be mainly aesthetic, and I don't understand the third one at all (what difference does it make to read with two pages visible and not just one?). The second one makes more sense. Clearly it's easier to (say) click on your Youtube bookmark, while on the computer, than it is to go and read the mag in the kitchen, while sitting reading in your favorite chair. A caricature, perhaps. But it's what we would expect, the computer and the internet being designed for easy access and convenience. The internet age is also the age of handy time-wasters.

But this is not a problem if it's easily fixed. So why not have a "anti-distraction" device on the Kindle? Activate it and you lose the internet for an hour or two, either completely or in strategic chunks -- lose Wikipedia, lose facebook or other top time-wasters, lose email. There would be an emergency bail-out, as there always is for a real book. But the bail-out option would be as inconvenient as getting out of a comforting chair to get to the phone. Perhaps a password kept in the shed or loo or letterbox, or a number you have to dial on the real phone. Or, to keep it digital, some laptop chore that the user has specified in advance, like sending an awkward email or organising your Documents folder. More simply, there could be no built-in bail-out, and your last resort is a connected computer in another room.

There are drawbacks to this anti-distraction idea. No anti-distraction plan is proof against a sufficiently determined ditherer. And for the reader to activate such a plan they would have to have a firm commitment to sustained reading in the first place. But both of these drawbacks apply just about as well to ordinary book-reading. That is, anyone who would otherwise be a good book-reader would have the skill and dedication to overcome them.

Conclusion

The internet does certain things very well. It searches for things, links things together, and makes it easy to follow the links. It's also pretty good at just displaying raw language. Hard-copy books are only really good at the latter. If we have a choice between the two, we should take the one that does more useful things. So why worry that the internet is replacing hard-copy books?

The answers that Rosen gives us are a) the new function of the internet (all that linking) is bad for us and b) the internet is not very good at the old role (displaying raw language as a book does). To a) I say: all that linking is a valuable thing that we do anyway (only slower) when reading a book. And to b) I say: the problems with the screen as a book could be solved, with a bit of thought and technology, by anyone who has the skill and discipline to read an ordinary book.

There remain concerns about the aesthetics of books (the roughed edges, the smell of the binding). But somone who doesn't share a bibliophile's taste can still be a perfectly good reader of Dickens -- at least, I don't see any good reason to otherwise in Rosen's article. Personally, I'ld prefer to read books in hard-cover. But I think that other people can read them just as well on the screen.

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Another look at the people of the screen

Two points of method in the debate about online reading

Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.

This is Christine Rosen writing in The New Atlantis on the fate of reading in a digital age. Needless to say, it's not a very happy article. Rosen means the article as a counterweight to the work of "techno-utopians", who see the digitisation of books as an unalloyed good. But Rosen doesn't just balance things out -- she slides them into gloom. Screen-reading won't just be book-reading in a new medium, she says. It'll be a new activity altogether, where reading is shallow and aimless and readers are numb to their own humanity.

I'll look at Rosen's main worries in the next post. But first, here's a couple of general points about the debate, inspired by Rosen's article: compare like with like, and don't let differences of medium obscure similarities of function.

Compare like with like

To be fair, Rosen scolds a "technophile" (Steven Johnson in the London Guardian) for failing to compare like with like -- for comparing computer programmers with book readers in terms of their likely economic success in the digital climate. As Rosen points out, "Johnson would have done better to compare obsessive novel writers and obsessive computer programmers...Most of the people immersed in screen worlds are not programmers. They are consumers who are reading on the screen, but also buying, blogging, surfing, and playing games."

That's fair enough, but it rubs both ways. Rosen is as misguided as Johnson when she compares the book-reading community with the entire web community, in all its moods and activities. It's more plausible to compare the web community to the entire non-web community, where the latter includes (along with book-readers) its fair share of shallowness, idleness, and wasted time. The online community, like the offline community, has its disciplined and intelligent suburbs and its more scruffy one. The real question is whether the internet will give a net outflow from the former to the latter.

So if Rosen is right, and cognitive content of normal reading has been replaced by, and not just supplemented by, a "vaguely defined screen savvy", that's something to worry about. But if we do an equivalent of quality reading on the internet now, as before, there's no immediate concern. Importantly, this means that we may be OK even if we spent the majority of our internet time in the aimless, shallow, "power search" mode that Rosen laments.

Different medium, same function

Rosen scolds Johnson again for failing to distinguish between the values of the digital world and values within the digital world. Computer programmers might earn a lot in the "digital climate", she says, but that's no use if the climate itself is wrong. And there's truth in that. But the overall lesson of Johnson's article, in seems to me, is not just that techies achieve techie goals. It's rather that they achieve goals that everyone wants to achieve -- like professional success and political awareness. Activities in the digital medium can serve the same function as different activities in other media -- even if the difference of medium tends to obscure the similarity of function. In Johnson's words: "Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?"

With this in mind, the following claim from the article looks fishy: "People who read regularly for pleasure are more likely to be employed, and more likely to vote, exercise, visit museums, and volunteer in their communities; in short, they are more engaged citizens."* Perhaps your average blogger is less likely to go to museums or help out in the local soup kitchen. But they become engaged citizens in ways that are peculiar to the internet -- online donations, political awareness, writing open source code, getting involved in decent online forums.

*To be fair, the claim comes from a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study, not from Rosen. And she counters it with Harold Bloom's skeptical view of the link between books and civic engagement.

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Review of "Lords of the Fly" by Robert E. Kohler

A fine book about flies and scientists

Robert E. Kohler. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. University Of Chicago Press, 1994.

First of all, Lords of the Fly is an excellent book. It is readable, thorough, vivid and original. It contains enough technical detail to guide the reader, but not too much to confuse him. It describes, in a novel way, an important and much-studied period in the history of biology: the rise of genetics in the first half of the century. It contains considerable detail about the everyday working lives of the “Drosophilists,” the men and women who worked with the fruit fly Drosophila. But it always tries to link those details to the actual science they produced. “I hope to persuade the readers of this book,” writes Kohler, “that experimental sciences have been shaped by their material cultures.” Kohler succeeds.

The challenge is to explain that success. What lessons does the book contain for those who would write laboratory-based histories of science? One lesson is that comparison works. Kohler uses the comparative approach to illuminate two separate but similar historical episodes: the early years of research based on Drosophila, led by T.H. Morgan at Columbia University; and the work, led by Beadle, on Neurospora.

Kohler also shows that structure works. Throughout the book, Kohler treats Drosophilia and the Drosophilists in three different ways: as technological devices, with the Drosophilists manipulating their flies to create scientific instruments; as an episode in natural history, with the human and animal organisms migrating, specialising, adapting, selecting; and as an example of a “moral economy,” a human community with a set of values, procedures, and penalties. These themes serve as a map, opening up a field of inquiry and setting its elements into clear array.

Kohler also makes good use of metaphor and analogy. At times her analogy between experimental life and ecological life is merely decorative. But often it is illuminating, casting descriptive and explanatory light. For example, he writes: “Intragroup conflict, by isolating Dobzhansky from the traditional practice of his American colleagues, cleared the way for the rapid evolution of a new species of experimental practice.”

The subtitle of the book is a nod to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump, the ground-breaking study of experimental science in the seventeenth century. Kohler only takes what he needs from Shapin and Schaffer, which is an interest in the details of experimental practice. He does not pick up Shapin and Schaffer's task of pricking the pretensions of scientists. By showing (for example) that Morgan and his students “constructed” a new fly by manipulating its genotype, Kohler means to show how scientists work, not to challenge the integrity of their results. In one sense this approach limits the force of Kohler's book, since he does not enable himself to explain the resolution of disputes about ultimate results. But it also opens up room to explain many other features of experimental life, such as choices of research topics, the pace of research, the harmony or otherwise of the “moral economy,” and the failure of interdisciplinary efforts.

Sometimes Kohler pushes his aims too hard. He suggests, for example, that material practices were the “controlling factor” in the rapid expansion of Dobzhansky's project of mapping the phylogenies of naturally occurring Drosophila pseudoobscura. From Kohler's account, however, it seems that a theoretical breakthrough (the discovery of a link between phylogenetic maps and chromosomal inversions) was just as important. Also, one might protest that Kohler does not fully capture the amount of repetition and long-term drudgery that was involved in processing Drosophilia. But the reader gets glimpses of this aspect, as in Dobzhansky slaving over mounds of flies. Kohler might have turned the glimpses into a full view by including more technical detail and literary evocation. But those two features are not on the book's agenda. As for Kohler's actual aims, he meets them in style.

Lords of the Fly on Amazon

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"Representing Electrons" by Theodore Arabatzis

An ambitious and pretty successful biography of the electron

Theodore Arabatzis, Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006

In Representing Electrons, Theodore Arabatzis gives a detailed account of scientific inquiry into the electron, covering roughly the years 1891-1824. The main message is that scientific entities have a "life of their own": they can act independently of theory, theoreticians, and experimenters. In delivering this message, Arabatzis makes a bold and largely successful attempt to bring the historical and philosophical approaches into a mutually stimulating relationship.

You can see Arabatzis’ dual interest in the history and philosophy in his choice of advisors and collaborators. While at Princeton University Arabatzis came into contact with the philosopher Bas van Fraassen, and numerous other philosophers are energetically deployed in the body of the book: Karl Popper, Larry Laudan and Thomas Nickels are quoted on the topic of “problem situations”, Paul Feyerabend and Ian Hacking on scientific realism, and Hilary Putman on theories of reference. Also featured in the author's acknowledgments are prominent historians of science, including Jed Buchwald, Warwick Taylor and Ernan McMullin.

In Representing Electrons, Arabatzis puts his multi-layered background to good use. Three themes dominate the book: realism and meaning change; the "discovery" of scientific entities; and the autonomy of theoretical entities. In Arabatzis's account, each of these themes has a historical and a philosophical dimension.

Take the topic of scientific discovery. Here, Arabatzis corrects the commonly-held view that J.J. Thomson “discovered” the electron. In doing so he uses the historian’s tools, probing scientists’ ideas through their scientific papers (such J.J. Thomson’s Cathode Ray article in Philosophical Magazine) and other writings (Lorentz’s Nobel Prize speech, for example. In later chapters he uses interviews conducted by Thomas Kuhn.) But this historical spade-work is guided by a philosophical discussion of “discovery” that draws on Hacking, Kuhn and Nickles. Here Arabatzis argues for the possibility of an account of discovery that is realism-neutral, and stresses the gradual, consensual nature of discovery: what we call “discoveries” are usually something more like “constructions.”

A similar pattern emerges in the next four chapters. Here, Arabatzis goes into considerable detail when dealing with the key episodes in the evolution of ideas about the electron, following the concept as it moves between various stages within physics (from classical to quantum and relativistic physics) and between disciplines (physics and chemistry). But his account is held together by the broad idea that the electron had a "life of its own," a capacity to throw up problems and suggest solutions.

Throughout the account, Arabatzis keeps a close eye on the stability of the "electron" concept through time and between practitioners. This conceptual stability comes to the fore in the concluding discussion about meaning change and realism in science. Arabatzis goes over some responses to Paul Feyerabend, who argued from meaning change to the non-existence of unobservable entities. When these responses fail, what is left for the realist? Arabatzis gives a two-fold answer. First, the case for realism can be supported by reference to the "writings" of the putative entity: if multiple observations give evidence of the same unobservable entity, you can be pretty sure the entity is real. Secondly, the case for realism can be supported by a historical account of a concepts' stability over time.

The final paragraph of the book draws out the implications of these arguments for historical accounts of the electron. Hence the attempted union of history and philosophy is carried right to the end of the book. Is this attempt successful? On the whole, the answer must be “yes.” There is a danger here of artificially gluing different disciplines together, but Arabatzis largely avoids this danger. The philosophical discussion in the concluding chapter draws on examples from the author’s historical account; during the historical discussion the reader is constantly reminded of the philosophical questions at hand; and the philosophy comments not only on the science of microphysics but also on the methodology of historians of physics.

One might complain that the philosophical discussion about realism and meaning change is independent of the “biographical approach” that Arabatzis takes to the electron. At least, Arabatzis seems to be in two minds about this. On the one hand, he pursues the “historicist” approach to discovery precisely because it does not require any prior commitment to realism or anti-realism: it keeps everyone happy. On the other hand, he writes the concluding chapter (on meaning-variance and realism) largely to justify his historical methodology: “for those who disbelieve in the existence of unobservable entities...a historical approach devoted to its representation may seem vacuous.”

In Arabatzis' defense, the final chapter does explore the implications of the historical account for the realism debate (not just the other way round). And his equivocation here may be just another sign that historians and philosophers (not just Arabatzis) have inconsistent aims. To a historian, who is worried about what happened in the past, the key criterion for existence of an entity is whether the entity was significant for past scientists. To a philosopher, the key criterion is whether it is, in fact, right to think that the entity exists. If Arabatzis is in two minds here, the problem does not lie with him, for being inconsistent, but with the two disciplines, for being different; Arabatzis' only real fault is not to clearly acknowledge this difference.

In the well-tilled field of historical research into the electron, novelty is crucial to a book’s success. The chief novelty in Representing Electrons is is the idea that concepts have a "life of their own." This idea does give rise to a fresh retelling of the atomic story: a vivid picture emerges of the electron standing on the outside of theory, teasing physicists into dead-ends and leading them on to unexpected new insights.

But Arabatzis has only given us a new picture insofar as he has applied it to a new entity: the ideas behind the picture are unexciting. For example, Arabatzis writes about Sommerfeld's selection rules, and how his “struggle to discipline the electron in a principled way ran into difficulties with its writings.” But do these metaphors convey anything more than the mundane fact that Sommerfeld had trouble matching his theory about the electron to his observations about it? A similar question may be asked about the fact that physicists found heuristic value of theories, and that they had trouble making the concept of the electron internally coherent. If the answers to these questions are “no”, this is not to say that there is no value in Arabatzis' biographical approach. It just means that the value lies in its contribution to the narrative structure of the book, and not to its philosophical depth.

One can always make quibbles about exposition, especially when an author tries to describe technical paths of reasoning. Overall Arabatzis does a good job here: a basic knowledge of maths is required to understand the derivations, but most of the discussion is within the reach of the ordinary reader. However, the book would benefit from more images of the relevant theories (eg. of atomic structure) and experimental results (especially spectral patterns). This would not just aid reader understanding. Copies of original diagrams of the electron would give a better idea of how physicists "represented" the electron to eachother and to themselves.

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Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008 II

A third selection from the 2008 annual conference of the NZ division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy

Tool Use and Life History of Early Homos. Ben Jeffares (ANU).

How to account for human cognitive and social evolution? One approach is to focus on the physical evidence of human evolution (skeletons, tools, drawings, etc.) and on the periods where this physical evidence indicates dramatic changes in human life, thought and behavior. This is Jeffares' approach, and in this talk he concentrated on a dramatic change in human tool use that seems to have taken place around 1.5 million years ago.

1.5mya is a hotspot for archaeologists because it's meant to be the great coming of age of our species – the point where we stopped being walking chimps and became hairy humans. And a jump in tool use is the main marker of this shift. Jeffares thinks tools were around well before the point where the first appear in the archaological record. Skeletal remains indicate that early bipeds had a hand structure suitable for tool-use well before 2.5mya. Be that as it may, tools became more refined around 1.5mya, being more symmetrical and sophisticated and more likely to be “time travellers”: made in advance and for repeated use.

How to account for this change? It's really quite interesting, but the evidence is fragmentary. Studies have suggested that homos started living differently around the time that tool-makers sharpened their act. The started having longer childhoods, longer periods of learning and maturing: the age of the teenager had begun. They also had patchier resources, had to kill away from home and in unknown places. So they had to plan ahead, making tools at home using secure resources. And, crucially, the children sat around while the tool-makers worked, and the tools lay around as well. Teaching ensured that any new skills or gizmos could be passed on. And the tools that lay around acted as “templates”, finished products that young killers could copy. As Jeffares put it, students could learn from “products”, not just from “behaviors.”

A nice story, but is it true? Jeffares is sensitive to the weaknesses of the evidence, and with good reason. It is not an exaggeraion to say that the extended-childhood data is based often based on “half a dozen teeth.” Human evolution is light on evidence and heavy on theorising – not necessarily a bad thing, and good for philosophers. There's some doubt about Jeffares' early tool-use thesis. Tools are not the only reason that manual dexteritry, of the kind found in skeletal remains, can arise. As Sterelny puts it, “it's always important to be able to scratch your bum.” Turning over rocks for food, extracting berries or flesh, forcing other animals to the ground: all would need precise and powerful grips.

Some will also question the inference from stone-crafting to tool-use. Some of the stones in question are beautifully symmetric, crafted beyond the needs of mere huntsmen. They have the look of ornaments, icons. Jeffares insists, though, that the elegant tear-drop stones are the exception. And there's no need to worry about the fact they have a sharp edge all the way round. True, this would make them inpracticable as hammers or weapons. But they were not always like that, says Jeffares. Whenever one edge wore out, our frugal ancestors worked on another edge of the same stone -- and so on until the stone was crafted all the way around. It's only the finished product we see.

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Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008 II

A second highly selective selection from the 2008 conference of the NZ branch of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

When not to have an Argument: the Different Explanatory Goals of Population Biology and Evo-Devo. Brett Calcott (ANU)

This talk was an attempt to resolve (in so far as it can be resolved) the debate between population biologists and evolutionary developmental biologists. A persuasive talk, but Calcott may have missed something important. I should note that part of Calcott's project is to unify evo-devo explanations with pop-bio explanations by showing how they both fit into a single account of explanation -- the “difference-maker” account of explanation. But the meat of the talk comes in Calcott's account of how explanations differ between the two approaches to biology.

Calcott distinguishes between “population-level” and “individual-level” explanations for evolutionary change. The former uses the genetic make-up of a population, plus the mathematical theory of genetic change, to explain changes in that genetic make-up. The latter uses certain physical differences between two stages in an individual's evolution, plus a knowledge of bioengineering, to explain certain other physical differences between the same two stages.

Calcott elaborates this distinction by saying that the former explanation is one of motive, and the other of means. Imagine an explanation of why a child got the chocolate bars on the top shelf in the kitchen. One could say that the child liked chocolate very much, so he was motivated to get it. Or one could say that he used a stool to help him reach the chocolate – he had the means. Both of these are genuine explanations of the child's behavior; whether we are satisfied with one or the other will depend on what we already know and what we want to find out. We can't ascribe motives to evolution, of course. But it seems reasonable to distinguish between what drives an evolutionary change (gene frequencies and their interactions) and what facilitates it (ie. how adaptive changes in structure to an individual are underwritten by other structural changes).

If this distinction holds, two things are clear. First, Calcott's distinction cuts across another popular distinction that is sometimes used to account for the disagreements between evo-devo and pop-bio – that between “proximate” and “distal” explanations. How can we explain, say, the human scab? We could give a biochemical account of why blood goes hard when exposed to air, and how this helps to heal the wound underneath. We need not look to the past to do this. Or we could try to explain how the tendency to form a scab has evolved – how it has come about that humans have the kind of biochemistry that leads to scabbing. This would certainly involves studying the past. Sometimes evo-devo is said to give “proximate” and pop-bio to give “ultimate” explanations.

Against this, Calcott insists that individual-level explanations, as he describes them, can account for how current phenotypical traits came about. After all, those explanations tell us how the structure of an individual at one point of time leads to a different structure in the same individual at another time. It tells us the mechanical means for this change. If we want a more fine-grained account of change over time, we just give a continuous series of these individual-level explanations.

As Calcott points out, certain “lineage diagrams” do just this. The lineage diagram we all know is of human evolution: a series of imags of our species in profile, running from the hunched and hairy ancestors to the pale and upright modern human. This doesn't explain much. But a more sophisticated diagram might. To illustrate, consider a set of instructions on how to make an oragami figure. These usually consist in a series of five or six drawings of different stages along the way to the final figure. And each drawing has dotted lines and arrows that tell you how to get to the next figure – what combination of small changes are needed in order to add a wing here, an envelope there, a sharp point there. Producing these “instruction series” is one job of biologists, and Calcott has all the right slides to show that they take the job seriously.

Calcott is clear that his distinction between individual-level and population-level explanations defuses the debate between evo-devo and pob-bio, rather than resolving it. He points out that the two forms of explanation he describes can come into conflict. That is, one form can give an explanation of a phenomenon that the other can refute. In any particular case of such a conflict, there can be a dispute about which account should hold more weight. But this is just as reconcilable as any other dispute in science between two competing explanations for a phenomenon. No two correct explanations of the two kinds could ever disagree over the facts of evolution. In this sense, they are “commensurable.” What should not be disputed is that both of them can give insight into how species have evolved.

Now, all of this strikes me as pretty well on the right track. But I'm not convinced that Calcott has covered all the areas of serious disagreement between evo-devos and pop-bios. As I understand them, evo-devos do in fact propose a new population-level process of evolution. The don't just give us, for each evolutionary event, an account of how certain structural changes are grounded in other structural changes. They give us an alternative view of how natural selection occurs. On the old view, genotypes fix phenotypes. And evolution occurs when a new and better genotype is randomly produced and outlasts the other ones. On the new view, genotypes have a very loose hold on phenotypes. Evolution occurs when the environment changes and phenotypes change in response to it, without any genotypical adjustments occuring. Genes only change further down the line. They help to ground the new phenotype, but the new phenotype arose earlier and independently, as an adaptive response to the environment. In a phrase, phenotypes lead genotypes, and not the other way around.

One can argue about whether this new picture is really new, or just a new angle on the old one. But it is a matter of sociological fact (I thought, perhaps wrongly), that the evo-devo picture was, and is, new enough in appearance to cause a big split between the evo-devos and the pop-bios. And this really does seem to be a split about the way in which evolution occurs, not about two different patterns of explanation that can be applied to evolution. Hence Calcott's distinction does not help to heal this particlar split, even if it can heal others.

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Notes on ACAAPNZ 2008

ACAAPNZ = annual conference of the New Zealand branch of the Australasian Association of Philosophy

Naturally, the Australasian Association of Philosophy has a New Zealand branch and (just as naturally) this branch has a regular conference that takes place in New Zealand. Oddly, though, the 2008 conference had a lot of Australians. But there's a natural explanation for this. The Australian National University can't find enough top Australian philosophers to fill their gaduate programs, and New Zealanders get first pick of the international scholarships at the ANU. Couple this with the fact that some top thinkers at ANU have dual careers in the big and small islands of the South Pacific, and you get quite a lot of inter-breeding. And when the man with the dual careers is Kim Sterelny, the scruffy luminary of cognitive evolution, you get quite a lot of Australian philosophers of biology at your New Zealand conference. This is all to the good, of course. But it means there's lots of philosophy of biology in the following notes on the conference, and not a whole lot else. So in here (in this and the following two posts) is my very selective list of conference talks, and some thoughts on them.


Presidential Address: On Turing on Intelligence as an Emotional Concept. Diane Proudfoot

A curious talk with drama, video, and a spiky question-time. The puzzle about the Turing Test is that Alan Turing's original version of the test seems needlessly complex. It consists in a jurer who asks questions of two hidden objects. One is a real person and the other is either a real person or a computer imitating a person. The jurer's task is to judge whether the second object is a real person or not. But it seems like one could just as well get rid of the first hidden object, and ask the jurer to judge whether it is a human or not.

Proudfoot thinks that the more complex test was better for Turing because he thought of mind as an “emotional” and not just an “intellectual” concept. Which is to say that whether we judge an object to be thinking or not depends on “our own state of mind and training”, which can vary between judges.

Proudfoot drew on three bodies of data, two sociological and one historical, to make her case. One is that humans are naturally credulous when interacting with computers. This can be nicely demonstrated by quirky videos of humans led into conversation with blocks of moving metal. Another is that humans guard their uniqueness jealously. We don't like being taken in by mere metal. At the annual Turing test Olympics, humans are more often mistaken for computers than the other way round. The historical fact is that Turing did indeed say that thinking is “emotional” in the way described above.

What to say about these bodies of data? The audience consensus seemed to be that they are interesting, but that it is not clear how they explain Turing's preference for the more complex test. Perhaps the idea is that the complex test brings out our jealousy to counteract our credulity. But how does the complex test accomplish this? And if mind really is an “emotional” concept, then the judgements we naturally make about the intelligence of machines should be our raw data about that intelligence, not fallible hunches.

To the second question, Proudfoot responds that according to Turing, our emotional response to a machine is only one component of the machine's intelligence, the other component being a fact about the machine itself. So Proudfoot would presumably claim that our credulity is not part of the subjective component, and is fallible. She did not give grounds for this claim -- even so, it can still form part of a how-possibly explanation for Turing's complex test.

The drama from the talk came from a mock-up of Alan Turing's 1952 broadcast on the BBC. Not all the original listeners liked the original broadcast. One listener said it sounded as if it had been “read from a prepared script, and badly.” Others were flatly opposed to the idea that machines could think. The mock-up got a receptive audience, though, not least because it shown the hidden dramatic talents of some professors of logic – talents great enough that noone could work out who they were.

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