Congrats, Randy!

Link to paper: users.ox.ac.uk/~grafen/cv/p...

Anyway, fun and pleasant to watch

To view the whole thing you must register an account (free one-week trial.

(13/13)

But, of course, who gets to decide what really matters?

As Dennett put, there is no such thing as philosophy free science.

(12/n)

It also means that you can get stuck in cycles where some complain that certain observations (development/species selection/niche construction/pick your favourite) are not given the credit they deserve and others dismiss them as interesting but irrelevant to “what really matters”.

(11/n)

Evolutionary biology is a big synthetic field.

I believe is a great thing and a strength. But it seems like sub-field competitions are almost inevitable.

(10/n)

How to make sense of a disagreement like that between Dawkins and Noble?

Here, I think @birchlse.bsky.social comment of sub-field competition (originally made in a different context) is helpful

(9/n)

Similarly, in the @iai.tv debate, Dawkins argues that the details of embryology are interesting (“and Denis explains them wonderfully…”), but they are not important from an evolutionary perspective.

(8/n)

There, he notes that inclusive fitness is often difficult to calculate in practice, but that it follows deductively from pop gen.

The way to prove it, he argues, is not through experiment, but logically. (One would not prove Pythagoras’s Theorem by measuring angles with a ruler in nature.)

(7/n)

The emphasis on logic also comes up in Dawkins’s discussion of inclusive fitness at the Oxford Union a few years ago.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrgq...

(6/n)

It’s striking how much of these debates for Dawkins are about logic.

Noble will explain the intricacies of DNA repair and Dawkins will laud the fluency of the explanation and then reply that it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that some genes survive in the gene pool and some do not.

(5/n)

A key point of contention is what to make of the complicated molecular mechanisms of development.

To Noble, this makes talk about individual genes meaningless.

To Dawkins, this misses the point.

(4/n)

The second is that it feels quite vintage.

Much of the same argument comes up already in The Extended Phenotype and other things published around then.

(3/n)

The first is a very polite debate.

The two go back a long way: Noble was the examiner for Dawkins’s doctoral defence and also organised a debate at Balliol soon after The Selfish Gene was published.

Both spend a lot of time praising each other’s writing.

(2/n)

Dennett D. (1983). Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: The “Panglossian paradigm” defended. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 6: 343–390.

Dennett delivered the lectures in the 1982–1983 academic year, and they were eventually published as Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting in 1984.

philpapers.org/archive/CLAP...

Ellen Clarke!