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"Sober, Elliott"
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Disjunction and distality
The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal (ppc) theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise.
Journal Article
Did Darwin write the Origin backwards?
After clarifying how Darwin understood natural selection and common ancestry, I consider how the two concepts are related in his theory. I argue that common ancestry has evidential priority. Arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas arguments for common ancestry do not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work. In fact, Darwin held that the key evidence for common ancestry comes from characters whose evolution is not caused by natural selection. This raises the question of why Darwin puts natural selection first and foremost in the Origin.
Journal Article
Philosophy in Science: Some Personal Reflections
The task of Philosophy in Science ( PinS ) is to use philosophical tools to help solve scientific problems. This article describes how I stumbled into this line of work and then addressed several topics in philosophy of biology—units of selection, cladistic parsimony, robustness and trade-offs in model building, adaptationism, and evidence for common ancestry—often in collaboration with scientists. I conclude by offering advice for would-be PinS practitioners.
Journal Article
Still little evidence sex differences in spatial navigation are evolutionary adaptations
A putative male advantage in wayfinding ability is the most widely documented sex difference in human cognition and has also been observed in other animals. The common interpretation, the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis, posits that this male advantage evolved as an adaptive response to sex differences in home range size. A previous study a decade ago tested this hypothesis by comparing sex differences in home range size and spatial ability among 11 species and found no relationship. However, the study was limited by the small sample size, the lack of species with a larger female home range and the lack of non-Western human data. The present study represents an update that addresses all of these limitations, including data from 10 more species and from human subsistence cultures. Consistent with the previous result, we found little evidence that sex differences in spatial navigation and home range size are related. We conclude that sex differences in spatial ability are more likely due to experiential factors and/or unselected biological side effects, rather than functional outcomes of natural selection.
Journal Article
Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique
All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such measures face a fourth problem—the Problem of Explanatory Irrelevance.
Journal Article
Instrumentalism, Parsimony, and the Akaike Framework
Akaike’sframeworkfor thinking about model selection in terms of the goal of predictive accuracy and hiscriterionfor model selection have important philosophical implications. Scientists often test models whose truth values they already know, and they often decline to reject models that they know full well are false. Instrumentalism helps explain this pervasive feature of scientific practice, and Akaike’s framework helps provide instrumentalism with the epistemology it needs. Akaike’s criterion for model selection also throws light on the role of parsimony considerations in hypothesis evaluation. I explain the basic ideas behind Akaike’s framework and criterion; several biological examples, including the use of maximum likelihood methods in phylogenetic inference, are considered.
Journal Article
Behaviorism and Blackbox Inference – A Reply to Eric Charles and Nick Thompson
This paper is a reply to Eric Charles and Nick Thompson's critique of my 2017 paper, \"Methodological behaviorism, causal chains, and causal forks.\" My paper challenged the behaviorist thesis that postulating inner causes of outward behavior is pointless if the goal is to predict and explain behavior. I used the example of a literal blackbox (a box with a button on one side and two lights on the other) to develop my argument. In the present paper, I clarify my argument and discuss related issues concerning Ockham's razor and operationalism.
Journal Article
Gene Editing and the War Against Malaria
Malaria is a tropical illness that blood-feeding mosquitoes spread from person to person. In 2018, approximately 228 million malaria cases emerged, with an estimated 405,000 deaths recorded in the same period. More than half of those deaths were young children. Mosquito nets have limited effectiveness in preventing infection, as do pesticides, and antimalarial drugs also have limited effectiveness in preventing and treating infection. Compounding this problem is the lack of resources and infrastructure in regions where the risk for malaria is greatest. Here, Bier and Sober discuss the gene-drive method of altering populations of mosquitos.
Journal Article