Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here is a great anti-reductionist paper, in which the author demonstrates that: * Temperature is not equivalent to the particular mean molecular kinetic energy of a collection of molecules, since any collection will always have such a mean but it still may not have a temperature: “The appearance of the temperature as an argument in the Boltzmann distribution function n i = n 0 e -U i /kT is therefore precisely what it seems to be, a macroscopic determinant of a microscopic condition without which a gas does not have a temperature.” * Water is only a collection of H 2 O molecules in its gas phase. Even the purest of liquid water will contain many hydrogen and hydroxyl ions. So even such a simple substance as water does not reduce to H 2 O. The situation is worse with more complex molecules: " For example, methyl ether and ethanol share a Hamiltonian, the quantum mechanical description of their energetic properties. Nevertheless, they are very different molecules. Et...

Noah Millman, who typically seems to be an intelligent fellow, forwards two surprisingly fatuous contentions in this post . 1) "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" Ah, someone must've had their final-cause-detection meter set on high, and still have failed to find any teleology! Because what else can Millman mean here? Four hundred years ago, the founders of modern science made a methodological choice: they would only look for efficient causes, and they would only consider efficient causation in their explanations. Final causation was excluded not because of any evidence that it does not exist, but because explanations in terms of final causes were thought to be unenlightening. That an enterprise which has deliberately excluded teleology from its explanations does not reveal to us any final causes is hardly surprising. 2) Millman next suggests that the hole created in Aristotelian ethics by removing teleology (which...

And not the reverse. Livers don't go around detoxifying on their own, and occasionally bump into a heart and lungs and decide to make an organism. No, we only understand what organs do by seeing their role in the entire organism. I mention this as part of the campaign to make the "mouth of truth" your anti-reductionist blog of choice. (Although Ed Feser is not bad either.) One interesting thing that has emerged is that some people are ready to deeply defend reductionism without apparently having any idea what it is. One commenter offered thermodynamics and Darwinian evolution as examples of successful reductionist theories, when, in fact, they are two prime examples of theories resisting reduction for over a century. For example, convection in thermodynamics is an excellent example of a theory which cannot possibly be reduced to the action of isolated molecules: what would it even mean for a single molecule to be undergoing convection?! It is a solid, scientific conce...

Far from reducing to just the state of your neurons, it turns out that your psychic health hardly depends on you alone: the trillions of microbes living in our guts apparently also play a keep part in our mental state .

From Charney and English, "Candidate Genes and Political Behavior," American Political Science Review , Feb. 2012: Hence, a single gene can code for multiple proteins , something that is estimated to occur in 90% of all human genes. We cannot equate a particular allele straightforwardly with the production of a particular form of protein and from that with the production of a particular physiological effect and corresponding phenotype. Once considered the paragon of stability, DNA is subject to all manner of transformation. For example, we retrotransposons or "jumping genes" comprise 45% of the human genome, that the genome play copy-and-paste mechanism changing DNA content structure, are regulated by the epigenome (and hence are potentially environmentally responsive), and appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain... "The dogma and collect their genetics until the 1990s was the genotype would predict phenotype. We thought that once we clone...

But this running with the genes just ain't where it's at... A great paper in the current issue of American Political Science Review, "Candidate Genes and Political Behavior" by Charney and English, takes down the contemporary trend in the social sciences to find a gene that makes one vote Republican, a "God gene," a gene that makes you trade on Wall Street, and so on. The major problem is that all of the studies is that they rely on a false, reductionist view of the gene that has been massively discredited over the last few decades in biology. Some key quotes: Genes do not regulate the extent to which they are capable of being transcribed in any obvious, unidirectional manner. Rather, the extent to which a gene can be transcribed is controlled by the epigenome, the complex biochemical regulatory system that turns genes on and off, is environmentally reponsive, and can influence phenotype via environmentally induced changes to gene transcribability8 with...

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