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Understanding ‘Understanding’
Quotes from Addy Pross, What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology Chapter Understanding ‘Understanding’ “In the scientific world we strive to achieve understanding of phenomena in the world around us through application of the scientific method.” “At the very heart of the scientific method is the process of induction, a way of reasoning whose roots…
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Hinshelwood, bacteria and biologists
Hinshelwood is a famous chemist (Nobel price for kinetics of chain reactions). He also spent the considerable time on research of the growth of bacterial cells. From his biography: “Shortly before the 1939-45 war, Hinshelwood began work on the growth of bacterial cells. For some time he had been thinking about applying kinetic measurements and…
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Microbial genomics challenge Darwin
Microbial genomics challenge Darwin Collection of 14 papers. Editors Didier Raoult, Eugene V. Koonin. Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol. 2012. Editorial: Microbial genomics challenge Darwin Didier Raoult, and Eugene V. Koonin http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fcimb.2012.00127/full Different approaches: Raoult: radical upstaging of the Darwinian paradigm. Forterre and Gupta: conservative view. Koonin and Wolf: strives to balance the radical and the…
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On Newton’s World View
Quotes from David Castillejo, Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos. These are quotes from Newton manuscripts. Alchemy “This rod & the male & female serpents joyned in the proportion of 3, 1, 2 compose the three headed Cerberus which keeps the gates of Hell. For being fermented & digested together they resolve & grow dayly more…
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Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings
My comments to the everything-list while discussing Fodor’s paper Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/everything-list/xcBi6v8SAg4 ———————– To understand Fodor’s answer it is necessary to understand his argument. Shortly: 1) Natural selection is assumed to be unintentional. It just happens but it does not has a goal. 2) The existence of coextensive traits in the organism…
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When I told my aunt that I wanted to study philosophy …
From preface Clément Vidal, The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective, 2012. “Deciding what to do after high school is difficult and pivotal. When I told my aunt that I wanted to study philosophy at the university, she looked at me very empathically and told me: “have you considered…
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Leeuwenhoek and sperm cells
A quote from The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick ‘Leeuwenhoek jumped up from his bed one night, “immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” and raced to his microscope. There he became the first person ever to see sperm cells.…
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Wittgenstein and Christian Tradition
A quote from Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein Chapter 1. The situated thinker A Man at the Crossroads “If we are to classify him [Wittgenstein] at all, we would certainly have to call Wittgenstein a religious thinker within the Christian tradition. But that characterization is not easy to reconcile with the content of Wittgenstein’s actual philosophical work,…