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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933.
🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky
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Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social |
1200 followers 1007 following 1104 posts
History & philosophy of science: biology, complexity, diagramming. Philosophy of history. PhD candidate (ABD) Stanford. Curates these BlueSky feeds: History and Philosophy of Biology Complexity Science Philosophy of History and Historiography
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933.
🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky
0 replies 0 reposts 9 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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David Levine, in the New York Review of Books.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Ernst Mayr was born OTD in 1904.
“Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.”
🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
1 replies 11 reposts 27 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; … the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded.” —Learned Hand
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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It’s supposed to be a device for playing music, it I don’t know how it works in detail. I chose it because it has an MC Escherish quality that seems to me to visually evoke the references in the Gopnick quote to recursion and self-reference.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Rube Goldberg was born OTD in 1883.
A Goldberg contraption “does more than you have to in order to do something…. And so it ends up being a study of itself.” Adam Gopnick
🧪🦋🦫🐡 #HistSTM
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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OTD in 1875, Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants was published.
These plants show “extreme sensitiveness,” more even than the human body, as well as “the power of transmitting various impulses from one part of the leaf to another,” all despite lacking “any nervous system.”
🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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🌱🐋
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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OTD in 1858, papers by Darwin and Wallace regarding transmutation of species by natural selection were read to the Linnean Society.
Its president later noted that 1858 had not seen any “discoveries which at once revolutionize … the department of science on which they bear.”
🐋🌱🗃️🧠🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Joseph D. Hooker was born OTD in 1817.
Darwin’s best friend, and the period’s greatest botanist. Like D, H feuded with Richard Owen. O sought to bring H’s Kew Botanic Gardens under the authority of O’s British Museum, accusing H of “attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds.”
🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM
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Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (PTPBio)
@ptpbio.bsky.social
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Vol 16, no 1 of PTPBio has dropped, with articles from Karen Kovaka and Rose Novick, François Papale and W. Ford Doolittle, Rose Trappes, and Cristóbal Unwin Holzapfel, plus a book review from Michael R. Dietrich. Check it out!
#philbio #openaccess
ptpbio.org
1 replies 12 reposts 20 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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A complicated man. Very talented naturalist. Willing to stand up for his beliefs even under great pressure. But his apparent hostility to Darwin? Not the substantive critiques, which were fair enough. But I consider the Quarterly Review piece unfair. And especially the accusations against D's son.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Kinky Friedman has died.
“I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets.”
🐋🌱 #BookSky
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Forthcoming in October from Chicago:
🧪🐋🌱🦫🦋 #EvoBio
1 replies 9 reposts 16 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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By combining genome sequencing, isotope tracing, and analysis of wind patterns and the source of pollen clinging to their legs, researchers believe they’ve established a migration of painted lady butterflies from Africa to French Guiana, the first documented transoceanic migration by an insect. 🐋🌱🧪
1 replies 10 reposts 24 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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“Q: Is GPT-5 faster? A: Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day.”
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Sorry. I meant to write “physical objects,” not “metaphysical objects.”
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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My own view is that Quine is both spectacularly wrong here, and paradoxically, almost right. I would say that metaphysical objects are epistemically superior as metaphysical posits precisely *because* they are so good at bringing order to the flux of experience.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Willard Van Orman Quine was born OTD in 1908.
“Physical objects are … irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.” It’s just that they are “more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
#PhilSci #PhilSky
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I too am unpersuaded by the language you quote. But I do like one way they cash it out. The report doesn’t just tell readers what was found. It also tells them the limits imposed by the experimental set-up, inviting them to imagine new work that might limit, extend or contradict the reported finding
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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This may be a sign that my intellectual temperament is not ideally suited to analytic philosophy. My first move on reading anything is to ask “What’s interesting/good in this?” “What can I use here?” I don’t like to approach an essay or talk from the angle of “What’s wrong with this argument?”
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I also wasn’t 100% convinced by some of the more outré claims. But I liked 1) the focus on demanding and rewarding imaginative engagement by the reader, 2) the resistance to monistic claims like “all papers are IBE,” and 3) the attempt to build on Morgan’s (brilliant) stuff on narrative in science.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I hear you, brother. My experience lead editing a special issue was 1. Amazement at the talent, industry, and good spirits of the journal editors, and 2. Hair-pulling frustration at the production process, based as far as I could tell on the cost-saving measures implemented by the corporate parent.
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Emily Lakdawalla
@elakdawalla.bsky.social
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Every academic article has a corresponding author whose email address is listed on the first page. If an article is paywalled, just send a short, polite email requesting a PDF from the author. 95% of the time you’ll receive it within a day. People like knowing their work is being read!
21 replies 277 reposts 799 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I didn’t know that. Kind of a strange choice for an English translation. The English title fits the book, certainly. But Un Verdor Terrible is more emotionally resonant.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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His When We Cease to Understand the World was fabulous. Very dark, but wonderful.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Absolutely. They want to argue that contemporary scientific journal articles are narrative in a special way that demands and rewards imaginative engagement on the part of the reader, which they connect to modernist fiction. I argue Darwin was doing something very much along the same lines.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland climbed Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador on this day in 1802.
Left: H, B, their guides, and I presume, their dog, with Chimborazo in the background, by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1806).
Right: from H’s Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805).
🐡🧪 #HistSTM
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I used to be a lawyer. My first job out of law school was clerking for a judge. My judge and I both had a love for Lewis Carroll, so we would work references into Carroll stories and poems into his legal opinions.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Fascinating! I get why they invoke modernist narratives, but many things they point to (eg, the invitation to the reader to manipulate elements in imagination) pre-date modernism.
On narratives, diagrams, and manipulative imagination in Darwin, see below (paywall).
🌱🐋🗃️🧠🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Killion gets it right about Mays and Bay Area sports fans of a certain age. I liked baseball, but it was not central for me. But, still, Willie Mays stood for everything that I aspired to as a boy. And unlike so many of the heroes of youth, he never did anything to disillusion us. A great man.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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That’s what I take the linked article to be discussing as well
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Sure. I mean “primary” in the sense of original. Not sure how one would even think about assessing “most important.”
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’m a bit nonplussed that it’s controversial to suggest that language primarily serves for communication, not reasoning.
Alarm calls, vocal mating displays, etc. are widespread in animals. Wouldn’t we presume that reasoning arose later and is secondary.
🐋🌱🧪 #Evobio
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I don’t. Just found out about it here.
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Roberta Millstein 🌎🌱🐩🏊🏼♀
@cepaea.bsky.social
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Info on my forthcoming book: for clothcover/paperback, you can pre-order from U Chicago Press: press.uchicago.edu/.../chicago/... — use code UCPNEW for 30% off. Book will be sent when available, probably end of June. For an e-copy, you can wait for the open access version, probably end of July.
🌱🐋🌎
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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🗃️🧠
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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🧠🗃️
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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O.C. Marsh and others used the idea that extinction creates ecological space for more advanced beings, supported by fossils they extracted illegally from treaty lands, to justify the dispossession of those lands by portraying their original inhabitants as naturally doomed to extinction
#HistSTM ⚒️🧪
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Reminds me of the scene from Life of Brian where the Roman Centurion schools Brian in proper Latin for his anti-Roman graffiti.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Today is Bloomsday. In celebration, here’s Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I like to think of—anachronistically—as representing “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Barbara McClintock was born OTD in 1902.
“I start with the seedling, and I don't want to leave it. I don't feel I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a real pleasure.”
🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
1 replies 11 reposts 31 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Micheal Ghiselin has died. Although he called himself a “sea slug genital anatomist,” he was also a subtle student of #HPBio.
I knew him too as a founder and spiritual leader of the Philosophical Pizza Munch, long hosted at the Cal Academy of Sciences, continuing remotely today.
#HistSTM #philsci
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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I like and agree with “interesting and unorthodox.” Also “obsessive, manic, and profoundly strange.” Tomato, tomato.
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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“Dad is given both options of the Trolley Problem. But as he begins to think it over, he keeps saying, “This is exactly like the Kobayashi Maru!” He then spends so much time explaining how Captain Kirk cheated to win the scenario that he never pulls the lever.”
#PhilSky
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Babbage would later use a model of the Difference Engine to show that what we perceive as miracles are better understood as consequences of laws of nature we don’t fully understand. He proposed the origin of new species of plants and animals as an example of this.
#HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪 #PhilSci
1 replies 5 reposts 14 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London.
#HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪
0 replies 6 reposts 18 likes
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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Fernando Pessoa was born OTD in 1888
"Since we cannot extract beauty from life, let us at least extract beauty from our inability to extract beauty from life. Let us make of our failure a victory, something proud and positive, complete with pillars, majesty and spiritual acquiescence."
🦋🦫 #PhilSci
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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One of my favorite stories about the Burgess Shale fauna was how Simon Conway Morris’s reconstruction of Hallucigenia got it upside down
Do you remember Pikaia—the basal chordate that Stephen Jay Gould thought was the ancestor of all vertebrates?
Turns out we got it upside down too.
🐋🌱🧪⚒️ #HistSTM
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Greg Priest
@gregpriest.bsky.social
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English landscape painter John Constable was born OTD in 1776.
"Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments."
🧪🐋🌱🐡#philsci #HistSTM
0 replies 3 reposts 25 likes