Another year done, a few more essays produced. Below are the three papers I wrote for PHIL412, my course on the philosophy of biology (not all that well differentiated from a lot of biology). They are (for obvious reason) of substantially higher standard than many of my other philosophical writings on the site. Funnily enough, they are also substantially longer.
Ridley would have you believe (via Mendel's Demon) that complex life such as us and in fact everything visible to the naked human eye is extremely unlikely. Unfortunately, his arguments are less than convincing and in an essay no longer than the others I even have the time to begin building a case which I think is far more accurate. As well as addressing Ridley's argument in quite a comprehensive manner I briefly sketch out an argument which concludes that given the right conditions, as assumed by Ridley, complex life is not just a possibility - it's damn near inevitable. Essay and bibliography.
One of the key missteps identified in Ridley's argument was his assumption that the complexity of an organism can be measured by the length of its genome. This assumption is in error both because of the biological facts and because the idea that the length of your genome is a measure of how complex you are is almost immediately dissonant with what we mean by the word “complexity”. Consider: while it might take me a very long time to describe a pile of rubbish, far more time than it might take me to describe a human to the same level of detail, we would not call the rubbish pile more complex. We simply do not measure complexity by the length of the description. Given this problem, Ridley's arguments could (and should) be charitably reinterpreted as being about the likelihood of the evolution of long genomes, rather than the likelihood of the evolution of complex life. However, this necessary reinterpretation does leave a crucial question unanswered: what is biological complexity? In this essay I investigate the possible options and develop a system for measuring it. Essay and bibliography.
On a quite unrelated topic, in this essay I investigate the evolution of intelligence and the situations under which it can arise, from the perspective of a philosophical engineer. I firstly argue why the intentional design of intelligence is either impossible (and it probably is) or so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. Following on from this I examine the theoretical and empirical evidence we have available to us regarding the evolution of Hominid-type intelligence and conclude that an evolutionary ratchet may be sufficient in some situations. This leads to a number of important conclusions regarding both the nature of the intelligence that will result (it will probably be much like us) and also the degree of control over this nature such an engineer might have (very little or none). Essay and bibliography.
Note: I don't buy my argument from incompleteness anymore, perhaps someone could make it work but as I've written it here I don't think it holds very much water. The rest of it is passable.