As I may have mentioned before, at the moment I'm very much enjoying Google+, the new Google social network. Among other things, I come across fascinating material through the links posted by fellow G+'ers, such as John Baez and Massimo Pigliucci. John and I have many common interests, including math, music and early hominids: on the latter, he recently posted a link to an article on the latest work of Svante Paabo, who is at the forefront of the application of DNA-based methods to paleontology. An excerpt from the article:
Other experiments Paabo and his colleagues have been running have offered more promising results. At the talk, Paabo described some of his latest work on a gene called FoxP2. Ten years ago, psychologists discovered that mutations to this gene can make it difficult for people to speak and understand language. (Here’s a ten-year retrospective on FoxP2 I wrote last month in Discover.) Paabo and his colleagues have found that FoxP2 underwent a dramatic evolutionary change in our lineage. Most mammals have a practically identical version of the protein, but ours has two different amino acids (the building blocks of proteins).
The fact that humans are the only living animals capable of full-blown language, and the fact that this powerful language-linked gene evolved in the human lineage naturally fuels the imagination. Adding fuel to the fire, Paabo pointed out that both Neanderthals and Denisovans had the human version of FoxP2. If Neanderthals could talk, it would be intriguing that they apparently couldn’t paint or make sculptures or do other kinds of abstract expressions that humans did. And if Neanderthal’s couldn’t talk, it would be intriguing that they already had a human version of FoxP2. As scientific mysteries go, it’s a win-win.
Do read the whole thing, if (like John and me) you think that early hominids is one of the most interesting topics around!
Massimo Pigliucci has a blog post on the role of intuitions in philosophy, which is a topic that (as some readers may recall) also occupies a large chunk of my time. Massimo discusses (quite critically) a recent paper by J.R. and J.R.C. Kuntz, and argues that, while intuitions most likely have a role to play for contexts of discovery, they should play no role in contexts of justification (in philosophy as elsewhere).
As the Kuntz’s make clear, intuitions can play two distinct roles in philosophy (or, for that matter, in anything else, including science): one in what philosophers of science call the context of discovery — providing the starting point from which logic (or empirical evidence, in the case of science) take off — and one in the context of justification, i.e., as data used to test hypotheses. The former is not only perfectly justified, but in fact inevitable. Galileo’s and Einstein’s thought experiments began as intuitions, and so does much valuable research in science and scholarship in philosophy. Hilary Putnam’s famous thought experiment about a twin earth can be used as a good exercise to make explicit, and if necessary to criticize, reject or modify, our thinking about language and its referents. However, intuitions cannot and should not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions, because they are not epistemically reliable [...]
I find myself agreeing almost entirely with Pigliucci here, but I'm wondering what readers might think of his forceful position.
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