I had wanted to provide some supporting instance-material to the below, since Glen raised it again.
> On Aug 1, 2025, at 5:27, glen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Eric explicitly mentioned a-semantic layers of formal representations w.r.t. > "Darwinian evolution" and there may be a dearth of specificity about which > "formalism" they intend. I don't interact with many evolutionary biologists. > But part of the frustration expressed by ... what ... field biologists (?) > with evolutionary biologists is that they seem to rely too much on metaphor. > Some have used phrases like "hand waving". But the ones I argue with agree > there could be such a thing as theoretical biology and simply have trouble > getting clarity on whatever the evol biols mean when they use the words. A nice example of a specific chunk of what I am calling a-semantic is represented in much of what Michael Lynch writes. Here are two recent-enough examples. (The first is open-access; I see just now that the second is behind a paywall, which is a bit of a pity, just for what the writing style tells you about the author, which provides a helpful context when evaluating the rest of his arguments. They are also short and fairly easy-reading.) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702207104https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702207104 Lynch will assert — and does in both of these papers — that a certain formal system that is the standard framework for population geneticists, “is” “the formal theory of evolution”. Meaning that, in his intention, while there may be much required from biology to describe as much as we know about some system or the phenomena it participates in, all-and-everything that makes it specifically an “evolutionary” phenomenon is the part that maps to the few terms and rules that Lynch presents as the formal system of population genetics. The rest might be physiology, or developmental biology, or biochemistry, macroecology, etc., and Lynch will assert that the population-genetic perspective is that all that rest can be black-boxed and interfaces with the “evolutionary” aspect only through receiving phenotypes through one window and handing back fitnesses through another. So that’s his world. An important thing to understand in this is the Lynch is a very able, strict, and productive practitioner of population genetic analysis, and the presentation he gives here is a fair representation of best practice in that domain. The fact that Lynch would (I think almost-surely) not present that formalism as a-semantic is a separate issue. In our thread of conversation we recognize that the semantic bindings are what Neurath or Carnap or Quine would have categorized as “choices” by a user, following Hilbert and the logicians in referencing formal systems (though here Quine would have broken away, probably arguing that there is no such thing as a really “formal” system in the sense of Hilbert, completely free from dependence on connotation). Lynch could, in principle, understand all that, but he has other goals and would rather blow by such things as a waste of time in getting to where he wants to be. So one deals with the person according to who he is committed to being. It doesn’t impede our ability to understand what is going on. I would argue that his world-view, like many, happens to be quite self-serving. He simply defines out-of-scope all the aspects of causal reasoning that aren’t subsumed within the formal system he employs, and thus by fiat those other dimensions are not “evolutionary”. My own view is that that choice is not merely self-serving, but very very far from what one would call a general program of “inference to the best explanation”, or a very rich notion of what constitutes causation. As such, it is a poor explication of what we want from the notion of the “evolutionariness” of a phenomenon, and much wider and equally concrete explications that take into account more of causality can readily be given. But as a source of null hypotheses (his emphasis on neutrality and effective population sizes, for instance), it does need to be reckoned with quantitatively before being dismissed as inadequate. Anyway, I mention this because I believe it is one source for the frustration Glen mentions below by GI biologists at various sorts of gate-keeping that the population geneticists seem to like to practice as a group. By the way, if anybody has a _lot_ of time to put into recreational reading, a philosophy colleague pointed me to this dissertation: https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/220272015/FULL_TEXT.PDF FULL_TEXT PDF Document · 1.7 MB by Joseph Bentley, which is the most helpful thing I have read to clear away underbrush and make a reasonable case for what Neurath and Carnap were after in their projects of Logical Empiricism, and how those projects related to later efforts, specifically Quine's. I get weary sometimes of treatments in the Stanford Encyclopedia, which out of necessity to give broad coverage in a short space, will repeatedly make reference to the names of things, but often _never_ bother to even say what the names refer to. The dissertation was a remedy for a lot of those omissions in the high-viz summaries. Eric
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