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WORK TITLE: Other Minds
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Godfrey-Smith, Peter Richard
BIRTHDATE: 1965
WEBSITE: http://petergodfreysmith.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Australian
http://petergodfreysmith.com/biographical * http://petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/PGS_CV_2016_Dec.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1965, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; married.
EDUCATION:University of Sydney, B.A. (first class honors and University Medal), 1987; University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., 1991.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Philosophy professor, educator, researcher, and writer. Stanford University, assistant professor of philosophy, 1991-98, associate professor of philosophy, 1998-2003; Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, professor of philosophy (fifty percent), 2003-05; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, visiting professor of philosophy (fifty percent), 2003-05, professor of philosophy, 2006-2011; the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), distinguished professor of philosophy, 2011-; University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, professor of history and philosophy of science, (fifty percent), 2015-. Also visiting lecturer at University of Sydney School of Philosophy, spring, 1995, honorary professor of philosophy 2011-15; and visiting associate professor in Harvard University Department of Philosophy, 2000-01.
Scuba diving.
MEMBER:Philosophy of Science Association, (governing board, 2016-).
AWARDS:Lakatos Award, 2011, for Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including PSA 1992, Volume 1, edited by D. Hull, M. Forbes, and K. Okruhlik, Philosophy of Science Association, 1992; Mental Representation: A Reader, edited by S. Stich and T. Warfield, Blackwell, 1994; Artificial Life 4, edited by R. Brooks and P. Maes, MIT Press, 1994; Adaptationism and Optimality, edited by S.H. Orzack and E. Sober, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. edited by S. Oyama, P. Griffiths, and R. Gray, MIT Press, 2001; Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological and Scientific Perspectives, edited by R. Pennock, MIT Press, 2001; The Evolution of Intelligence, edited by R. Sternberg and J. Kaufman, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002; Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, edited by B. Weber and D. Depew, MIT Press, 2003; Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation, edited by H. Clapin, P. Staines, and P. Slezak, Elsevier Publishers, 2004; Cognition, Evolution, and Rationality: A Cognitive Science for the 21st Century, edited by A. Zilhão, Routledge, 2005; Teleosemantics, edited by G. MacDonald and D. Papineau, Oxford University Press, 2006; The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future, edited by P. Carruthers, S. Lawrence, and S. Stich, Oxford University Press, 2007; A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, edited by S. Sarkar and A. Plutynski, Blackwell, 2008; Being Reduced, edited by J. Hohwy and J. Kallestrup, Oxford University Press, 2008; Stich and His Critics, edited by D. Murphy and M. Bishop, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; Mapping the Future of Biology: Evolving Concepts and Theories, edited by A. Barberousse, M. Morange, and T. Pradeu, Springer, 2009; Naturalism and Normativity, edited by M. De Caro and D. Macarthur, Columbia University Press, 2010; Carving Nature at Its Joints: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, Volume 8, edited by J. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and M. Slater, MIT Press, 2011; The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology), edited by B. Calcott and K. Sterelny, MIT Press, 2012; Millikan and Her Critics, edited by D. Ryder, J. Kingsbury, and K. Williford, Blackwell, 2012; Individuals across the Sciences, edited by Thomas Pradeu and Alexandre Guay, Oxford University Press, 2015; The Cambridge Companion to Popper, edited by J. Shearmur and G. Stokes, Cambridge University Press, 2016; and How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, edited by David Livingstone Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a history and philosophy of science professor. Smith, who grew up in Sydney, Australia, is primarily interested in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also works on pragmatism, especially in relation to John Dewey, who was an American philosopher and psychologist and a strong proponent of pragmatism. Godfrey-Smith is a contributor to professional journals and popular periodicals. An avid scuba diver, Godfrey-Smith is also a photographer whose photos and videos have appeared in periodicals.
Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
In his book titled Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Godfrey-Smith provides a new analysis of Charles Darwin’s theory of “natural selection,” which was first introduced in 1859. The book also includes Godfrey-Smith’s extension of Darwin’s idea. Natural selection is the process in which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. Godfrey-Smith begins with an overview of natural selection and presents the author’s viewpoint about subjects covered in subsequent chapters, including the key elements of natural selection.
“As the title clearly hints, Godfrey-Smith wishes to refocus our attention on the fact that evolution is, at core, a population-level phenomenon,” wrote Notre Dame Philosophical Review website contributor Massimo Pigliucci, who went on to note: “There are many subtle points in this short and dense book, and even grasping the broad picture will demand much attention from the reader.” F.S. Szalay, writing in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, recommended Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection “to those in science (or teaching science) and philosophers concerned about science and its conceptual methodology .”
Theory and Reality
In his next book, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Godfrey-Smith provides insights into the main themes of the philosophy of science. In the process, he addresses one hundred years of debate concerning how science works and whether or not it informs us about what the world is really like. He also discusses the philosophy of science in connection with other ways of understanding our world and the universe. Based on introductory lectures in philosophy of science given by Godfrey-Smith, the book is intended for undergraduate students and general readers without a background in philosophy.
The author provides a chronological account of the philosophy of science beginning with the early twentieth century, focusing on the most important work in the field. He covers topics such as logical positivism and Karl Popper’s theory of science. Godfrey-Smith also addresses various callenges to the field from others in fields such as the sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. In the last third of the book, Godfrey-Smith addresses some of the most recent work in the field. Each chapter includes a section on further readings.
“As Godfrey-Smith weaves this fascinating story of Western intellectual heritage, he is careful to point out key people, concepts, and controversies which have shaped (and continue to shape) our understanding of science,” wrote Metapsychology website contributor James Sage, who went on to comment: “The book is extremely readable, comprehensive, and thoughtful. In a review for the Dynamic Ecology website, Jeremy Fox recommended Theory and Reality “to anyone who wants a quick accessible overview of philosophy of science, including scientists who want an overview so that they can then hone in on the bits of philosophy of science most relevant to their own work.”
Philosophy of Biology
Philosophy of Biology provides an introduction to the field for students. The field “is one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary philosophy and of growing interest to a wide academic audience,” wrote Choice contributor A.C. Love. In the first chapter, Godfrey-Smith examines the relationship between philosophy and biology. He points out that both fields, in a sense, are interested in how things “hang together.” Godfrey-Smith goes on to tell readers: “In its relation to science, philosophy has often … functioned as an ‘incubator’ of theoretical ideas, a place where they can be developed in a speculative way while they are in a form that cannot be tested empirically.”
Godfrey-Smith goes on to discuss the role of “mechanistic” explanations and theoretical models in biology. He then focuses on evolution and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Other topics addressed by Godfrey-Smith include individuality and organisms, genetics, species, the tree of life, and evolution and social behavior. “Writing introductory philosophy textbooks poses a distinctive set of challenges, and writing introductory philosophy of biology textbooks poses an additional set of challenges of its own,” noted Brian Garvey in a review for the Notre Dame Philosophical Review website, adding: “Godfrey-Smith meets these challenges most admirably.”
Other Minds
In his book titled Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Godfrey-Smith, an accomplished scuba diver, traces the origins of consciousness to sea, where animals first appeared. As Godfrey-Smith tracks the development of the mind, he reveals how seaborne cells that began living together eventually became capable of sentience, that is, the ability to feel, perceive, or experience things subjectively. Godfrey-Smith, however, primarily focuses on cephalopods, which are sea animals such as a squid, octopus, or nautilus. “Watching octopuses watching him, our author considers minds and meanings,” wrote New York Times Online contributor Carl Safina.
Godfrey-Smith points out that cephalopods are like vertebrates in that they have complex nervous systems. The author especially focuses on the octopus to tell the story of the evolution of consciousness as he describes encounters with these sea creatures during scuba diving expeditions off the coast of Australia. “Octopuses play, they recognise humans and, like us, they exhibit qualities of caution and recklessness,” wrote Guardian Online (London, England) contributor Philip Hoare. Writing in Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith observes that an octopus has a half billion neurons covering the entire body. Octopuses’ eight arms are almost independent of the central brain in that they “can taste, smell, sense light and move of their own volition,” as noted by Seattle Times Online contributor Irene Wanner.
The book is is directed to a nonscientific audience in that Godfrey-Smith keeps the technical scientific data to a minimum. Rather he takes several key evolutionary ideas and explains them in “simple analogies comprehensible to the general reader,” as Library Journal contributor Steve Young emphasized. Godfrey-Smith explains that conscious awareness evolved more than once. He compares the intelligence of vertebrates with that of cephaopods. In the process he shows how cephalopods developed consciousness in a very different way than vertebrates.
“Godfrey-Smith doesn’t provide definitive answers to his questions, but the journey he leads is both thoroughly enjoyable and informative,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Nick Romeo, writing for the Chicago Tribune Online, remarked: “Godfrey-Smith skillfully links the details of evolutionary history and biology to broader philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Godfrey-Smith, Peter, Philosophy of Biology, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, January-February, 2017, Olivia Judson, “What the Octopus Knows,” review of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Donna Seaman, review of Other Minds, p. 22.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2010, F.S. Szalay, review of Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, p. 1502; August, 2014, A.C. Love, review of the Philosophy of Biology, p. 2209.
Economist, December 17, 2016, “Smart Arms; Animals and Intelligence,“ review of Other Minds, p. 78.
Library Journal, November 15, 2016, Steve Young, review of Other Minds, p. 93.
Psychology Today, November-December, 2016. Gary Drevitch, “We Are Not Alone: There Are Few Creatures on Earth That Seem as Alien as the Octopus, Staring with Its Strangely Evolved Brain,” p. 47.
Publishers Weekly, September 12, 2016, review of Other Minds, p. 43.
ONLINE
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (December 6, 2016), Nick Romeo, review of Other Minds
Critical Rationalism, http://www.criticalrationalism.net/ (April 11, 2012), review of Theory and Reality.
Dynamic Ecology, https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/ (July 23, 2015), Jeremy Fox, review of Theory and Reality.
Forbes Online, https://www.forbes.com/ (August 27, 2014), John Farrell, review of Philosophy of Biology.
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 15, 2017), Philip Hoare, review of Other Minds.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (December 2, 2016), Meehan Crist, review of Other Minds.
Metapsychology, http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/ (January 30, 2004), James Sage, review of Theory and Reality.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (December 27, 2016) Carl Safina, “Thinking in the Deep: Inside the Mind of an Octopus,” review of Other Minds.
Notre Dame Philosophical Review, http://ndpr.nd.edu/ (August 15, 2009), Massimo Pigliucci, review of Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection; (October 13, 2014), Brian Garvey, review of Philosophy of Biology.
Peter Godfrey-Smith Website, http://petergodfreysmith.com/ (June 30, 2017).
Seattle Times Online, http://www.seattletimes.com (December 2, 2016), Irene Wanner, “Other Minds: Diving Deep into the World of the Octopus.”
1CURRICULUM VITAEPeter Godfrey-SmithDecember 2016Philosophy ProgramThe Graduate CenterCity University of New York365 Fifth AvenueNew York, NY 10016, USA.Unit for History and Philosophy of ScienceCarlsaw BuildingUniversity of SydneyNSW 2006, AustraliaCONTACTEmail: pgodfreysmith@gmail.comBIOGRAPHICAL Born Sydney, Australia in 1965. Citizenship: Australia and US.Married, no children.ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS1991 to 1998: Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University.1998 to 2003: Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University.2003 to 2005: Professor of Philosophy (50%), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy (50%), Harvard University.2006 to 2011: Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University.2011 to present: Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY.2015 to present: Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (50%), Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney.EDUCATION1987: Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honors and University Medal, University of Sydney.1991: PhD in Philosophy, University of California, San Diego.Dissertation: "Teleonomy and the Philosophy of Mind."
2FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS:1994: Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Stanford University.1994: Dean's Fellow in the Humanities, Stanford University.1998: Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholarship (for 1998-2001), Stanford University.2001: Association of Stanford University Students (ASSU) Teaching Award.2011: Lakatos Award 2010, for Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.AREAS OF SPECIALIZATIONPhilosophy of biology, philosophy of mind.OTHER RESEARCH AND TEACHING AREASPhilosophy of science, pragmatism (especially John Dewey).VISITING AND HONORARY POSITIONS1995 (Spring): Visiting Lecturer, School of Philosophy, University of Sydney.2000-2001 (Fall term): Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University.2011 to 2015: Honorary Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney.EDITORIAL AND ADVISORY WORKGoverning board, Philosophy of Science Association, 2016 to present.Associate editor, Biology and Philosophy, 2000 to 2016.Editorial board, Philosophy of Science, 2009 to present.Editorial board, Animal Sentience, 2015 to present.Program Committee, Philosophy of Science Association 2008 Meetings.Advisory Committee to the Program Committee, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 2009-2011.PUBLICATIONSBooks:1. Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Chinese edition by Hunan Science and Technology Press, 1998.
32. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Romanian edition by Herald Press, 2012; Persian edition, 2013; Korean edition in preparation; Arabic edition in preparation (Jadawel publishing).3. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chinese edition in preparation.4. Philosophy of Biology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.Greek edition in preparation (Crete University Press).5. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Portuguese, Romanian and Chinese editions in preparation.Articles in Journals:1. "Why Semantic Properties Won't Earn their Keep," Philosophical Studies 50 (1986): 223-236.2. "Misinformation," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989): 533-50.3. "Signal, Decision, Action," Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 709-722.4. "Indication and Adaptation," Synthese 92 (1992): 283-312.5. "The Dimensions of Selection," with R. C. Lewontin, Philosophy of Science 60 (1993): 373-395.6. "Functions: Consensus Without Unity," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1993): 196-208. Reprinted in D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds.), The Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 280-92.Reprinted in D. Buller (ed.) Function, Selection and Design. Albany: Suny Press, 1999, pp. 185-197.7. "A Modern History Theory of Functions," Noûs 28 (1994): 344-362. Reprinted in C. Allen, M. Bekoff and G. Lauder (eds.), Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 453-77.Reprinted in D. Buller (ed.) Function, Selection and Design. Albany: Suny Press, 1999, pp. 199-220.Reprinted in A. Rosenberg and R. Arp (eds.), Philosophy of Biology: An Anthology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 175-188.Reprinted in S. Linquist (ed.), Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology. Ashgate Publishing, 2010.8. "On the Evolution of Behavioral Heterogeneity in Individuals and Populations," with (first author) C. Bergstrom, Biology and Philosophy 13 (1998): 205-231.
49. "Adaptationism and the Power of Selection," Biology and Philosophy 14 (1999): 181-194. Reprinted in S. Linquist (ed.), Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology. Ashgate Publishing, 2010.10. "On the Theoretical Role of 'Genetic Coding,'" Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): 26-44.11. "The Replicator in Retrospect," Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 403-423.12. "Explanatory Symmetries, Preformation and Developmental Systems Theory," Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): S322-S331. (Proceedings of PSA 1998).13. "On the Evolution of Representational and Interpretive Capacities," TheMonist 85 (2002): 50-69.14. "Dewey on Naturalism, Realism and Science," Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): S1-S11 (Proceedings of PSA 2000).15. "Individualist and Multi-level Perspectives on Selection in Structured Populations," with (first author) B. Kerr. Biology and Philosophy 17 (2002): 477-517. Target article with three commentaries and reply, "Group Fitness and Multi-Level Selection: Replies to Commentaries," pp. 539-549.16. "On Price's Equation and Average Fitness," with (first author) B. Kerr. Biology and Philosophy 17 (2002): 551-565.17. "Goodman's Problem and Scientific Methodology," Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003): 573-590.18. "What is Altruism?" with (first author) B. Kerr and M. Feldman. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19 (2004): 135-140.19. "Folk Psychology as a Model," ThePhilosopher's Imprint 5 (2005) No. 6: 1-16.20. "Theories and Models in Metaphysics," Harvard Review of Philosophy 14 (2006): 4-19.21. "Local Interaction, Multi-Level Selection, and Evolutionary Transitions," Biological Theory 1 (2006): 372-380.22. "The Strategy of Model-Based Science," Biology and Philosophy 21 (2006): 725-740.23. "Conditions for Evolution by Natural Selection," Journal of Philosophy 104 (2007): 489-516.24. "Varieties of Population Structure and the Levels of Selection," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (2008): 25-50.25. "Triviality Arguments Against Functionalism," Philosophical Studies 145 (2009): 273-295.26. "Models and Fictions in Science," Philosophical Studies 143 (2009): 101-116.27. "Generalization of the Price Equation for Evolutionary Change," with (as first author) Ben Kerr. Evolution 63 (2009): 531-536.
528. "Adaptationism and the Adaptive Landscape," with (as first author) Jon F. Wilkins. Biology and Philosophy 24 (2009): 199-214.29. "Selection in Ephemeral Networks," with (as second author) Ben Kerr. American Naturalist 174 (2009): 906-911.30. "Gestalt-Switching and the Evolutionary Transitions," with (as second author) Ben Kerr, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science64 (2013): 205-222.31. "Darwinism and Cultural Change," Philosophical Transations of the Royal Society B367 (2012): 2160-2170.32."Metaphysics and the Philosophical Imagination," Philosophical Studies 160 (2012): 97-113.Special issue on philosophical methodology.33."Cephalopods and the Evolution of the Mind," Pacific Conservation Biology 19 (2013): 4-9.34. "Signs and Symbolic Behavior," Biological Theory 9 (2014):78-88.35. "Dewey and the Question of Realism," Noûs, online first, November 2013,
6Chapters in Books:1. "Additivity and the Units of Selection," in D. Hull, M. Forbes and K. Okruhlik (eds.) PSA 1992, Volume 1. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1992, pp. 315-328.2. "Of Nulls and Norms," in D. Hull, M. Forbes and K. Okruhlik (eds.) PSA 1994, Volume 1. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1994, pp. 280-290.3. "A Continuum of Semantic Optimism," in S. Stich and T. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 259-277.4. "Spencer and Dewey on Life and Mind," in R. Brooks and P. Maes (eds.), Artificial Life 4. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 80-89. Reprinted with revisions in M. Boden (ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 314-331.5. "Three Kinds of Adaptationism," in S. H. Orzack and E. Sober (eds.), Adaptationismand Optimality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 335-357.6. "Organism, Environment and Dialectics," in R. Singh, C. Krimbas, D. Paul and J. Beatty (eds.), Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical and Political Perspectives. (Volume 2 of a Festschrift for R. C. Lewontin). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 253-266.7. "Genes and Codes: Lessons from the Philosophy of Mind?" in V. Hardcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 305-331.8. "Environmental Complexity and the Evolution of Cognition," in R. Sternberg and J. Kaufman (eds.), The Evolution of Intelligence. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002, pp. 233-249.9. "On the Status and Explanatory Structure of DST," in S. Oyama, P. Griffiths and R. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 283-297.10. "Information and the Argument from Design," in R. Pennock (ed.), Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics: Philosophical, Theological and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 575-596.11. "On Genetic Information and Genetic Coding," in P. Gardenfors, J. Wolenski and K.Kajania-Placek (eds.), In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, pp. 387-400.12. "Between Baldwin Boosterism and Baldwin Skepticism," in B. Weber and D. Depew (eds.), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 53-67.
713. "On Folk Psychology and Mental Representation," in H. Clapin, P. Staines, and P. Slezak (eds.) Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishers, 2004, pp. 147-162.14. "Untangling the Evolution of Mental Representation," in A. Zilhão (ed.), Cognition, Evolution, and Rationality: A Cognitive Science for the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. pp. 85-102.15. "Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics," in G. MacDonald and D. Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 42-68.16. "Innateness and Genetic Information," in P. Carruthers, S, Lawrence, and S. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 55-68.17. "Adaptationism," (with Jon F. Wilkins), in S. Sarkar and A. Plutynski (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. London: Blackwell, 2008, pp. 186-201.18. "Biological Information," (with Kim Sterelny), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.),
826. "Evolutionary Theory: 5 Questions. Peter Godfrey-Smith," in G. Oftedal, J. Friis, and P. Rossel (eds.), Evolutionary Theory: 5 Questions. Copenhagen: Automatic Press.27. "Dewey, Continuity, and McDowell," in M. De Caro and D. Macarthur (eds.) Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, pp. 304-321.28. "Signals, Icons, and Beliefs" in D. Ryder and J. Kingsbury, D. Ryder, and K. Williford (eds.), Millikan and Her Critics. Blackwell, 2012, pp. 41-58.29. "Dewey and the Subject-Matter of Science," in J. Shook and P. Kurtz (eds.), Dewey’s Enduring Impact, Prometheus Books, 2010. To be reprinted in Italian in Pragmatismo e Filosofia della Scienza.30. "Popper's Philosophy of Science: Looking Ahead," in J. Shearmur and G. Stokes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Popper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 104-124.31. "Information and Influence in Sender-Receiver Models, With Applications to Animal Communication," in U. Stegmann, (ed.), Animal Communication Theory: Information and Influence. Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 377-396.32. "Darwinian Individuals," F. Bouchard and P. Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Perspectives on Biological Associations and Emerging Individuality. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2012, pp. 17-36.33. "Quine and Pragmatism," in the BlackwellCompanion to Quine, edited by G. Harman and E. LePore. Wiley/Blackwell, 2014, pp. 54-68.34. "Individuality and Life Cycles," in Individuals Across the Sciences, edited by Thomas Pradeu and Alexandre Guay, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 85-102.35. "Animal Evolution and the Origins of Experience," in How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, edited by David Livingstone Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 51-71.Empirical Work:1. "Field Observations of Mating in Octopus tetricus Gould, 1852 and Amphioctopus marginatus (Taki, 1964) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae)," with (as first author) Christine Huffard. Molluscan Research 30 (2010): 81-86.2. "Long-Term High-Density Occupation of a Site by Octopus tetricus, with Possible Site Modification Due to Foraging Behavior," with Matthew Lawrence. Marine and Freshwater Behavior and Physiology45 (2012): 261-268.3. "Octopus tetricus (Mollusca: Cephalopoda) as an Ecosystem Engineer,” (D. Scheel, P. Godfrey-Smith, M. Lawrence)Scientia Marina 78(2014):521-528.
94. "Signal Use by Octopuses in Agonistic Interactions," (D. Scheel, P. Godfrey-Smith, M. Lawrence) Current Biology26 (2016): 1-6.Book Reviews, Discussion Notes, Replies to Critics, Encyclopedia Entries, etc:1. Review of Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories(1984). Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (1988): 556-560.2. "Optimality and Psychological Explanation," (invited commentary) Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (1991): 496.3. Review of Elliott Sober's Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution and Inference(1988). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 487-490.4. "Function" in J. Kim and E. Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp. 187-88.5. "Preface to Chapters 15 and 16," in R. Belew and M. Mitchell (eds.), Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Vol. XXIII. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995, pp. 227-31. The Preface is to selections from Herbert Spencer's writings on evolution, chosen by myself.6. "Meaning, Models and Selection: A Review of [David Papineau's] Philosophical Naturalism." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1996): 673-578.7. Review of Elliot Sober's From a Biological Point of View (1994). Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 160-164.8. "Précis of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature," Adaptive Behavior 4 (1996): 453-465.9. "Replies to Four Critics," Adaptive Behavior 4 (1996): 486-93. (Replies to reviews of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature.)10. "Replies to Sober, Sterelny and Neander," Biology and Philosophy 12 (1997): 581-590. (Replies to reviews of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature.)11. "Author's Outline" and "Replies to Critics" of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature, Metascience 12 (1997): 7-12, 31-37.12. Entry for "J. A. Fodor," in the RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Philosophy.13. Entry for "Semantics, Teleological/Biological," in the RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Philosophy.14. "Maternal Effects: On Dennett and Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Philosophy of Science65 (1998): 709-720.15. "Procrustes Probably: Comments on Sober's 'Physicalism from a Probabilistic Point of View,'" Philosophical Studies (Proceedings of the 1997 Oberlin Philosophy Colloqium) 95 (1999): 175-181.
12University, Assistant Professor), Kritika Yegnashankaran (Bard College, Assistant Professor), John Matthewson (co-advisor with Kim Sterelny and Alan Hájek), (Massey University, Lecturer), Brett Calcott (co-advisor with Kim Sterelny), (University of Sydney, research fellow), Austin Booth, Henry Shevlin.Other Doctoral Dissertation Committees:Amol Sarva, Jonathan Kaplan (Oregon State, Associate Professor), Patrick Forber (Tufts, Associate Professor), Angela Potochnik (Cincinnati, Associate Professor), Ben Jeffares, Bharath Vallabha, Ron Planer (Kentucky, Assistant Professor), Ben Phillips, Frank Boardman.SELECTED TALKS AND PRESENTATIONS(Complete list available on request)"Author meets Critics" session on Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature, Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Seattle, 1996."Dewey and the Question of Realism"•Harvard University, Philosophy Department Colloquium, 1996•University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Philosophy Department Colloquium, 1997"On the Theoretical Role of 'Genetic Coding'"• Australasian Association of Philosophy Meetings, 1998• University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, Science Studies Colloquium, 1999• College for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, Berlin, 1999• 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Cracow, Poland, 1999"Some Unorthodox Theories of Causation"• Michigan University Philosophy Department Colloquium, 2000• Yale University Philosophy Department Colloquium, 2000• Harvard University Philosophy Department Colloquium, 2000"John Dewey's Philosophy of Science"• Philosophy of Science Association Meetings (PSA 2000), Vancouver• Columbia University, History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium, 2001.
Biographical
Peter Godfrey-Smith
I am currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York), and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (half-time) at the University of Sydney.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and I have a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. I taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. I moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. I took up a half-time position in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015.
My main research interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. I also work on pragmatism (especially John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. I’ve written four books, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), which won the 2010 Lakatos Award, and Philosophy of Biology, released in 2014 by Princeton.
My photos and videos have appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, Boston Globe, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
My CV (pdf) is here. An interview on the 3AM Magazine site is here. Citation information is here. A short video interview about my current interests is here. A podcast in the Philosophy Bites series is here.
High-resolution photos are here, here, and here (Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Service). Another newer one is here (Paul Morejón Studios).
Smart arms; Animals and intelligence
The Economist. 421.9020 (Dec. 17, 2016): p78(US).
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Why the octopus may be far more intelligent than we think
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. By Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 255 pages. To be published in Britain by William Collins in March 2017
LIKE life itself, the mind first emerged in Earth's oceans. What is less well appreciated is that it evolved there in at least two distinct ways. One sentient branch of the tree of life is descended from the animals that crawled onto dry land hundreds of millions of years ago. It comprises humans and other mammals, and birds. The other branch remained water-bound and eventually produced another collection of creatures possessing higher intelligence: the cephalopods, a class of animals that includes squid, cuttlefish and octopus, probably the smartest of them all. In "Other Minds", Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher, skilfully combines science, philosophy and his experiences of swimming among these tentacled beasts to illuminate the origin and nature of consciousness.
An octopus's body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog's, but most of these reside in the cephalopod's arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of consciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.
Early experiments assumed that the intelligence of animals could be estimated by their ability to carry out tasks, such as learning to pull a lever in exchange for food. Octopuses perform quite well in such tests but not as well as rats. Yet it is the anecdotes buried in research papers or related to him by scientists who work with animals that Mr Godfrey-Smith contends are often more revealing than the experiments themselves. One researcher told him of an octopus that expressed its displeasure with the lab food by waiting until she was looking before stuffing the unwanted scrap of squid down the drain.
According to the author, such behaviour shows octopuses are more intelligent than the scientific literature suggests. Despite these displays of chutzpah, however, they have failed to become as smart as mammals or birds because, as a short-lived and solitary species, they have not had to contend with the many challenges of social living that seem to drive the evolution of complex brains.
"Other Minds" presents an intriguing possibility in the form of Octopolis, off the east coast of Australia. A patch of sand a few metres in diameter covered in thousands of empty scallop shells, Octopolis appears to host up to a dozen or so octopuses at any one time and presents them with an opportunity to meet. "Some will pass by others without incident, but an octopus might also send out an arm to poke or probe at another," Mr Godfrey-Smith writes. "An arm, or two, might come back in response, and this leads sometimes to a settling-down, with each octopus going on its way, but in other cases it prompts a wrestling match." Could interactions like these lead, over many thousands of years, to the octopus becoming a brainier species? It might if there were thousands of such sites in the world's oceans. Sadly, Octopolis is the only known example. If only, if only.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.
By Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p22.
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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.
By Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Dec. 2016. 288p. illus. Farrar, $27 (9780374227760). 612.8.
Philosophers don't usually practice their discipline at the bottom of the sea, but, for Godfrey-Smith, observing and videotaping octopuses in the wild have provided invaluable keys to the evolution of consciousness. In an engrossing blend of avidly described underwater advenmres off the coast of Australia in what he dubbed Octopolis for its unusual congregation of busy cephalopods, and a fluid inquiry into the brain-body connection, Godfrey-Smith considers the protean nature of the octopus, a complex animal utterly divergent in its evolutionary trajectory from our own. Nonchalandy elucidating complex concepts, he describes the octopus' decentralized nervous system, phenomenally malleable body, and multihued light-show skin, all propelled by a mischievously curious and intrepid intelligence, well illustrated by lively tales about laboratory octopuses with attitude. Godfrey-Smith also performs an exceptionally revealing deep dive into the evolutionary progression from sensing to acting to remembering to the coalescence of the inner voice, thus tracking the spectrum between sentience and consciousness. Godfrey-Smith concludes with wonder--"The mind evolved in the sea," which is "the origin of us all"--and concern: the sea must be defended and preserved.--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Steve Young
Library Journal. 141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p93.
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* Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar. Dec. 2016.288p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9780374227760. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374712808. PHIL
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What happens when a scuba-diving philosopher observing an octopus realizes that the octopus is observing him? The answer is this book: Godfrey-Smith (philosophy, CUNY Graduate Ctr.; Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection) weaves his undersea experiences with octopuses and cuttlefish with scientific and philosophical analysis. Conscious awareness has evolved more than once, Godfrey-Smith explains, as he investigates these otherworldly creatures and their ways of experiencing their aquatic environment. Avoiding technical scientific data, he focuses instead on a few key evolutionary concepts explained by means of simple analogies comprehensible to the general reader. Philosophically-oriented readers will be left wanting more precise explorations of the nature of consciousness, self-consciousness, awareness, sentience, and so on. Others will wish the author had more imaginatively conceived the creature's inner life. Godfrey-Smith ultimately stops short of such speculations, remaining the outside observer, a philosopher of science, even while haunting the imagination of readers after the book's covers are closed to wonder, "What is experience like for them?" VERDICT Godfrey-Smith's forays into philosophical analysis here are immanently readable. [See Prepub Alert, 6/19/16.]--Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL
Young, Steve
We are not alone: there are few creatures on Earth that seem as alien as the octopus, starting with its strangely evolved brain
Gary Drevitch
Psychology Today. 49.6 (November-December 2016): p47.
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In 2009, 50 feet underwater in a bay off Australia's east coast, diver Matt Lawrence discovered a site where at least a dozen octopuses came to feed and nest on a bed of shells. The creatures grew accustomed to Lawrence, who returned regularly, sometimes with philosopher and fellow diving enthusiast Peter Godfrey-Smith. On one visit, an octopus took Lawrence's hand in one of its arms and led him on a walk across the sea floor for about 10 minutes, until they'd reached the cephalopod's den.
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Such encounters at the spot divers came to call "Octopolis" helped inspire Godfrey-Smith's new book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. The author, who teaches at the University of Sydney and the City University of New York, has produced a concise and elegant guide to evolution, consciousness, and marine biology: "The mind evolved in the sea," he writes. "Water made it possible."
The idiosyncratic sentience of the octopus, from whom we split on the evolutionary tree 600 million years ago, indicates that higher intelligence on Earth evolved not once, but twice, Godfrey-Smith argues, and in distinctly different directions. "An independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior," the octopus is "the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien."
An octopus has about 500 million neurons, far short of our 100 billion, but well within the range of many mammals. A great many of the neurons are in the arms, which virtually have minds of their own, and so the animal lives with semi-autonomous limbs that, to its central brain, are both "self" and "non-self." Is the octopus aware of that? Does it have consciousness? That can't be definitively answered, but there are clues: Octopuses in captivity find ways to unscrew the tops of their containers and sneak away to find food. They've also figured out that if they spray a jet of water at an offending light bulb, it will short-circuit and turn off. More to the point, they are exceedingly skilled at detecting when they are and are not being observed, even for a moment.
Why does the octopus, with its intelligence and perhaps even consciousness, have an average life span of only about two years? Godfrey-Smith's short answer is that, because it must emerge from camouflage to hunt, it is vulnerable to predators. His long answer involves a deft exploration of the role of genetic mutation in evolution and aging. He suggests, however, that if a community like Octopolis could be maintained for thousands of generations, a longer life span for the octopus could evolve. That would enable further study, a prospect he'd relish because "if we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all."
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Publishers Weekly. 263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p43.
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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-22776-0
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Deftly blending philosophy and evolutionary biology, Godfrey-Smith (Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection), an Australian philosopher of science, uses his passion for cephalopods to address "how consciousness arose from the raw materials found in living beings." Comparing vertebrate consciousness and intelligence with that of cephalopods is not as odd as it might seem, because "cephalopods are evolution's only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates." Godfrey-Smith demonstrates that octopuses are constructed from a dramatically different plan than vertebrates, with each of their arms having the ability to act and sense their environment semi-autonomously from their central brains. This striking difference raises intriguing questions about the nature of communication within organisms, as well as about the meaning of intelligence. Godfrey-Smith couples his philosophical and scientific approach with ample and fascinating anecdotes as well as striking photography from his numerous scuba dives off the Australian coast. He makes the case that cephalopods demonstrate a type of intelligence that is largely "alien" to our understanding of the concept but is no less worthy of wonder. He also ponders how and why such intelligence developed in such short-lived creatures (they generally live only a few years). Godfrey-Smith doesn't provide definitive answers to his questions, but the journey he leads is both thoroughly enjoyable and informative. (Dec.)
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Philosophy of biology
A.C. Love
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.12 (Aug. 2014): p2209.
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Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Philosophy of biology. Princeton, 2014. 187p bibl index afp ISBN 9780691140018, $29.95
51-6737
QH331
2013-24519 CIP
Philosophy of biology is one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary philosophy and of growing interest to a wide academic audience. Here, Godfrey-Smith (CUNY Graduate Center), a prominent and prolific scholar working in the field, delivers an elegant and stimulating analysis of key areas in the life sciences where conceptual questions arise regularly. These include the distinctiveness of mechanistic explanation, the significance of idealization in modeling, the meaning of fitness and units of selection, function and teleology, dimensions of individuality, gene definitions, species concepts, and the evolution of cooperation. Helpful distinctions are drawn along the way, such as the difference between origination and distribution explanations or empirical, explanatory, and methodological adaptationism. Key concepts (e.g., "ontological framework" or "memory system") assist in taming the diversity of biological reasoning about complex phenomena. If there is a drawback to the book, it is the limited coverage of molecular, cell, and developmental biology where many contemporary biologists work. But Godfrey-Smith provides an exemplar of expositional clarity and philosophical insight for those who would imitate his approach in these domains. Part of the "Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy" series. Summing Up: Essential. **** Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/ faculty.--A. C. Love, University of Minnesota
Love, A.C.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Darwinian populations and natural selection
F.S. Szalay
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 47.8 (Apr. 2010): p1502.
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47-4397 QH375 2009-464162 MARC
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Darwinian populations and natural selection. Oxford, 2009. 207p bibl index afp ISBN 9780199552047, 549.95
This book on evolutionary theory authored by a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith (Harvard; Theory and Reality, 2003; Complexity and the Function of Mind and Nature, 1996), is mainly (but not exclusively) for philosophers. It is well written, pithy, and eminently accessible to biologists interested in modern Darwinian theory. Chapter 1 gives an admirable overview not only of the aims but also of the author's stand on subjects developed in the following chapters. Godfrey-Smith covers in detail issues related to natural selection and its representations, variation and selection, origins, reproduction, and the various views of "individuality." The work is particularly enlightening in its discussions of levels of transitions, the proposed issues of germ lines, and "the gene's eye view." Cultural evolution receives detailed treatment, making it of some interest to anthropologists. The book should be valuable to those in science (or teaching science) and philosophers concerned about science and its conceptual methodology (not its techniques, as the two are often confused). Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Upper-division undergraduates and above in evolutionary biology, philosophy, and/or anthropology.--F. S. Szalay, University of New Mexico
2014.10.13
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PETER GODFREY-SMITH
Philosophy of Biology
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philosophy of Biology, Princeton University Press, 2014, 187pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691140018.
Reviewed by Brian Garvey, Lancaster University
Writing an introductory textbook on philosophy, or on some branch thereof, presents difficulties that, I would suggest, don't arise to anywhere near the same extent in other disciplines. In philosophy it is hard, and probably impossible, to get agreement among qualified practitioners either on substantive points, or on what the noteworthy positions are, or even on what questions are worth asking. Writing a textbook on philosophy of biology has its own particular challenges, since it potentially aims at two very different audiences. Philosophy and biology students may be unfamiliar with the concepts and ways of working of each other's disciplines. Moreover, much of the subject matter of philosophy of biology overlaps with the subject matter of certain widely-read popular science authors (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and a host of others). Consequently, students can come to the subject already well-stocked with prejudices. Among the prejudices that recent popular science writing sometimes engenders is hostility to philosophy, and to philosophy of science in particular. A quote from Richard Feynman about the utility of ornithology to birds is well-liked by some popular science writers. In assessing Peter Godfrey-Smith's new textbook on philosophy of biology, I will be considering how well he meets these challenges.
The first challenge has to be met by making a selection of topics to cover out of the many that might be deemed to fit under the heading 'philosophy of biology'. These include some questions that are of the very traditional analytic philosophy (in particular analytic metaphysics) kind, such as 'what makes something an individual?' -- the kind of questions some would call 'pure' philosophy. It also includes some questions that many would consider straightforwardly scientific, but can be usefully discussed by philosophers either because they are of a general, synthesising character, or because the state of our knowledge is currently such that there is much room for speculation. As Godfrey-Smith says in his introduction, philosophy tries to work out 'how things "hang together". . . in an especially broad way', and 'has often also functioned as an "incubator" of theoretical ideas, a place where they can be developed in a speculative way while they are in a form that cannot be tested empirically.' (p. 1) The empirical findings and theories of biology must inform any answer worth taking seriously to questions of the kinds he has described here, as indeed they ought to inform answers to questions of the first, more 'purely' philosophical, kind. Finally (and I do not pretend that this list is remotely exhaustive, or even that it represents clear principled divisions), there are debates around the alleged implications of the theory of evolution for moral questions. These are of interest to philosophers because biologists -- or at least people drawing inspiration from biology -- here encroach on matters that have traditionally been part of philosophy's subject matter. Oddly enough, people who believe that evolution is relevant to moral questions seem to spend much of their time arguing that it is relevant, rather than showing what the relevance is. In any case, there is a role for philosophers to evaluate these relevance claims, in part because the claims are often made by non-philosophers with little knowledge of what the questions discussed by philosophers actually are (e.g., Edward O. Wilson, Sam Harris.)
Godfrey-Smith makes a judicious selection from issues within all of these classes of issues, avoiding giving undue weight to one class or another. As an example of the first ('pure' philosophy) kind, let's take the question about individuals. Godfrey-Smith rightly recognizes that our growing understanding of biology renders some intuitively appealing ideas about individuality problematic, and not only that, but it renders some answers that superficially appear to be scientifically informed -- such as ones that define biological individuals by genotype -- problematic as well. He shows how there are a number of dimensions along which entities can vary -- bottlenecking, reproductive specialisation, and overall integration -- that can affect whether we should call something an individual or not. He also notes that there are good reasons for thinking of individuality as something that evolves -- that is to say, lineages of things can start off as individuals and lose the characteristics that made them such. The origin of eukaryotic cells provides one example of this, but it is far from being the only one.
Examples of general synthesising questions with which Godfrey-Smith deals are those about the relationship between organism and environment, and about the 'tree of life'. The widespread image of organisms adapting to their environment by natural selection was challenged by Richard Lewontin and others who present an alternative picture of organisms actively shaping or even 'constructing' their environment. Lewontin's concept of 'construction' applies to the physical altering of environment that all living things cannot help but do, but also to the selecting of environment and to the fact that the type of organism determines which bits of its physical surroundings constitute its environment. Godfrey-Smith presents this debate clearly and fairly (pp. 54-59), and concludes that while it is 'hard to work out whether there is anything substantial at stake' (p. 58), there is a genuine substantial question of whether, in any given case, an organism responds to change by changing its environment or by itself changing. Since there are many genuine cases of the former, adaptation in the sense of an organism changing to fit its environment 'is not so ubiquitous.' (p. 59) The 'tree of life' is another popular image that has been challenged, notably in the work of Lynn Margulis, and Godfrey-Smith deals with it on pp. 113-119, in the context of a chapter on "Species and the Tree of Life". Following Margulis' discovery that many of the organelles within eukaryotic cells are descendants of what were separate organisms, some biologists have suggested that the image of a tree should be replaced with that of a net or web. Nonetheless, Godfrey-Smith argues we should not conclude from that that the shape of the history of life is a mere imposition based on our interests: there still are pre-existing patterns of ancestry, even if the shape of those patterns is not tree-like.
Among the speculative ideas related to biology, the ones that have been discussed most by philosophers, and certainly that engender the most heated controversy, are those where evolutionary biology is applied to understanding human psychology. Sociobiology and its main successor-paradigm, Evolutionary Psychology, have by some been touted as the only way to give the human sciences the grand unifying theory they allegedly need. But by others they have been condemned as irresponsible speculation, and very often as ideologically motivated speculation at that. Godfrey-Smith's discussion of these issues is in a chapter entitled "Evolution and Social Behavior", which it shares with a discussion of the evolution of co-operation in general. He does not directly address the more controversial aspects of Evolutionary Psychology, such as its alleged sexist or politically quietist implications. But he does conclude, as do many of Evolutionary Psychology's left-wing critics, that 'human nature' is more made than found. However, since he sees this making as a population-level, evolutionary process -- 'A new characteristic that is "abnormal" now might be the basis for a new nature in the future' (p. 142) -- the similarity that he claims between this thought and Sartre's ideas seems to me to be tenuous. In the same chapter he deals very briefly indeed with the supposed implications of evolution for moral questions. He is dismissive:
If some behavior has an evolved function, all that means is that it has been associated with reproductive success and has been kept around for that reason. The fact that some habit or characteristic is "natural" in this sense does not, and should not, prevent us from criticizing it and perhaps trying to change it. (p. 142)
The two-audience problem requires that anyone writing an introduction to philosophy of biology has to be willing and able to give explanations of terms from the two different subjects in a way that is comprehensible to the absolute beginner in each discipline, while not making the text boring for the more advanced student. Students will be turned off if a lot of time is being spent explaining things they already know. In general, Godfrey-Smith's explanations of terms are both brief and lucid, and should not alienate either of the potential audiences. However, I would question the wisdom of placing so early in the book -- in the first full-length chapter after what is in effect a short introduction -- a discussion of the very technical issue of laws, mechanisms and models. This, I fear, will strike many students from both groups as an arid debate. I hasten to add, though, that Godfrey-Smith's treatment of this material cannot be faulted.
It is, in my opinion, a key responsibility of those of us who teach philosophy of biology to combat some of the prejudices and loose thinking that float around the wider culture about biology and evolution. (Lest this seem an excessively negative and ignoble aim for philosophy, let's not forget that Socrates spent much of his time combating the arguments of the sophists.) Godfrey-Smith does some truly excellent work of this kind. At some points he takes the time to correct widely held factual inaccuracies. For example, he mentions the belief that all the cells in a human body are genetically identical. As Godfrey-Smith points out, this is false because of the phenomenon of mosaicism:
Mosaicism is the presence of different genetic material, due to mutation and other types of divergence, within a single organism. . . . We start our lives from one cell, but mutations accumulate with every cell division. Talk of genetic identity across a person's cells is an idealization; their cells are just very genetically similar. (p. 69)
This may seem to many readers a relatively unimportant point, and it occurs in the context of a discussion of individuality that may be uninteresting to people without the requisite appetite for old-fashioned metaphysical questions. However, it does illustrate Godfrey-Smith's admirable meticulousness and willingness to spend time correcting common misconceptions. Another that he deals with, and a more important one to my mind, is the supposed indivisibility of genes. As quoted on p. 94, Dawkins says that genes 'do not blend' and 'have a flintlike integrity'. But Godfrey-Smith responds that the breaking up and recombination of chromosomes that takes place during the production of sex cells 'does not pay attention to the boundaries between cistrons, or any other units at a gene-like scale.' (p. 94) The reason I think this is a valuable thing to point out is that Dawkins' description of genes as flintlike is part-and-parcel of his more general quasi-mystical way of talking about them; he sometimes calls them 'immortal' as well. So Godfrey-Smith is to be commended for so matter-of-factly dealing with it.
At other points he tackles some of the ideas that float around the subject and that, if anything does, deserve to be called by Daniel Dennett's derogatory term 'deepities'. A deepity is defined as a saying that sounds meaningful and profound, but is actually either trivial, meaningless or false. Since this term is mainly used by the likes of Dennett and Dawkins, it is almost invariably applied to ideas to which they are hostile, which in practise means ideas from the worlds of religion and continental philosophy. But the worlds of popular science and the 'third culture' have their deepities, too. One of those is the saying, much-liked by Dawkins, that 'DNA is information'. This is often glossed as: DNA is more like a text than it is like a physical object, and this supposedly helps to explain why it produces the effects it does in an organism's development, as well as its allegedly unique role in evolution. Yet, as Godfrey-Smith points out (pp. 144-45), one of the distinctive things about a text is that it can be instantiated in many different physical forms, not just in multiple copies: it remains the same text when printed in a different size, a different font, written in ink or pencil or chalk, on paper or on slate, in electronic characters on a screen, or not written at all but spoken. By contrast, the causal properties of DNA, including the effects it has on an organism's development, require it to be in the physical form that it is and no other. A printout of C's, G's, T's and A's would not do it.
To take one final example, Godfrey-Smith takes up the issue of what one might call 'natural selection inflation': a way of thinking where goal-directed activities of all kinds are understood to be forms of natural selection. This can be seen for example in Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism, Dennett's 'pandemonium' architecture of the mind, Dawkins' memes, and theories of learning that try to explain it wholly in terms of trial-and-error. There is apparently a tendency to believe that, because natural selection does such a good job of explaining how we get designed and purposeful things -- or, if you insist, apparently designed and purposeful things -- from processes that are not in themselves goal-directed, then all designed and purposeful things must be instantiating a process of natural selection. It may appear that anyone who denies this is thereby committed either to mysterianism or to explanations in terms of a grand conscious designer -- at any rate, to something that marks a break in the completeness of naturalistic explanation. It is worth noting in passing that not everyone feels the need for a unified naturalistic world-view with the same urgency, and that those who do not feel it deserve a better answer than the rhetorical jibes to which they are routinely subjected by Dennett, Dawkins and their ilk. Even if one accepts the imperative towards naturalistic unity, and further accepts that the only acceptable naturalistic account of how we get purposeful things at all is natural selection, it still remains tenable that natural selection could give rise to entities or systems that pursue goals in ways that are not themselves instantiations of natural selection.
Evolution by natural selection, built our brains, and maybe nothing else could. But once it has done so, our brains can do things that are smarter than just throwing out new behaviors -- or beliefs -- and seeing if they work. We can engage in logical reasoning and planning (at least some of the time), and shape ideas and behaviors without exposing them at every step. Sometimes variation and selection builds more variation and selection, as in the vertebrate immune system, and sometimes it builds something else. (p. 47)
This, to my mind, is one of the most useful pieces of fire-extinguishing that Godfrey-Smith does in the book.
So, to sum up: writing introductory philosophy textbooks poses a distinctive set of challenges, and writing introductory philosophy of biology textbooks poses an additional set of challenges of its own. Godfrey-Smith meets these challenges most admirably. The few negative points I mentioned along the way are minor quibbles, and this must now be considered one of the very best textbooks in its field. I shall certainly be recommending it to my students.
AUG 27, 2014 @ 07:21 AM 3,344
Peter Godfrey-Smith Takes On The Philosophy Of Biology
John Farrell , CONTRIBUTOR
I cover science and technology.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press), may not sound like the kind of book even science enthusiasts want to crack open for pleasure, but it's a great way to get up to speed on all the issues that working biologists love to debate amongst themselves.
Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the Philosophy Program at City University of New York. His more academic books include, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press), and Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press). His main areas of interest include the philosophy of mind and pragmatism.
In just 200 pages, Philosophy of Biology includes short, succinct chapters on mechanisms and models, natural selection, genes, adaptation and function, species and the Tree of Life, evolution and social behavior, and information.
But as I mentioned in my last post, the question for many science geeks is: why even bother with a book on philosophy at all--let alone the philosophy of science?
What good is it?
So, I asked Scott Carson, an associate professor of philosophy at Ohio University*, what he tells his students at the start of each semester.
Carson's main areas of interest are the history of evolutionary biology and the biomedical sciences, and among his publications is this fascinating essay he co-authored on how quantum indeterminacy may effect evolution.
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"Typically," he said via email, "I tell my students that philosophy of science is important because we live in a society that is very much a product of what Bas Van Fraassen called 'The Scientific Image'. That is, we are, as persons, largely shaped by the culture that surrounds us and we are presently surrounded by a culture that is increasingly impacted by science and technology.
"If we are to be intelligent and well-informed members of the society and culture in which we find ourselves, it is essential that we understand not only the results of scientific research, but the foundations of science itself."
In Carson's view, this will put us in a better position to evaluate questions about the nature of the authority of the sciences and the reliability of the conclusions and recommendations made by scientists.
"Ideally a philosopher of science is not someone who hopes to make any positive contributions to the working sciences," he said, "but someone who is interested in answering philosophical questions that are informed by the discoveries of the sciences and who wants to describe and assess scientific practice as accurately as possible."
In terms of the current book, he added, "I think you will find that this is very close to what Godfrey-Smith believes is the proper function of the philosopher of science."
Peter Godrey-Smith, author of Philosophy of Biology, new from Princeton University Press (image courtesy of the author's website)
"If philosophers of science do a good job of understanding and teaching the foundations of the sciences to their students," said Carson, "then there is some hope that we will gradually develop a better-informed public with respect to the STEM disciplines. That hope might be somewhat slim, of course, since not everyone goes to college and not everyone who goes to college takes philosophy and not everyone who takes philosophy takes philosophy of science—but it is better than nothing."
This indeed is echoed in Godfrey-Smith's book, which in nine chapters covers all of the big questions that biologists argue about.
For example: in evolution, the question of how to define species remains a topic of considerable debate.
This is something John Wilkins addressed in the videos I linked to before. As odd as it sounds, biologists have different definitions of the term for working purposes. But as Godfrey-Smith points out, the history of the species concept is complicated.
Thinking about species was transformed by Darwin and evolutionary theory. The story is sometimes told as one in which everyone before Darwin was in the thrall of a typological view, which Darwin exploded. The real history is more complicated (Winsor 2006), but Darwin certainly changed the landscape. From then onward species had to be regarded as things that can evolve slowly from other species and have vague boundaries. On a Darwinian view, variation within a species does not reflect imperfection or faulty realization of a type, but is the normal state of affairs— I will say more about this attitude to variation at the end of the next chapter. It is possible to shoehorn evolutionary thinking into a typological view, but since Darwin, there has been a search for a treatment of species that fits better with an evolutionary perspective. At least two dozen different “species concepts” have been proposed, though they fall (appropriately) into a smaller number of clusters. [from Chapter Seven]
Then there is the whole question of 'information'. Creationists have been arguing for years that the genetic code is a program of information that can only be properly understood as the work of an intelligent agent. But it's a faulty metaphor, according to Godfrey-Smith.
He discusses information theory and how it applies--and doesn't apply--to biology in his last chapter.
Another motivation for the view that evolution is an informational process comes from the idea that an evolving population accumulates information about its environment. For [Richard] Dawkins, a species is a computer that “builds up, over the generations, a statistical description of the worlds in which the ancestors of today’s species members lived and reproduced” (1998, p. 239). It is true that evolution is a process in which earlier events leave marks and traces that are present later. That itself is nothing unusual in a physical process. A geological formation, such as a mountain, contains traces of the processes that produced it, in its rock strata and other features (including its fossils). Changes in gene pools have causes, and sometimes it is possible to work out, within limits, how a species reached its present state. The sequence of branching events in the tree of life leaves marks from which the history can be reconstructed. When the past leaves traces in the present in this way, these traces in a sense are “signs,” but only in the way seen also in ordinary tree rings, which can be used to infer the history of a tree but have no further role. So far there is no reason to think that evolution has a relationship to information that other physical processes do not have.
While Philosophy of Biology is intended mostly for students, non-specialists should not be put off. Godfrey-Smith's style is engaging, almost conversational.
Available in hardcover and Kindle formats.
* the post originally stated that Scott Carson was an associate professor at Ohio State University. This has been corrected.
2009.08.15
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PETER GODFREY-SMITH
Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Oxford UP, 2009, 207pp., $49.95 (hbk.), ISBN 9780199552047.
Reviewed by Massimo Pigliucci, City University of New York-Lehman College
Ever since the publication of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, a book for the lay reader that popularized the ideas of influential evolutionary biologists like William Hamilton and George Williams, there has been much discussion of so-called "universal Darwinism". Dawkins' dual aim was to reduce evolutionary phenomena to the level of the gene, while at the same time abstracting the Darwinian process of natural selection of "replicators" and making it into something that would apply beyond the domain of biology. One of the most popular consequences of the latter approach is the birth of memetics, the study of rather fuzzily defined cultural replicators (the "memes"). Once the door was open for evolutionary biology to take over the social sciences and the humanities -- as seen for instance in the attempt at cross-disciplinary colonialism articulated by E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge -- a host of both technical and lay publications have taken for granted the basic idea of universal Darwinism. Philosophers have not been immune to the fashion; a prominent example is Daniel Dennett, who in his Darwin's Dangerous Idea referred to Darwinism as a "universal acid" which "eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways."
There is, of course, quite a bit of substance to all of the above. Dennett, for instance, is right in labeling Darwin's insight as "dangerous" for the then status quo of Victorian science and society, and evolutionary theory is (rather surprisingly) still a threat to a large number of people who simply cannot accept the idea of being the result of chance and necessity and not of special divine creation. At a more technical level, it is also true that the principle of evolution by natural selection can be described in highly formalized ways, which therefore detach it from the specific biological substratum with which it happens to have been instantiated on planet earth. Perhaps the most compelling of such characterizations is the one given by Richard Lewontin in 1985, summarized in Peter Godfrey-Smith's book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (p. 18):
A sufficient mechanism for evolution by natural selection is contained in three propositions:
1. There is variation in morphological, physiological, and behavioral traits among members of a species (the principle of variation).
2. The variation is in part heritable, so that individuals resemble their relations more than they resemble unrelated individuals and, in particular, offspring resemble their parents (the principle of heredity).
3. Different variants leave different numbers of offspring either in immediate or remote generations (the principle of differential fitness).
In a paper published in 1983 in Evolution from Molecules to Man (edited by D. S. Bendal) and significantly entitled "Universal Darwinism", Dawkins made the rather bold claim that something like the above conditions are not only necessary, but sufficient for the Darwinian process to take off, which means that we should expect any system, biological or not, and terrestrial or not, that displays those characteristics to evolve by natural selection.
Despite the clamor generated by universal Darwinists, there has long been a current of partial dissent concerning such matters among both evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science. This is not a question of rejecting the fundamental Darwinian insight, so no comfort need be taken by supporters of so-called "intelligent design" and other forms of creationism. Rather, it is an intellectual dissatisfaction with the Dawkinsian picture, which seems just a bit too simple and clear cut to be a realistic portrait of how the world actually works. The first and most convincing attacks have been aimed at the centrality of the gene, the starting point of Dawkins and colleagues' construction. It has for instance been pointed out that genes are just one of many causal factors in the evolutionary process, and that by themselves they actually do not "do" anything at all. In some sense, of course, genes do "carry information" from one generation to another (they are "replicators" in Dawkins' terminology), but information also comes from other components of the organism (in the form of epigenetic inheritance) and from the environment (which has led to the theory of niche construction in ecology). Few philosophers have pushed this line of criticism as far as denying a special role to genes altogether, but very good arguments have been made that genes have to share the limelight and cannot be thought of as any more crucial to the evolutionary process than several other factors.
The selfish gene paradigm has also been very effectively challenged, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, by the demonstration that natural selection can and does act at multiple levels (individual, group and species), not just the genetic one. Moreover, genes do not function in isolation inside the genome, but are enmeshed in highly complex webs of epistatic (gene-gene) interactions, which make the whole idea of a "selfish" genetic element rather unintelligible. (Dawkins has tried to bypass this problem by relegating other genes in a given genome to being part of a focal gene's environment, a rather artificial and counterintuitive move that enormously complicates our understanding of what counts as an "environment".) A consensus of sorts has emerged from these debates according to which genes can always be used as "bookkeepers" to track the evolutionary process, because whatever happens in the course of evolution eventually alters gene frequencies over time. But this is a far cry from thinking of genes as central to the process itself.
It is against this background that we need to situate Peter Godfrey-Smith's new book. As the title clearly hints, Godfrey-Smith wishes to refocus our attention on the fact that evolution is, at core, a population-level phenomenon. As every evolutionary biologist learns in introductory courses, individuals survive and reproduce, but populations evolve. Accordingly, it is not by chance that population genetics is the cardinal discipline that provides the mathematical foundations for the so-called Modern Synthesis, the currently accepted version of Darwinism. Godfrey-Smith's interesting and original twist is that we need a better and more comprehensive understanding of what, exactly, counts as a Darwinian population: the classical collection of individuals belonging to the same species and living in a particular geographic area? The ensemble of the genes encompassing a genome? The much broader "gene pool" of an entire species? Or even the species of organism that identify a particular phylogenetic clade?
Godfrey-Smith begins by defining what he means by a Darwinian population: "This is a population -- a collection of particular things -- that has the capacity to undergo evolution by natural selection. A 'Darwinian individual' is any member of such a population" (p. 6). The novelty of the approach is that the author immediately goes on to prepare the reader for the fact that in the course of the book one will encounter a family of Darwinian processes, some of which will involve what Godfrey-Smith calls "paradigm cases" while others are "marginal cases". It is this idea of organizing Darwinian processes along a spectrum that eventually allows the author to tackle some of the most thorny issues of contemporary theoretical biology, from the major transitions in evolution (e.g., from unicellular to multicellular organisms) to the levels of selection debate, to the limits of ideas such as selfish genes and memetic replicators.
To get to that point, Godfrey-Smith introduces his readers to a multidimensional conceptual model aimed at both clarifying the complexity of evolutionary processes and fleshing out the above mentioned distinction between paradigm and marginal cases of Darwinian populations. We encounter several graphical representations of this conceptual space, the most important of which are found on p. 64 and p. 95. Let me briefly explore the first example, to give the reader a flavor of what Godfrey-Smith is after. Figure 3.1 in the book is a three-dimensional conceptual space defined by the following parameters: the fidelity of heredity, H; the dependence of realized fitness differences on intrinsic properties of the individual, S; and the continuity of the adaptive landscape on which evolution takes place, C. Let us be a bit more precise about each term defining the H-S-C heuristic space. H is a measure of how reliable the inheritance of an individual's characteristics actually is. H cannot be zero, otherwise there is no parent-offspring correlation, and evolution cannot get started. S assesses to what degree variation in reproductive output within a population (a necessary condition for natural selection) is related to intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic) features of the individuals making up the population. Godfrey-Smith is aware of the thorniness of philosophical discussions of "intrinsic" vs. "extrinsic" characteristics, but maintains that at its very basic the concepts are straightforward. So, for instance, the chemical composition of something is an intrinsic property, while being someone's relative is an extrinsic property (because it depends on relations external to the individual). Finally, C is a measure of the smoothness of the fitness landscape: high C means that small changes in phenotype correspond to small changes in fitness (smooth landscape), while low values of C mean that small changes in phenotype correspond to jumps in adaptive space (rugged landscape).
Once we understand the H-S-C space (which, remember, is one of several conceptual subspaces defined by Godfrey-Smith) we can see how the author deploys it to explore the characteristics and limits of Darwinian processes. For instance, "paradigm" cases of evolution, i.e. those that most biologists would easily recognize as such, are found in the high-H / high-S / high-C corner of the diagram: the fidelity of replication is high, variation in fitness is dependent entirely on intrinsic properties, and the adaptive landscape is very smooth. In this corner, natural selection reigns supreme because the conditions for its operation are ideal. From there, however, Godfrey-Smith begins to examine what happens if one moves away from paradigm cases. Going toward low-H, for example, makes a population subject to an "error catastrophe" that will halt its evolution, because the heritability of individual features is no longer reliable. Moving toward low-C values increases the ruggedness of the adaptive landscape, and adaptive evolution is no longer possible (because small changes in phenotype will correspond to large and unpredictable jumps in fitness). The low-S / low-C area is governed by the process of stochastic drift rather than by natural selection, because variation in reproductive output depends largely on extrinsic characteristics and the landscape is rugged, and so on. Finally, the the 0-0-0 corner corresponds to very marginal (as opposed to paradigmatic) cases of evolution, since all three conditions are highly compromised.
Godfrey-Smith goes on to build additional spaces like these, based on a variety of additional conceptual parameters, the general idea being to identify under what conditions populations behave in a Darwinian manner and what one can say about evolutionary dynamics under a broad spectrum of circumstances. This multidimensional conceptual approach is then deployed in the latter parts of the book to consider in greater detail problems such as the above mentioned levels of selection (chapter 6), major evolutionary transitions (chapter 6), selfish genes (chapter 7) and memes (chapter 8).
The author's discussion of the so-called "gene's eye view" of evolution promulgated by Dawkins, Sterelny, Kitcher and others is much more nuanced than most. It is fairly clear that there are indeed selfish genetic elements, such as transposons and like molecular entities. Nevertheless it is also obvious at this point that the complexity of both molecular and organismal evolution simply cannot be captured satisfactorily by looking at things exclusively from the gene's eye perspective. An interesting point made by Godfrey-Smith is that genes are not actually the long-lived, stable entities that Dawkins would like them to be in order to qualify as the "immortal replicators" at the center of the evolutionary stage. Phenomena like crossing-over (the splitting and recombining of chromosomes) do not respect genes' boundaries, which means that the smallest functional units of heredity in most modern organisms are amino-acid coding triplets of nucleotides, not entire protein-coding genes (not to mention that many genes do not actually code for proteins at all, acting instead as regulatory elements modulating the action of other genes). Moreover, Godfrey-Smith makes an intricate argument, based on a well known hypothesis in molecular evolution focused on so-called intra-cell conflict, that genes are "late-comers [in evolution]. They are the products of complex evolutionary measures taken by cells to suppress what would otherwise be carnage at the chromosomal level" (p. 141). The details cannot possibly be explored here, but if Godfrey-Smith is right, genetic replicators are most certainly not a quintessential characteristic of the evolutionary process, a conclusion that dramatically undermines the utility of the gene's eye view of evolution.
What about memes and cultural evolution? Here again Godfrey-Smith is subtle and balanced. He does recognize that there is a distinct possibility that some cultural processes have Darwinian features, but he states in no uncertain terms that "Darwinism is not likely to unify and transform the social sciences" (pp. 147-148). One of the major reasons for his skepticism of the Dawkins-Dennett position is that "Darwinian models of culture become less applicable as power relations [among human agents] become more asymmetric", because societal-level networks of interactions make the society itself much less like a paradigmatic case of a Darwinian population (p. 149). Of course asymmetric power relations are extremely common in human societies (e.g., the success of a "meme" corresponding to a tune or the ideas presented in a book will have a lot to do with the kind of access to distribution and advertising that a recording or publishing company has at its disposal, and will not depend just on intrinsic characteristic of the "meme" itself -- a case of low-S above). A further blow to the relevance of memetics is dealt by Godfrey-Smith when he points out that "once people combine too many sources of information and manipulate that information too intelligently, the phenomenon will vanish" because we will be in a low-H area in the multidimensional conceptual space discussed above (p. 160).
There are many subtle points in this short and dense book, and even grasping the broad picture will demand much attention from the reader. Still, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection will be something to be reckoned with for anybody interested in the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory and in the applicability of Darwinian ideas beyond the strict confines of biological evolution.
Book review: Theory and Reality: An Introduction to Philosophy of Science by Peter Godfrey-Smith (UPDATED)
Posted on July 23, 2015 by Jeremy Fox
In a recent post on philosophy of science for ecologists, Brian identified Harvard philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of science as promising-looking. I thought it looked promising too, so I read it (Kindle edition). Here’s my review. (UPDATE: another review here)
The book is based on introductory lectures in philosophy of science that Godfrey-Smith used to give at Stanford. It assumes no background knowledge of philosophy, and so is perfectly accessible to anyone reading this blog. But it’s aimed at people interested in philosophy, and takes that interest for granted. It doesn’t spend much time trying to argue you into an interest in philosophy you don’t already have. And it’s not aimed at teaching you just the bits of philosophy of science that you need to know in order to be a good scientist, or a better scientist than you are already. For instance, at various points it links philosophy of science to topics in epistemology and metaphysics that scientists have no particular reason to care about. So it’s not the philosophical equivalent of, say, an introductory biostats course or “math for ecologists” or whatever. Whether you find philosophy of science useful in your day-to-day scientific work is up to you.* But if you want to have a better sense of where philosophers of science are coming from, and be able to identify and understand those bits of philosophy of science that are relevant to you as a scientist, then I think you’ll find this book very helpful.
The first 2/3 of the book is a chronological survey of the most important work in philosophy of science from the early 20th century up until almost the present day, with a few nods to important earlier figures. It switches from chronological to topical organization to cover recent work. I think the chronological organization is effective. Features of later work that might otherwise seem puzzling make more sense when you know about the earlier work that later work was either trying to build on or improve upon. The book also includes a couple of chapters on fields on the boundary of philosophy of science (sociology of science, and feminist philosophy of science and “science studies”).
It’s a short and easy read—I knocked it off in a couple of days. It’s the philosophy of science equivalent of one of those bus tours that takes you to, say, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Stonehenge, and Bath all in one day. Yes, those bus tours only hit the obvious highlights, and yes they only give you a quick superficial glance at the sights you’re seeing, and yes they leave you wanting to go back for more. But they fill a real need. So for “Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster…” read “the logical postivists, Hempel, Quine, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan, Goodman,” plus various other figures discussed more briefly.
It’s an opinionated survey. Godfrey-Smith always tells you what he thinks of the ideas he discusses, and he uses the final chapters in part to lay out and stump for his own views. I welcomed this. I wouldn’t want a he-said, she-said survey that just describes what philosophers have written without any attempt at evaluation. Reading someone else’s evaluation helps me form my own evaluations, rather than getting in the way of me forming my own evaluations. Especially since Godfrey-Smith always gives a fair (sometimes generous) description before he launches into (often critical) evaluation. Nor does he skip any major ideas he disagrees with. At least, I didn’t notice any obvious gaps in the coverage, and I know enough philosophy that I’m fairly sure I would have. And Godfrey-Smith tells you when his own views are unorthodox, as opposed to when he’s voicing widely-shared opinions, so he never comes off as trying to railroad you towards his own views.
I broadly agree with Godfrey-Smith’s views, and I think most scientists will too. He’s a “naturalist”, which in this context means a philosopher of science who takes as his starting point how actual (rather than hypothetical or idealized) scientists go about their business. (Not that he thinks science as its currently practiced is above criticism, including philosophical criticism.) The only point where I seriously disagreed with him was his explication of subjective Bayesianism, which is surprisingly light on criticism. Godfrey-Smith strongly criticizes many other views, his overall judgement seems quite good, and he’s familiar with current everyday scientific practice. So I don’t understand how he could fail to strongly criticize a view that has been strongly criticized by various recent philosophers of science (e.g., Deborah Mayo), and that has never gotten any traction among practicing scientists or statisticians.** Especially because the subjective Bayesian view grew in part out of Carnap’s work in logical positivism, and Godfrey-Smith follows the rest of philosophy of science in writing off Carnap’s work as a dead end.
For those of you who worry that philosophy of science is remote from the actual practice of science, well, if your read this book you’ll discover that many philosophers of science worry about that too. As the book discusses at length, perhaps the biggest issue in philosophy of science ever since Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 has been figuring out the philosophical implications, if any, of how science was and is actually done. Those implications aren’t obvious. There’s an old philosophical dictum, dating back at least to Hume, that “is does not imply ought”. That is, descriptive and normative issues are two different things. How scientists do science, or how they’ve done it in the past, doesn’t on its own imply anything about how science should be done (especially since scientists themselves often disagree with one another on how to do science). But on the other hand, the descriptive and normative aren’t totally independent of one another either. As another old philosophical dictum goes, “ought implies can”. That is, any claim about how things should be presupposes that they could be that way. I have to say that I sometimes found Godfrey-Smith a bit unclear on the relationship between descriptive and normative claims in philosophy of science. Or maybe just a bit unclear on what claims are being made in the first place. In particular, some (not all) recent work at the interface of philosophy of science and other disciplines—sociology of science, “science studies”, feminist philosophy—arguably suffers from muddying descriptive and normative claims, and from lack of clarity about exactly what’s being claimed in the first place. Godfrey-Smith notes this, but his summaries of this work sometimes suffer a little from the same flaw, I think. In his admirable urge to take seriously recent work at the boundary of philosophy of science and other disciplines, I think he’s a bit less critical and demanding of that work than he should be. For instance, there’s a serious discussion of Bruno Latour, whom Andrew Gelman for one frequently mocks, and not without reason. I don’t think Godfrey-Smith should’ve mocked or omitted Latour and related figures. But I do think the chapters on sociology of science and feminism/science studies are a bit too uncritical and drift a bit too far away from philosophy of science sensu stricto. And Godfrey-Smith’s explication of his own naturalism wasn’t totally satisfying to me. I left the book with more of a sense of what his naturalism isn’t than what it is. Bill Wimsatt is one naturalist philosopher of science who’s good at linking how science is actually done to a normative account of how it should be done. For instance, Wimsatt emphasizes how human beings are cognitively limited in all sorts of ways. Many scientific practices involve heuristics and “rules of thumb” that would be suboptimal or even undesirable for a cognitively-unlimited being, but that are optimal given humans’ cognitive limitations. The scientific preference for “simple” or “parsimonious” models is a good example. As Godfrey-Smith notes, philosophers of science have tried mightily—and failed abysmally—to find a universal justification for preferring simple models. After all, the truth might be complicated. And there doesn’t seem to be any other desirable property (testability or whatever) that invariably increases with the simplicity of one’s model. But as Wimsatt (but not Godfrey-Smith) notes, real scientists’ preference for simple models doesn’t have the sort of universal justification philosophers traditionally have sought. Rather, a preference for simple models is justified in many contexts (not all!) for heuristic reasons, such as that real human beings just can’t wrap their heads around complex models, and that simple models often (not always!) provide a good-enough approximation to more complex models.
At the end of every chapter are suggestions for further reading, along with brief comments (e.g., identifying which of the readings are accessible and which are advanced and technical). This is very helpful. There’s also a glossary, which I didn’t really need since I’ve read some philosophy of science already, but which I imagine would be a godsend for someone totally new to the subject. And while we’re on the subject of vocabulary,Godfrey-Smith is good about alerting the reader to (and avoiding) loaded terms that get used in different ways by different philosophers.
The style is clear and readable. There are occasional jokes, often rueful apologies for using well-worn examples. And the book shows its origins as introductory undergraduate lectures in a good way. Godfrey-Smith is good at picking clear examples to illustrate broader points. And he’s good at picking examples that undermine your pre-philosophical intuitions, and so motivate you to stop and think about something that might’ve otherwise seemed obvious.
I took away from the book a better understanding of some philosophical topics that I previously hadn’t understood. For instance, going into the book I’d found Nelson Goodman’s notion of “grue” to be weirdly pointless. I stand corrected on that, at least in part. I now see the point of “grue”, and it was interesting to find that it’s actually scientifically relevant (although I still think Goodman did himself no favors by making his point with such a weird hypothetical***). And I really like Godfrey-Smith’s own resolution of the “grue problem”. I now have a better understanding of Kuhn, including the various tensions and ambiguities in Kuhn’s thought. And I have a better sense of the current lay of the land in philosophy of science.
I’d recommend the book to anyone who wants a quick accessible overview of philosophy of science, including scientists who want an overview so that they can then hone in on the bits of philosophy of science most relevant to their own work.
*At least in part. It might also depend on the state of your field—you might have no choice but to learn and do some philosophy of science. Godfrey-Smith discusses the possibility that philosophical issues loom large for practicing scientists only under certain circumstances, such as during Kuhnian “paradigm shifts”. I think this is right. Part of why I’m interested in philosophy of science is that I think philosophical issues loom larger in a young field like ecology than they do in, say, chemistry.
**“Bayesian” scientists and statisticians come in various stripes, but hardly any are subjective Bayesians in the sense Godfrey-Smith explicates, and most would find that sort of subjective Bayesianism totally bizarre. Andrew Gelman, for instance, is a self-described Bayesian, but is emphatically against the sort of subjective Bayesianism philosophers of science apparently have paid the most attention to.
***And I say that as someone who very much sees a place for ridiculous hypotheticals.
Review - Theory and Reality
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Review by James Sage, Ph.D.
Jan 30th 2004 (Volume 8, Issue 5)
Whether you are interested in philosophy of science as a scholar or as a supplement to your other professional interests, Peter Godfrey-Smith presents a provocative discussion that covers key topics, including: logical empiricism, naturalism, realism, explanation, as well as issues related to confirmation, evidence, and Bayesian probability.
In particular, I believe that those who teach philosophy of science (whether at the undergraduate or graduate level), will find this volume invaluable. Godfrey-Smith presents clear and organized chapters which are a pleasure to read. His prose is clear, his examples carefully developed and highly appropriate. And in places where Godfrey-Smith presents his own analyses and his own commitments, he is careful to flag such passages.
The book is organized as a progression of ideas and debates in science over the last 100 years. As Godfrey-Smith weaves this fascinating story of Western intellectual heritage, he is careful to point out key people, concepts, and controversies which have shaped (and continue to shape) our understanding of science. As a straightforward introduction to the philosophy of science, Theory and Reality draws careful connections between philosophy, science, and other fields, such as psychology, astronomy, history, and mathematics. Readers will enjoy the chronological presentation of ideas in each chapter. Throughout, Godfrey-Smith consistently includes important lessons from the philosophy of science (the difference between prescriptive statements and descriptive statements, the difference between causation and explanation, the difference between metaphysics and epistemology, etc.).
In addition to a chronological organization, Godfrey-Smith's book can be used in a thematic fashion, with chapters 1 and 2 serving as crucial background and introductory discussions. Chapters 3, 4, 10, and 14 address issues related to evidence, testing, and theory choice. Chapters 5 thru 11 address the idea of scientific change and the social organization of science. Chapters 12 and 13 deal with the metaphysical side of the philosophy of science. And chapter 14 presents a nice discussion of Bayesian probability.
Each chapter includes a "further reading" section which will help to guide readers to additional materials. Readers will also find at the end of the book an extremely useful glossary of terms, as well as the large number of references and a comprehensive index.
Pedagogically, Theory and Reality has enormous promise (which shouldn't be any surprise, as the book is a culmination of 11 years of Godfrey-Smith's lectures on these topics). By itself, the book is extremely readable, comprehensive, and thoughtful. When used in conjunction with other texts, Theory and Reality can provide the much need "paste" to make sense of these important developments in the philosophy of science. For example, instructors may wish to use Godfrey-Smith's text along with selections from original sources, such as Hempel, Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Latour, Quine, Dewey, Hull, or Churchland.
Because Godfrey-Smith incorporates numerous, accessible examples to illustrate his points, I have no doubt that students will find his treatment of issues to be rewarding. Above all else, Theory and Reality is clearly written. While addressing important issues (such as the difference between logical positivism and logical empiricism), Godfrey-Smith displays consistent clarity. It is truly refreshing to read a text that is thorough, clear, and penetrating. Students with little or no background in philosophy or philosophy of science will find this book to be extremely worthwhile. Professionals in other fields and other disciplines will appreciate the breadth and depth of this book, as well as the recommendations for further reading provided at the end of each chapter.
While the book has no weak chapters (each is penetrating and very interesting), I have several favorite parts of Theory and Reality. These include chapters regarding Thomas Kuhn, "Kuhn and Normal Science" (chapter 5) and "Kuhn and Revolutions" (chapter 6). These are among my favorite chapters not because I am a huge fan of Kuhn (in fact, I tend to be fairly wary of Kuhn and Kuhn-enthusiasts), but I must admit that these chapters present an extremely valuable presentation of Kuhn, paradigms, and related issues, such as scientific crises, puzzles, revolutions, and incommensurability. So, whether you are a die-hard fan of Kuhn and paradigms, or whether you are mildly skeptical about Kuhn and paradigms, Godfrey-Smith provides an organized and thoughtful discussion of such issues. Throughout his discussion of Kuhn, Godfrey-Smith is careful to include criticisms and his own insights (and as always, the reader is provided with signposts marking Godfrey-Smith's own views). For this reason, it is delightful to read a candid and yet intellectually honest presentation of a controversial topic such as Kuhn and scientific paradigms. Similar remarks apply to Godfrey-Smith's treatment of the sociology of science (chapters 7 thru 9).
In sum, Theory and Reality has no weak chapters (this is worth repeating). Especially strong are the first two chapters ("Introduction" and "Logic Plus Empiricism"), which provide an introductory framework that allows the reader to move quickly from chapter to chapter (following chapters in order), or from topic to topic (bouncing one's way thru the text). Whether you teach philosophy of science, or whether you are simply interested in issues relating science, philosophy, history and other fields, I am confident that you'll find Theory and Reality an accessible and rewarding read.
© 2004 James Sage
“Theory and Reality” by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Posted on April 11, 2012 by Rafe
This book was published in 2003 and subtitled “An introduction to the philosophy of science.” The 22 Amazon reviews to date average 4 stars and not one provides a hint of the extent to which Popperism is sawn off and misrepresented in the book. It is another volume in the “burying Popper” genre and fortunately I happened on a secondhand copy because after some critical discussion on the Curi list it was clearly not worth the full price. It demonstrates, again, that academic philosophers can spend a career without meeting somone who can provide a straight feed on Popper, or at least a Popperian who the philosopher is prepared to take seriously.
The book begins with a chronological account of the philosophy of science in the 20th century and the second part defends S-G’s own views: (a) the “naturalistic” approach to the philosophy of science, based on what scientists actually do, and (b) saving a form of empiricism. He wants to develop both:
1. A general understanding of how humans gain knowledge of the world and
2. An understanding of what makes the work descended from the Scientific Revolution different from other kinds of investigation of the world.
It is interesting that Popper’s ideas are treated in one chapter from page 57 to 74, then there is no serious consideration of his ideas in the remainder of the 250 pp book. This signals that his ideas are merely of interest as a part of the history of ideas, not as a part of the living philosophy of science, despite the high regard for his ideas among scientists, which Godfrey-Smith thinks is probably based on a naive or simplistic view of Popper’s ideas.
In a chapter on Logic Plus Empiricism he wrote:
The logical positivists who did make it to the United States were responsible for the great flowering of American philosophy in the years after World War II. These include Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel and Herbert Feigl.
“The great flowering”?! Maybe careers and publications, but what about robust theories? On page 37 he notes that logical empiricism was near to extinct by the 1970s, so what was the point of the “great flowering”?
In the chapter on Induction and Confirmation “we begin looking at a very important and difficult problem, the problem of understanding how observations can confirm a theory.” I think it is fair to say that we do not get to understand how that process happens.
To be clear, near the start of the chapter on Conjecture and Refutation he writes that “I agree with many of these criticisms [of Popper] and don’t see any way for Popper to escape from their force”. (57)
Popper left Europe upon the rise of the Nazism, and after spending the war years in New Zealand, he moved to the LSE where he remained for the rest of his career [unless you consider the work that he did in the last three decades of his life]. There he built up a group of loyal allies, whom he often accused of disloyalty. His seminar series at the LSE became famous for its grueling questioning and for the fact that the speakers had a difficult time actually presenting much of their lectures, because of Popper’s interruptions.
Followed by a paragraph on the clash between Popper and Wittgenstein at Cambridge, without any explanation of the point at issue (the existence of real philosophical problems, which was denied by Wittgenstein). He could have mentioned that in NZ Popper wrote one of the great works of political philosophy in the 20 century but the bibliography does not list the OSE, nor The Poverty, Objective Knowledge or The Postscript, or any of the miscellaneous essay collections such as The Myth of the Framework, although G-S refers to Popper on “the myth of the framework” without any citation. He also made some use of the evolutionary development of knowledge without reference to Popper’s work on the topic, decades before. Later in the book he makes some reference to rules and procedures in science, without noticing that this is a central theme of Popper’s first book and he talks about social and community aspects of science without reference to Popper’s “social turn” that is quite clear in chapter 23 of The Open Society.
Introducing Popper
G-S wrote that Popper’s primary aim was to understand science rather than the “broader topics” of language, meaning and knowledge that concerned the positivists. He especially wanted to separate proper science from pseudoscience and metaphysics. The paradigms of psuedoscientists were supposed to be Freud and Marx. This may be a minor point but G-S more than once mentions Popper’s condemnation of Freudian psychology and Marxism. However it was uncritical followers of Freud and Marx who earned Popper’s ire. He could see some hope for a scientific version of Freud’s ideas and he devoted most of the second volume of OSE to exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Marx. The strengths were his rejection of pyschologism and his rudimentary situational or institutional analysis of social and economic processes. But of course G-S did not read The Open Society, nor The Postscript where he could have found Popper fully engaged with science and the role of philosophical and metaphysical arguments in coming to grips with scientific problems.
G-S introduces falsificationism as the centrepiece of Popper’s scheme which is a convenient way to introduce Popper after the positivists because falsification can be seen as a substitute for verification and Popper can be depicted as a rather strange and different kind of positivist (which is the way that people like Habermas and Rorty saw him). Popper wrote somewhere that he did not really like his views to be labelled “falsificationism” and of course the words should not matter, but I know from my research on philosophy texts that a list of standard criticisms of “falsificatonism” are routinely adduced to justify shelving Popper and moving on to Lakatos, Kuhn and the sociology of science.
Popper’s skepticism about induction and confirmation are much more controversial than his demarcation criterion and G-S wrote:
In the opinion of most philosophers [including G-S] Popper’s attempt to defend this radical claim was not successful, and some of his discussions of this topic are rather misleading to readers. As a result, some of the scientists who regard popper as a hero do not realize that Popper believed that it is never possible to confirm a theory, not even slightly, and no matter now many observations the theory predicts correctly. (59)
The problem for G-S is that the various programs to pin down the confirmation of theories or the attachment of numerical probabilities have yet to deliver, but science proceeds anyway. He notes that practically all philosophers have given up on certainty so we are all fallibilists now, but the justificationists keep hoping to find some way to justify higher levels of belief and escape from the conjectural theory of knowledge that consitutes one of the major “Popperian turns“. (The others are the objective turn, from subjective beliefs, the social or ‘rules of the game’ turn, and the metaphysical turn).
G-S finds it odd that an exponent of conjectural knowledge should be in search of true theories and he uses a Holy Grail analogy to make fun of Popper’s position. He imagines people in search of the eternally glowing “Holy Grail” and a person may carry a glowing Grail all his life without knowing if it is the real thing (glowing for ever).
This is similar to Popper’s picture of science’s search for truth. All we can do is try out one theory after another. A theory that we have failed to falsify up till now might, in fact, be true. But if so, we will never know this or have reason to increase our confidence.
This leaves out of account the growth of knowledge. We can achieve progress in science and form critical preferences for some theories that are better than others. We can also specify what would count as a better theory then the ones we have at present (in terms of things that it would need to explain, and tests that it would need to pass).
Popper on Scientific Change
He talks about the “appealing simplicity” of Popper’s two stage process of conjecture and refutation to explain scientific progres. If he had read Objective Knowledge he could have referred to the four-stage scheme that Popper repeatedly used in his later work to explain that we work on problems and make progress by shifting to deeper and more interesting problems.
At this stage G-S starts to talk about the things that scientists actually do, and the things that groups of scientists do. He could have noted the distinction that Popper made between the logic of testing and the conventions and procedures that are required to promote and sustain rigorous testing and criticism (to avoid what is now called confirmation bias, though G-S did not mention this). He did note that the process of conjecture and refutation has “a striking resemblance to another two-step process: Darwin’s explanation of biological evolution in terms of variation and natural selection”. Interesting! That was a point that Popper made (in passing) in The Logic of Scientific Discovery and over and over again in Objective Knowledge and other publications after the mid 1960s.
Objections to Popper on Falsification
He poses the question – “Is falsifiability a good way to distinguish scientific ideas from non-scientific ideas?” And he follows up with the suggestion “that something fairly similar to Popper’s question about demarcation does make sense: can we describe a distinctive scientific strategy of intestigating the world, a scientific way of handling ideas?” (63)
At this point G-S could explain that Popper drew a clear distinction between the decisive logic of falsifiability – the capacity of a true observation statement to falsify a universal statement, and falsification in practice which cannot be decisive for several reasons – the theory dependence of observations, the need for ancillary statements to describe the situation, the need to make assumptions about other theories, and finally the capacity of people to simply refuse to accept the apparent results of an experiment.
“This is a problem not just for Popper’s solution to the demarcation problem, but for his whole theory of science as well”. (64) Incidentally it is a problem for any philosophy of science.
Popper’s response is what I call the “social or rules of the game” turn, fully articulated by Ian Jarvie in a book that may have appeared just too late for G-S to have access to it for this book. Still, he would have found it in chapter 23 of The Open Society and he should have found it in The Logic of Scientific Discovery in the section where Popper explained the essential requirement for conventions (rules of the game) of scientific method. G-S appeared to regard this as “in some ways a retraction of his initial aim, which was to describe something about scientific theories which makes them special” (65). But the falsifiability criterion has to be seen as Popper’s logical rejoinder to the positivists who pinned their program to verification. His point was that verification will never and cannot possibly ever work, a point which if it had been taken on board would have saved the positivists and logical empiricists some decades of wasted efforts.
His response was to empasise the function of empirical testing (in the framework of the critical approach in general) backed up by conventions and protocols to keep scientists usefully engaged even though the results of experiments cannot be logically decisive (though many experimental results can be seen that way, for practical purposes).
But in making this move, Popper has badly damaged his original picture of science. This was a picture in which observations, once accepted, have the power to decisively refute theoretical hypotheses. That is a matter of deductive logic, as Popper endlessly stressed” (67).
He also stressed the difference between the logic of falsifiability and the practical problems of falsification. In defiance of this distinction which is clearly drawn in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, G-S is apparently committed to the idea that there was a “naive falsificationism” about Popper (which Lakatos exploited in such a damaging manner, playing on the capacity of readers like G-S to misread Popper). The myth lives on in a very recent anthology where the editor concluded that in light of Duhem etc “There can, therefore, be no such decisive refutation of a theory as Popper suggests“. However in The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper wrote “In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable, or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding.”
Objections to Popper on Confirmation
In the previous section I discussed problems with Popper’s views about falsification. But let us leave those problems aside now, and assume in this section that we can use Popperian falsification as a method for decisively rejecting theories. (67)
What is going on here? Popper advised that we cannot use falsification as a method for decisively rejecting theories, so why assume that we can? He goes on “If we make this assumption, is Popper’s attempt to describe rational theory choice successful? No, it is not.”
“Here is a simple problem that Popper has a very difficult time with. Suppose we are trying to build a bridge…”. We use a lot of theories, presumably theories that the scientists and engineers regard as well tested “tried and true” methods. Empiricists say that this is a rational way to go, but why this this so? “Let us focus on Popper, who wants to avoid the need for a theory of confirmation. How does Popper’s philosophy treat the bridge building situation”. (67)
He poses a strange situation where Popper has to choose between a theory that has been tested (and passed) many times and a theory which has just been conjectured and has never been tested. Neither has been falsified. Which to choose? The usual thing would be to pick the well tested theory. “But what can Popper say about this choice?
Of course Popper has said that for practical purposes it is rational to use the best tested theory that is available. What is the point that S-G is making? He wants to suggest that Popper would have some difficulty in explaining why a well tested (and unrefuted theory) should be selected ahead of a new theory that has not been tested but has also not been refuted. The answer is that Popper is not betting on the truth of the tried and unrefuted theory, he is betting on the same results, unless the circumstances change.
The bridge-building example is not relevant to scientific research because the bridge is an instrument and the theories that are used in its design could be known to be false, but good enough for the purpose (given the testing and safety factors that are built into bridged and other structures). The analogy is fundamentally muddle-headed in failing to make the distinction between testing theories in the intersts of scientific research and building structures that are safe and secure for human use.
Conclusion
There is more but that is enough to convey the flavour. The publication of this book (after scrutiny by independent reviewers) and the glowing reviews from readers raises some question about the prevalence of people in the academic world and the publishing industry who have read Popper thoroughly and appreciate what he was on about?
Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith review – the octopus as intelligent alien
A scuba-diving philosopher of science explores the wonder of cephalopods, smart and playful creatures who live outside the brain-body divide
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Philip Hoare
Wednesday 15 March 2017 03.30 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.23 EDT
‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea.” Coleridge’s lines evoke those Precambrian depths where sensate life first stirred, and which remain lodged atavistically in our collective imaginations. Perhaps that’s why we look on the octopus as an eldritch other, with its more-than-the usual complement of limbs, bulbous eyes, seeking suckers and keratinous beaks voraciously devouring anything in its slippery path.
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s brilliant book entirely overturns those preconceptions. Cephalopods – octopuses, squids and nautiluses – “are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals”, he writes, having developed on a different path from us, “an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour”. This is why they present themselves as a fascinating case study to Godfrey-Smith, who is a philosopher of science – because of what can be learned from them about the minds of animals, including our own. His book stands alongside such recent works as Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell’s The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins as evidence of new and unconstrained thinking about the species with which we share our watery planet.
Unlike cetaceans – whose sentience it is possible to imagine, partly because they demonstrate our mammalian connections so vividly and physically – cephalopods are entirely unlike us. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over,” says Godfrey-Smith. “This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” The fact that they have eight legs, three hearts, and blue-green blood allies them more with The Simpsons’ gloopy extra-terrestrials than anything earthly.
‘The body itself is protean, all possibility’ … an octopus hunting in a lagoon on the island of Mayotte near Madagascar.
‘The body itself is protean, all possibility’ … an octopus hunting in a lagoon on the island of Mayotte near Madagascar. Photograph: Gabriel Barathieu
The beauty of Godfrey-Smith’s book lies in the clarity of his writing; his empathy, if you will. He takes us through those early stirrings in the seas of deep time, from bacteria that sense light and can taste, to cnidarian jellyfish, the first organisms to exhibit nervous systems, which he describes wonderfully: “Picture a filmy lightbulb in which the rhythms of nervous activity first began.” The ocean itself became the conduit for evolution; we feel a magnetic attraction to the vast waters that gave us birth because we still carry the sea inside us. “The chemistry of life is an aquatic chemistry. We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us.”
In the same way, the octopus’s fluidity seems like a collation of the sea itself. Its ancestors evolved defensive shells and became the first predators: the frills of these snail-like creatures, which crawled on the ocean floor, became tentacles and they began to swim. Then they discarded their shells; the first octopus probably appeared 290m years ago. They also developed large brains to compensate for their new vulnerability. A common octopus brain has 500m neurons, a “smartness” that ranks alongside dogs and even a three-year-old child. But unlike a vertebrate’s, an octopus’s neurons are ranged through its entire body. It is “suffused with nervousness” – including its arms, which act as “agents of their own” and sense by taste as much as touch. For the octopus, “the body itself is protean, all possibility”; it “lives outside the usual body/brain divide”.
Clarity and empathy … Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Clarity and empathy … Peter Godfrey-Smith. Photograph: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office
The result is a wondrous being. In lab experiments, octopuses attain good results, able to negotiate mazes and unscrew jars containing food, using visual cues to achieve their goals. They also show a sense of craftiness – squirting water at researchers they don’t like, for instance. One celebrated aquarium-kept octopus proved its skill when staff noticed fish from a neighbouring tank had gone missing overnight – CCTV revealed the smooth operator. The octopus was lifting the lid on its own tank, slithering over to the fish, claiming its prize, then crawling back, covering itself again as if nothing had happened. But Godfrey-Smith finds another anecdote more revealing: an octopus at the University of Otago in New Zealand learned to turn off lights by squirting water at the bulbs; brightness annoys an octopus. Cephalopods are not only aware of their environment; they seek to manipulate it.
Godfrey-Smith’s interest in octopuses goes beyond the academic. An experienced scuba diver, his empathy is a product of personal observation, mostly in the Pacific Ocean close to Sydney, where he teaches. It is this that makes him ask what it feels like to be an octopus. Consciousness is required to perform novel acts – beyond routine or instinct. Octopuses will manipulate half-coconut shells in ways that suggest they are investigating the shapes as much as using them. They play; they recognise individuals (both human and octopus); and, like us, they exhibit qualities of caution and recklessness as they intuit the world.
Octopuses play, they recognise humans and, like us, they exhibit qualities of caution and recklessness
As those autonomous arms reach out and touch-taste the diving author, he reads their gestures as friendliness rather than possible predation. They even see with their skin, replicating the terrain around or below using a layered screen of pixel-like cells known as chromatophores, iridophores and leucophores to detect and reflect the shade and pattern of rocks or sand. Nor is this almost photographic ability solely for camouflage; cephalopods flood their bodies with colour according their moods. Godfrey-Smith’s Romantic flourishes summon up almost angelic, Blakean spirits: one octopus on the offensive, flushing red with horns, seems to create “a real sense of what is frightening for a human, and was trying to produce a vision of damnation”.
More like us than our hubris allows … an octopus in an aquarium in Timmendorfer Strand, Germany.
More like us than our hubris allows … an octopus in an aquarium in Timmendorfer Strand, Germany. Photograph: Markus Scholz/AP
Wondering if he is “entirely real in their watery world”, and not “one of those ghosts who does not realise they are a ghost”, the author hypothesises that this “chromatic chatter” is a subtle kind of communication. We now know that speech isn’t needed for complex thought; perhaps these animals, so incredibly sensate, learning from each other’s behaviour, shifting in shape and colour, are more social than we ever suspected. Yet what they might know or feel still eludes us.
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Returning again and again to his many-armed friends in their Octopolis off the Australian shore, Godfrey-Smith evokes a cephalopod utopia. In the process, he proves that, like all aliens, these strange, beautiful creatures are more like us than our hubris allows. Only evolutionary chance separates us. After all, as he concludes, “When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all.”
• Philip Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR will be published by 4th Estate in July. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life is published by William Collins. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
'Other Minds' explores how animal consciousness differs vastly from our own
'Other Minds'
“Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," by Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nick Romeo
Chicago Tribune
The profound strangeness of certain animals can sometimes inspire a sense of metaphysical wonder. Aristotle pondered everything from the cause of flatulence in elephants to the nature of a hyena's genitals. Though he probably never encountered many of the creatures he discussed, his biological works sort and study around 500 different species. Even mere rumors of interesting and unusual animals roused him to intricate speculative analysis.
More recently, the ability of bats to navigate by echolocation prompted one of the most famous philosophical papers of the 20th century: Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel argued that being a bat must involve some particular, subjective feeling, but that knowledge of this feeling is fundamentally inaccessible to humans because of our vastly different perceptual and cognitive architecture.
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Aristotle and Nagel are only a few of the philosophers who have seen in the stranger reaches of the animal kingdom a set of fascinating intellectual quandaries. In "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness," the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith continues this rich tradition of inquiry into the minds and natures of beings utterly different from us.
A list of the features of octopuses could easily be mistaken for a description of some alien life form. They have three hearts that pump blue-green blood through an eight-limbed body, which is so incredibly malleable that they can squeeze through a space roughly the size of one of their eyes. They can evade and confuse predators by changing colors and squirting clouds of ink. The octopus's esophagus passes directly through its brain, an arrangement that proves dangerous whenever the shells or claws of small creatures puncture this feeding tube and lodge in the brain.
But to speak of an octopus brain as a single discrete organ is somewhat misleading. The bulk of their neurons actually cluster in their arms, which possess a form of short-term memory and can clutch and grasp even after being surgically removed. This distributed neural intelligence is highly unusual, and it blurs the standard boundaries between mind and body. The arms of an octopus are not only appendages controlled by a central command center; they are also semi-autonomous units that can explore, move, perceive and remember.
These sorts of details are sufficiently weird and interesting that after adding some stories of his own observations on dives off the coast of Australia, Godfrey-Smith might have easily written a book that was just an extended marshaling of evidence for the claim that octopuses are strange and beautiful creatures. But his ambitions are larger: He wants to make progress on the fundamental question of how "consciousness arose from the raw materials found in living beings."
To this end, Godfrey-Smith returns to an ancient branching on the evolutionary tree over 600 million years old, roughly when genetic evidence suggests that the last common ancestor of humans and octopuses lived. This creature — perhaps small and worm-shaped — likely lacked eyes and certainly did not have complex nervous systems. Humans and octopuses thus developed complex nervous systems independently rather than both deriving this trait from a common ancestor. Darwin called this process convergent evolution — the wings of insects and birds are another example — and it offers a chance to see how evolutionary processes can result in different solutions to the same problem.
But what exactly is this problem? Why would nervous systems evolve even once, let alone multiple times? Godfrey-Smith's answer is twofold. The first reason is to enable the coordination of a creature's internal elements. The second is to link perceptions of the outside world with effective actions. He argues that this second selective pressure arose only after the rise of predation — likely sometime in the Cambrian Period, approximately 540 million years ago — when it became necessary to perceive surrounding threats more acutely and develop the cognitive capacity to process and act on those perceptions.
Godfrey-Smith skillfully links the details of evolutionary history and biology to broader philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness. While some of his claims are more persuasive than others — he might have provided sharper definitions of the intermediate category of subjective experience that is not yet conscious — the book is a valuable contribution to some of the most basic questions about the origins of conscious life.
Nick Romeo is a freelance writer.
'Other Minds'
By Peter Godfrey-Smith, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 255 pages, $27
‘Other Minds’: Diving deep into the world of the octopus
Originally published December 2, 2016 at 7:00 am
1 of 2
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s new book, “Other Minds,” delves into the deep mysteries of the octopus, both its evolution and its many marvelous abilities. Godfrey-Smith appears Thursday, Dec. 8, at Town Hall Seattle.
By Irene Wanner
Special to The Seattle Times
‘Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness’
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 254 pp., $27
Two animals more unalike than humans and octopuses are hard to imagine. Where we have a brain, spine and central nervous system, octopuses are “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien,” writes Peter Godfrey-Smith, an award-winning author of four books.
Octopuses have neither skeletons nor shells, can squeeze through a hole the size of their eyes, have three hearts with copper-rich blue-green blood, and are apparently color blind but somehow change colors to communicate or camouflage themselves. Their brains are a rudimentary clump through which their esophagus passes, meaning if they choke on something, it can cause brain damage.
But octopuses have a half billion neurons — cells that process and transmit information — in a net covering their entire body. Their eight arms, only partially dependent on the central brain, can taste, smell, sense light and move of their own volition. Like lizards able to detach their tails to escape predators, octopuses can jettison arms, which grow back. Generally, they’re territorial, more active at night and solitary except to mate.
Author appearance
Peter Godfrey-Smith
The author of “Other Minds” will appear at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave. Tickets are $5 at townhallseattle.org and at the door. Information: 206- 652-4255.
Godfrey-Smith, a scuba diver and also professor of philosophy at both the City University of New York and University of Sydney, began diving with a friend off Australia’s east coast at a site discovered in 2009. They named it Octopolis. Fifty feet below the surface, it was a rare place, for in a thick layer of scallop shells discarded after the meat had been eaten, the animals lived in a city of dens and interacted far more than usual.
Exploring Octopolis led Godfrey-Smith to explore the evolution of its otherworldly inhabitants. His book begins roughly 600 million years ago during the last time humans and octopuses shared a common ancestor, a flat wormlike thing a few millimeters long with light-sensitive patches, possibly nets of nerves or perhaps a tiny neural cluster of a brain. How, he wondered, did consciousness arise from these raw materials?
Even earlier than these worms were creatures whose fossils were found in the outback’s Ediacaran Hills in 1946. They provide “our first direct evidence” about life from about 635 million to 542 million years ago. Then suddenly, at least in geologic terms, the majority of animal phyla developed in the Cambrian period, and some seem to have been vertebrates.
Octopuses weren’t among them. They are cephalopods, a kind of mollusk. In the Cambrian, mollusks had shells. Gradually, octopuses’ single foot became tentacles, they lost their shells and their large nervous systems enabled uncommon intelligence, memory and the ability to learn, although researchers now call them “slow learners.” Despite that description, they recognize people; at those they dislike when in captivity, they squirt jets of water. Good navigators, they easily find their way home from foraging trips.
Godfrey-Smith discusses the mysteries of changing color, cognitive evolution and communication. He wonders how language evolved. Why is there such sophisticated talk among creatures not noted for sociable natures? He compares complex baboon behavior, which he says relies on only a few sounds, with octopuses, whose skin color patterns seem peculiarly elaborate for animals with a mere two-year life span.
At times, the science of this book is daunting, but its study subject is so amazing, it’s hard not to be drawn along, just as Godfrey-Smith was when he extended a hand to an octopus and it reached out to return his touch, echoing his interest.
Review Exploring the origins of consciousness, cephalopod and human, with Peter Godfrey-Smith in 'Other Minds'
An octopus
An octopus at The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Author Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science, also spends time under the sea with octopuses and cuttlefish. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Meehan Crist
Peter Godfrey-Smith is besotted with cephalopods. These enigmatic and generally solitary sea-dwellers include octopuses, cuttlefish and squid, all of which have big and complex brains and act in ways that suggest alien minds. A philosopher of science and experienced deep-sea diver, Godfrey-Smith has rolled his obsessions into one book, weaving biology and philosophy into a dazzling pattern that looks a lot like the best of pop science.
He peppers his latest book with vivid anecdotes from his cephalopod encounters: “I saw something moving under a ledge — something surprisingly large — and went down to look at it. What I found looked like an octopus attached to a hovercraft.… The animal seemed to be every color at once — red, grey, blue-green. Patterns came and went in a fraction of a second. Amid the patches of color were veins of silver like glowing powerlines. The animal hovered a few inches above the seafloor, and then came forward to look at me.”
Of this particular cuttlefish, he says, “This was my first experience with an aspect of these animals that has never stopped intriguing me: the sense of mutual engagement that one can have with them.”
The animal seemed to be every color at once — red, grey, blue-green. Patterns came and went in a fraction of a second.
— Peter Godfrey-Smith
Godfrey-Smith relates dramatic stories of mischief made by captive octopuses and spends a delightful chapter exploring cephalopods’ sophisticated color-changing abilities (“a kind of ongoing chromatic chatter”), but this is not narrative nonfiction about the secret life of cephalopods, along the lines of Sy Montgomery’s “The Soul of an Octopus.” This is a gifted philosopher and historian of science doing philosophy with octopuses. His project is no less ambitious than to work out the evolutionary origins of subjective experience.
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In philosophy, the problem of other minds is a time-honored and unresolved conundrum: how to justify the almost universal belief that other humans have minds much like our own, including a rich inner life. Here, in unadorned language that makes complex ideas readily accessible, Godfrey-Smith asks why subjective experience should have arisen in life on our planet at all.
Starting with single-celled organisms swimming in the primordial sea, Godfrey-Smith tells an incredibly compact and lucid history of the evolution of the nervous system, offering an account of what he sees as the material conditions underlying the evolution of consciousness.
There are two key concepts here, both involving feedback loops. The first is feedback between sensing and acting, and the second is feedback between an organism and its environment, including other organisms. “In the transition to the first animals with nervous systems, the [single-celled] machinery of external sensing and signaling was turned inward, enabling coordination within these new larger living units… Organisms became entangled in each other’s lives in new ways, especially as predator and prey.”
He firmly anchors his investigation in cephalopods because “Cephalopods and smart vertebrates are independent experiments in the evolution of the mind.” [200] Our last common ancestor probably lived about 600 million years ago and “had the form of small, flattened worms,” which means that after these branches of the evolutionary tree diverged, complex nervous systems and the kinds of minds they enable evolved at least twice, in parallel. Probably three times, as octopuses’ last common ancestor with other cephalopods lived 270 million years ago.
And so we arrive in the present. Of his experiences with octopuses, he notes: “if you sit in front of their den and reach out a hand, they’ll often send out an arm or two, first to explore you, and then — absurdly — to try to haul you into their lair.”
In this elegantly materialist telling, subjective experience is deeply embodied in physical form. Most of a cephalopod’s neurons are not clustered in a centralized brain, as in vertebrates, but located in the arms, which seem to have some degree of autonomy. “For an octopus, its arms are partly self – they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain’s perspective they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.” This is as alien a mind as we could hope to encounter. Godfrey-Smith posits a consciousness that remains rooted in top-down control from the central brain, like an orchestra conductor giving cues to jazz musicians, but one can’t help wondering: what if cephalopod experience is weirder than that? What might it be like for subjective experience to be plural — “we” and “not-we.”
Godfrey-Smith, whose previous books include “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,” “Philosophy of Biology” and “Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection” (which won the 2010 Lakatos Award), is well-versed in writing accessible entry points to complex ideas in philosophy and biology. Here, he delivers philosophy wrapped even more firmly in the glittering cloak of popular science. The result is an incredibly insightful and enjoyable book that draws on thinkers like Hume, John Dewey and the lesser-known Soviet-era psychologist Lev Vygotsky, as well as research from the fossil record, evolutionary biology and a wide range of animal cognition studies without ever falling into some of the more lamentable pitfalls of the popular science genre — condescending to the reader or oversimplifying the science.
“The mind evolved in the sea,” writes Godfrey-Smith, but if water is our origin, it may also be our destiny. Humans burning fossil fuels has led to rising levels of water in the atmosphere, which is causing increasingly extreme weather events such as catastrophic floods and droughts. According to the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.” A week ago, Arctic temperatures were running 35 degrees above average, and sea ice that should be freezing in November was, astoundingly, melting. Godfrey-Smith gestures to the climate crisis in the final pages of “Other Minds,” writing, “Our ability to manage this is hampered not just by greed and competing interests, but by the difficulty of getting a handle on the problem and understanding our own destructive capacities.” Whatever happens next — whatever we do with the consciousness enabled by these big brains of ours — we can’t say we weren’t warned.
When he considers the short life span of most cephalopods, he wonders, poignantly, “what is the point of building a large nervous system if your life is over in a year or two?” While he poses this question from an evolutionary perspective (“The machinery of intelligence is expensive, both to build and to run”), it leads quickly to the edge of a precipitous existential abyss: “What is the point of investing in a process of learning about the world if there is almost no time to put that information to use?”
Crist is writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University.
What the Octopus Knows
A scuba-diving philosopher explores invertebrate intelligence and consciousness.
Reinhard Dirscherl / Getty
OLIVIA JUDSON JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE SCIENCE
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REVIEWS
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
By Peter Godfrey-Smith
FSG
My love affair with octopuses began when I was 9. On a summer holiday by the sea, I found Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973) in my great-aunt’s bookcase. Written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the great pioneer of scuba diving, and his colleague Philippe Diolé, the book told of encounters between humans and cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and their more distant cousins, the nautiluses. A few days after I’d finished reading, I was out snorkeling and saw my first wild octopus. It was clambering over rocks in the shallows, changing color as it went. I was so excited that, after it vanished into a crevice, I leaped out of the water and began telling two strangers on the shore everything I’d learned from the book.
Cousteau and his team were the first to spend a lot of time—many hours at a stretch—in the water observing and filming wild octopuses and getting to know different individuals by visiting them regularly. Before long, some of the animals would come out to greet the divers, even climbing onto them and going for a ride. Others were shy, and would stay in their holes. Some appeared to develop preferences for particular humans. The divers wanted to know whether octopuses—as suspected—steal fish from fishermen’s nets, so they set up a net complete with several fish, and settled back to watch. Sure enough, an octopus came and helped itself to the lot. Another octopus opened a jar containing food, while a third seemed disturbed by its reflection when shown a mirror.
Cousteau’s accounts are anecdotes, not scientific experiments. Yet, taken together, they capture three aspects of octopuses—some species of them, at least—that strike anyone who spends time in the water with them.
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First, different individuals have different temperaments. Some are shy, some are bold; some are inquisitive, some aggressive. Because of this individuality, people who hang out with them, whether in the sea, at a public aquarium, or in the laboratory, tend to give them names—an honor normally reserved for mammals such as dolphins and chimpanzees. Cousteau spoke of an octopus called Octopissimus; one scientific paper I read referred to Albert, Bertram, and Charles.
Second, some octopuses will engage with you. They might reach out an arm and touch your hand. They will investigate an object you present to them, giving every impression of thinking about it as they do so. All the while, they will appear to watch you with their large, mobile eyes. Again, these are behaviors we associate with dolphins and dogs—but not with, say, fish, let alone animals such as sea urchins or clams.
The octopus mind has evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our own.
Third, octopuses often behave in surprising ways. Although Albert and Bertram were prepared to pull levers to receive pieces of fish, Charles destroyed the experimental equipment—he pulled it apart with his arms—and repeatedly squirted the experimenter with water. On a recent diving trip, my partner and I came across a little octopus sitting in the sand, two of its arms holding a large half clamshell over its head like a roof. For a while, we looked at it, and it looked at us. Then it shifted. It must have been reaching down with its other arms, because suddenly, like a small animated bulldozer, it tossed up a heap of sand. It did this several times, watching us closely and giving us the sense that, though it was interested in checking us out, it was also ready, if necessary, to pull the shell down like a lid and disappear into the seafloor.
The animals also frequently change their skin color and texture—which, to creatures such as ourselves, fine-tuned to watch faces for frowns and smiles, blushes and blanches, gives the appearance of emotional expressiveness. In other words, an encounter with an octopus can sometimes leave you with the strong feeling that you’ve encountered another mind.
FSG
But that mind—if mind it is—has evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our own. The most-recent common ancestors of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago, early in the evolution of animal life. Although much about our joint ancestors is obscure, they were probably small wormlike creatures that lived in the sea. This makes octopuses very different from other animals we suspect of sentience, such as dolphins and dogs, parrots and crows, which are much more closely related to us. In the words of Peter Godfrey-Smith, “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
Godfrey-Smith is a scuba-diving philosopher; his specialties are philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. While out diving some years ago, he began encountering octopuses and cuttlefish, became intrigued, and started studying them. The result is Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, a terrific mix of Cousteau-esque encounters with the animals in the wild (including a giant cuttlefish he calls Kandinsky), wide-ranging scientific discussion, and philosophical analysis. Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and bold, this book is the latest, and most closely argued, salvo in the debate over whether octopuses and other cephalopods are intelligent, sentient beings.
Mind, intelligence, sentience, consciousness—these are difficult, slippery terms, especially when applied to nonhuman animals. Cousteau remarked drily, “Scientists, although they concede that the octopus has a memory and that it learns quickly, do not use the word ‘intelligence’ in describing it.” He was writing in 1973, but it could have been yesterday. Several octopus researchers have told me that intelligence is a word they shy away from, either because of the SAT-like connotations, or because they feel that evidence for it is lacking, or because they think focusing on intelligence is narcissistic and fails to capture other important aspects of the wonder of these animals. Consciousness is even more contentious.
Arguably, though, it’s also narcissistic to assume up front that other animals are not, in some measure, intelligent or sentient, and that the human experience is unique in all respects. In any case, evolution doesn’t usually conjure complex traits from nothing; instead, they typically emerge from simpler antecedents. Light-sensing mechanisms run the gamut from molecules to eyespots to a huge variety of more complicated eyes. Nervous systems, too, show different levels of complexity; some are small and simple, while others are larger and more intricate. So why can’t the same be true of minds or consciousness? Indeed, as Godfrey-Smith reminds us, William James, the great 19th-century philosopher and one of the founders of psychology, argued that we should avoid assuming that human consciousness irrupted, fully formed, into the universe, and should seek simpler precursors. Taking this to its logical conclusion, Godfrey-Smith starts his quest for the origin of minds around the dawn of animal life, when nervous systems were first evolving into being.
Despite their “alien” credentials, octopuses do resemble us in some unexpected ways.
But let’s get back to octopuses. In many ways, they are indeed profoundly alien. The animals are mollusks, and thus more closely related to other mollusks, such as clams and snails, than they are to any mammal. Most famously, they have eight arms, each lined with scores of suckers capable of grasping and tasting. Octopuses lack bones or an external shell (though they have a piece of cartilage that protects the brain). As a result, their bodies are soft, flexible, and stretchy—properties that allow them to vanish through tiny gaps. A small octopus can easily get inside an empty beer bottle. And in some species at least, the animals have an astonishing capacity for camouflage, instantly changing color, texture, and posture so as to blend in with lumps of coral on a reef or the blankness of the sand. This helps them hide from the many animals that fancy having octopus for lunch.
Then there’s the fact that they live in the sea, which means they operate in an entirely different sensory world—gravity doesn’t press, sound travels differently, and as the water gets deeper, the light becomes more and more blue before fading out altogether. This makes them, like many marine animals, hard to study in the wild. Just to find out what octopuses do all day takes tag teams of observers spending hours snorkeling or diving. Only a handful of groups have ever attempted such work. And octopuses have a reputation for being difficult to keep in the laboratory—they are sensitive to water quality, tricky to look after, and well-known escape artists.
Despite their “alien” credentials, however, octopuses do resemble us in some unexpected ways. Their eyes are remarkably like human eyes, an example of evolution converging on roughly the same solution from two wildly different starting points. (Octopuses don’t see in color, but because of the way their eyes are wired, they also don’t have a blind spot.) Like us, octopuses are dexterous, and can reach out and manipulate objects in the world. They display all those inquisitive, friendly behaviors reminiscent of dolphins and dogs.
Most telling of all, octopuses, along with cuttlefish and squid, have far larger, more complex nervous systems than any of their molluscan relations—or indeed, than any other invertebrates—do. The California sea slug (also a mollusk) has about 18,000 neurons, and honeybees, the invertebrate runners-up for neuron count, have roughly 1 million. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about 500 million neurons. This is more than five times the number in a hamster, and approaches the number in the common marmoset, a kind of monkey. (Humans have about 86 billion.) Going just on the basis of neuron count, you might think octopuses were a kind of mammal. But whereas mammals keep most of their neurons in their heads, an octopus’s nervous system is distributed throughout its body: About two-thirds of its neurons are not in its head, but in its arms.
Which raises several questions. What forces led octopuses to evolve such large nervous systems? Does having a large nervous system necessarily mean octopuses are intelligent, even conscious? And if they are, is their experience of consciousness something akin to our own, or is it—reflecting, perhaps, their distributed nervous system—entirely different?
Drawing on the work of other researchers, from primatologists to fellow octopologists and philosophers, Godfrey-Smith suggests two reasons for the large nervous system of the octopus. One has to do with its body. For an animal like a cat or a human, details of the skeleton dictate many of the motions the animal can make. You can’t roll your arm into a neat spiral from wrist to shoulder— your bones and joints get in the way. An octopus, having no skeleton, has no such constraint. It can, and frequently does, roll up some of its arms; or it can choose to make one (or several) of them stiff, creating an elbow. Surely the animal needs a huge number of neurons merely to be well coordinated when roaming about the reef.
At the same time, octopuses are versatile predators, eating a wide variety of food, from lobsters and shrimps to clams and fish. Octopuses that live in tide pools will occasionally leap out of the water to catch passing crabs; some even prey on incautious birds, grabbing them by the legs, pulling them underwater, and drowning them. Animals that evolve to tackle diverse kinds of food may tend to evolve larger brains than animals that always handle food in the same way (think of a frog catching insects).
But are they clever? Measuring intelligence in other animals is a challenge even when they’re not as remote from us as the octopus. And for octopuses, Godfrey-Smith observes, there is “a mismatch between the results of laboratory experiments on learning and intelligence, on one side, and a range of anecdotes and one-off reports on the other.” Yet as he points out, the very wealth of anecdotes is important information, showing as it does the flexible, unpredictable ways in which different individuals behave. While pigeons will spend hours pecking keys to get food rewards, octopuses are notoriously feisty. Charles is by no means alone in electing to squirt the experimenter instead of following the protocol.
As for assessing animal consciousness, that at first seems impossible. But one angle of attack is to work from the situation in humans. Over the past 30 years, a growing body of results has shown that conscious awareness represents just a fraction of what the human brain is registering. At the same time, scientists are identifying the type of tasks that do require consciousness. In particular: Consciousness seems essential for learning new skills—such as finding an alternative way home or opening a coconut. Taking up the work of the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, Godfrey-Smith suggests that “there’s a particular style of processing—one that we use to deal especially with time, sequences, and novelty—that brings with it conscious awareness, while a lot of other quite complex activities do not.”
Like humans, octopuses learn new skills. In some species, individuals inhabit a den for only a week or so before moving on, so they are constantly learning routes through new environments. Similarly, the first time an octopus tackles a clam, say, it has to figure out how to open it—can it pull it apart, or would it be more effective to drill a hole? If consciousness is necessary for such tasks, then perhaps the octopus does have an awareness that in some ways resembles our own.
Perhaps, indeed, we should take the “mammalian” behaviors of octopuses at face value. If evolution can produce similar eyes through different routes, why not similar minds? Or perhaps, in wishing to find these animals like ourselves, what we are really revealing is our deep desire not to be alone.
Thinking in the Deep:
Inside the Mind of an
Octopus
By CARL SAFINA DEC. 27, 2016
OTHER MINDS
The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
By Peter GodfreySmith
Illustrated. 255 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
If we met an alien whose intelligence derived through an entirely separate
provenance from ours, would we recognize the sparkle in each other’s eyes? In
“Other Minds,” Peter GodfreySmith hunts the commonalities and origins of
sentience. He is an academic philosopher but also a diver. Watching octopuses
watching him, our author considers minds and meanings.
Octopuses and cuttlefish — cephalopods — make surprisingly good foils here.
Our last common ancestor, 600 million years ago, was a wormlike creature.
Cephalopods are therefore an independent voyage into complexity. “If we can make
contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is . . . because evolution built minds
twice over,” GodfreySmith writes. “This is probably the closest we will come to
meeting an intelligent alien.” When seeking other minds, we find that “the minds of
cephalopods are the most other of all.”
After hundreds of millions of years, we encounter beings familiarly strange, yet
strangely familiar. Bonefree and shapeshifting, octopuses’ “body of pure 8
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possibility” lets them flow through cracks the width of their eyes. Vertebrates share a
particular, inherited nervoussystem architecture. Cephalopods, though — different.
With neuron numbers comparable to those of mammals, octopuses’ brains are
distributed; their arms harbor nearly twice as many neurons as their central brain
(through which, incidentally, their esophagus passes. Not to mention: They have
three hearts). Neural loops may give the arms their own form of memory. Their skin
itself senses light and responds. An octopus is so suffused with its nervous system
that it has no clear brainbody boundary.
Thus most amazing: recognition, their “sense of mutual engagement,” their
disarming friendliness. “You reach forward a hand and stretch out one finger, and
one octopus arm slowly uncoils . . . tasting your finger as it draws it in. . . . Behind
the arm, large round eyes watch.”
GodfreySmith watched his dive partner as “an octopus grabbed his hand and
. . . Matt followed, as if he were being led across the sea floor by a very small eightlegged
child.” Ten minutes later they arrived at the octopus’s den.
Octopuses have personality (cephonality?), some shy, some confident or
“particularly feisty.” Some — not all — play, blowing and batting bottles around.
They recognize human faces; one study confirmed that giant Pacific octopuses could
even distinguish people wearing identical uniforms. Octopuses become fond of
certain people, yet at others they squirt disdainful jets of water. One cuttlefish
squirted all new visitors, but not familiar faces. (Giant cuttlefish look “like an
octopus attached to a hovercraft” and seem “to be every color at once.”) So, like
humans, cephalopods can categorize. Some squirt their lights out at night, shortcircuiting
them. They “have their own ideas.”
The search for intelligent life starts astonishingly far back. Even bacteria sense
and respond to the world, though that’s most likely analogous to motion detectors
rather than anything felt. Still, their complexity is mindblowing. To approach the
nutritious and avoid the noxious, the author says, a bacterial cell “uses time to help it
deal with space. . . . One mechanism registers what conditions are like right now,
and another records how things were a few moments ago. The bacterium will swim
8
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in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it
sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.”
Much later, multicelled gelatinous animals evolved neurons. Nerves underneath
coordinated cells’ “tiny contractions, contortions and twitches” into propulsive
pulsing. Other nerves wired lightsensing organs above to coordinate daynight
rhythms. The motioncontrolling system may have eventually entangled the light
sensors, whence light sensors aided motion guidance. Thus neurons convened into a
“chemoelectrical storm of repurposed signaling” — brains. (Deadly evidence: Box
jellyfish, some of whose two dozen eyes have lenses and retinas like ours, can
navigate by watching landmarks on the shore as they pulse along at three knots.)
Then, a halfbillion years ago, Cambrian animals first watched, seized and fled
other animals. Senses, nervous systems and behaviors escalated an arms race
against the senses and behaviors of others. If a yardlong cockroachlooking appetite
with two graspers on its head is swimming rapidly at you, “it’s a very good thing to
know, somehow, that this is happening, and to take evasive action.” With better
sensory processing and a need for decisions (fight or flee), the Cambrian delivered
Earth’s first information revolution. “From this point on,” GodfreySmith
emphasizes, “the mind evolved in response to other minds.”
Amid explosive evolution, you’d assume that speedy, grasping creatures evolved
often. Surprisingly, of about 34 basic animal body plans (phyla), only arthropods
(insects, crabs), vertebrates and one subgroup among mollusks — cephalopods —
evolved “complex active bodies.” Only vertebrates and cephalopods developed large,
complex nervous systems.
Contrary to some philosophers’ assumptions, consciousness doesn’t just project
out; it is a relationship in traffic with the outer world. Consciousness did not
“suddenly irrupt into the universe fully formed,” GodfreySmith says. “Perception,
action, memory — all those things creep into existence from precursors and partial
cases.” Asking whether bacteria perceive or bees remember “are not questions that
have good yesorno answers.” From minimal to elaborate sensing there’s a
continuum, “and no reason to think in terms of sharp divides.”
8
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How then did feeling begin? Rudimentarily, GodfreySmith asks: “Does damage
feel like anything to a squid?” Does injury feel bad to a lobster or a bee? Well, insects
don’t groom or protect injured parts of their bodies. But injured crabs, shrimp and
octopuses do. Injected with a chemical thought to spark pain, zebra fish prefer water
with a dissolved painkiller; so yes, fish feel pain. GodfreySmith says pain, hunger,
thirst and other “primordial emotions” do not require worldviews. If they are felt,
this by definition is sentience.
If this is philosophy, it works, because GodfreySmith is a rare philosopher who
searches the world for clues. Knowledgeable and curious, he examines, he admires.
His explorations are goodnatured. He is never dogmatic, yet startlingly incisive. His
refreshing guidance invites us, allowing breathing room, to consider, occasionally to
respectfully disagree.
Nervous systems compose “a symphony of tiny cellular fits, mediated by sprays
of chemicals across the gaps where one cell reaches out to another.” Most basically,
brains coordinate muscles into motion. In separate elaborations they process and
integrate sensory inputs and unify worldly orientation, managing biorhythms and
hormones. When surviving requires decision making, brains have developed
awareness. “Sentience,” GodfreySmith writes, “has some point to it.”
Still, we’re left pondering the “why” of awareness. We can register words flashed
so quickly we’re unaware of seeing them. Certain braindamaged people respond to
“visual” stimuli without vision. Painstaking practice facilitates execution of complex
musical passages using unconscious muscle memory. This twilight zone is
fascinating. Future work will probably reveal the neural circuitries involved.
Language isn’t required. As Godfrey Smith notes, “very complex things go on
inside other animals without the aid of speech.” Monkeys, elephants and many
others understand their social world with detailed complexity and nuance beyond
anything they could say about it.
Octopuses have existed over a thousand times longer than humans. The sea is
the original birthplace of the mind. “When you dive into the sea, you are diving into
the origin of us all,” GodfreySmith writes. Ancient. But not timeless. The author has
8dedicated his book to “all those who work to protect the oceans.” That says much. As
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we change the world, let’s bear this in our minds: Other minds are living their own
lives here with us on Earth.
Carl Safina is the author of “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.”
A version of this review appears in print on January 1, 2017, on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Thinking in the Deep.