Suppressed records of “depraved sex acts” by penguins finally released after a century

June 12, 2012 • 8:55 am

O tempora! O mores! As the BBC reports, a publication about the behavior of Adélie penguins, written by George Murray Levick after joining the 1910 Antarctic expedition of Captain Scott, has just come to light after more than a century.  Apparently Levick was so scandalized by the depraved and salacious behavior of the penguins that he recorded that behavior in Greek in his notebooks (see below).  The BBC reports:

Mr Levick, an avid biologist, was the medical officer on Captain Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910. He was a pioneer in the study of penguins and was the first person to stay for an entire breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare.

He recorded many details of the lives of adelie penguins, but some of their activities were just too much for the Edwardian sensibilities of the good doctor.

He was shocked by what he described as the “depraved” sexual acts of “hooligan” males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the “perverted” activities in Greek in his notebook.

On his return to Britain, Mr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled “the natural history of the adelie penguin”, but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times.

“He submitted this extraordinary and graphic account of sexual behaviour of the adelie penguins, which the academic world of the post-Edwardian era found a little too difficult to publish,” Mr Russell said.

The sexual behaviour section was not included in the official paper, but the then keeper of zoology at the museum, Sidney Harmer, decided that 100 copies of the graphic account should be circulated to a select group of scientists.

Mr Russell said they simply did not have the scientific knowledge at that time to explain Mr Levick’s accounts of what he termed necrophilia.

Here’s some of that Greek:

Fig. 1. Detail of entry from Vol. I of G.M. Levick’s ‘Zoological notes from Cape Adare’ on 10 November 1911 showing
coded reference in the Greek alphabet.

Levick’s unpublished notes on depraved penguins have just become widely available in a paper in Polar Biology, which is probably behind a paywall. The reference is below, and I’ll reproduce the abstract:

A previously unpublished four-page pamphlet by Dr. George Murray Levick R.N. (1876–1956) on the ‘Sexual habits of the Adélie penguin’ was recently rediscovered at the Natural History Museum (NHM) at Tring. It was printed in 1915 but declined for publication with the official expedition reports. The account, based upon Levick’s detailed field observations at Cape Adare (71°18′S, 170°09′E) during the course of the British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition 1910, commented on frequency of sexual activity, autoerotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex and homosexual behaviour. His observations were however accurate, valid and, with the benefit of hindsight, deserving of publication. Here we publish the pamphlet in its entirety, reinterpret selected observations and comment on its significance as a forgotten work by the pioneer of research on Adélie penguin Pygoscelis adeliae (Hombron and Jacquinot 1841) biology.

What did Levick see that so offended his senses?  Here are three observations that I’ve reproduced from the Polar Record paper:

Many of the colonies, especially those nearer the water, are plagued by little knots of ‘hooligans’ who hang about their outskirts, and should a chick go astray it stands a good chance of losing its life at their hands. The crimes which they commit are such as to find no place in this book, but it is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.

This afternoon I saw a most extraordinary site [sic]. A Penguin was actually engaged in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its own species. The act occurred a full minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no respect from that of ordinary copulation, and the whole act was gone through down to the final depression of the cloaca]

I saw another act of astonishing depravity today. A hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hindquarters was crawling painfully along on her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, when a cock noticed her in passing, and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately raped her, she being quite unable to resist him.

It’s striking that things which zoologists now take for granted as biological adaptations, or byproducts of adaptations, were considered so offensive that they had to be described in Greek, and couldn’t be circulated to the wider scientific community!  Such were Victorian times. I’m told that some Victorians even put “pants” around table legs since the sight of such a naked leg was considered offensive.

The suppression of Levick’s data says a lot about the relationship among animals, humans, and morality, but I’ll leave that to the historians of science. It also shows that biologists at the time were far more educated in classics than their modern counterparts!

Scandalous! Adelie penguins mating, image courtesy of mbsbird at http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mgsbird/3821414790/

h/t: Aidan Karley and many others after him

_____________________

Russell, D. G. D, W. J. L. Sladen, and D. G. Ainley.  2012.  Dr. George Murray Levick (1876-1956): unpublished notes on the sexual habits of the Adélie penguin. Polar Record, FirstView Article : pp 1-7

Polkie and Beale show that math proves Jebus (and a disquisition on modern natural theology)

June 12, 2012 • 5:00 am

I have gradually been compiling a list of modern “natural theology,” that is, those aspects of nature that theologians and religious people see as giving evidence for God.  Until 1859, the list’s top item was organismal “design”, but of course Darwin dispelled that.  But natural theology—the explication of nature as God’s handiwork—is alive and well, as John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale argue in the book I’ve highlighted all week, Questions of Truth:

While science is competent to answer its own questions, questions arise from our experience of doing science whose answering takes us beyond its narrow confines.(p. 12)

Over the past months I’ve made a list of where theologians see evidence for God in nature (not all of these are discussed in P&B):

  1. The Big Bang: what got it started in the first place? After all a quantum vacuum isn’t nothing.
  2. Why is science possible at all?  The human ability to apprehend truth must be a gift from God, since it couldn’t have evolved (see Plantinga)
  3. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” proves that God designed the universe
  4. Ditto for the existence of physical “laws”
  5. Only God could have give us the “innate” human sense or morality (see Francis Collins)
  6. The “fine-tuning” of the universe (that is, the values of physical constants) is evidence for God
  7. The appearance of humanoid creatures on the planet—creatures capable of apprehending and worshiping a God—is evidence of His handiwork.

Now there are rebuttals of all of these arguments, and I’ve discussed most of them over the past few years.  I just wanted to highlight one version of #2, as adumbrated by Polkie and Beale (pp. 81-82 of their book):

Consider human mathematical abilities. For survival, we need not much more than counting and a little elementary geometry. Whence then has come the human ability to study noncommutative algebras and to prove Fermat’s last theorem? I think conventional Darwinian theory is unable to explain this capacity, which requires for its understanding the belief that our environment is not limited to the physical and biological but must also include contact with a noetic realm of mathematical ideas, into which our ancestors were increasingly drawn.

For those who know about the history of evolutionary biology, this argument is remarkably similar to that of Alfred Russel Wallace, who of course proposed the idea of evolution by natural selection in 1858. But, unlike his rival Darwin, Wallace thought that one aspect of biology was inexplicable by natural selection: the human brain.  As the quote below shows, Wallace saw the brain as conferring abilities far beyond those needed to survive in our ancestral environments: we can design airplanes, play chess, write music, and fly to the moon (not, of course, in Wallace’s time!).  Since natural selection has no foresight, and cannot adapt organisms to their future environments, Wallace saw our large brain as evidence for God, or at least an intelligence in the universe.  This quote, reminiscent of Polkie and Beale, comes from Wallace’s “The limits of natural selection as applied to man” (1870).

We see, then, that whether we compare the savage with the higher developments of man, or with the brutes around him, we are alike driven to the conclusion that in his large and well-developed brain he possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements — an organ that seems prepared in advance, only to be fully utilized as he progresses in civilization.  A brain slightly larger than that of the gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore admit, that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution, whose essence is, that they lead to a degree of organization exactly proportionate to the wants of each species, never beyond those wants — that no preparation can be made for the future development of the race — that one part of the body can never increase in size or complexity, except in strict co-ordination to the pressing wants of the whole.

Wallace’s mistake, which should be obvious, is that we have no assurance that the human brain really is larger than it needs to be, even in the so-called “savages” whom Wallace encountered on his travels. Humans aren’t just gorillas: we can speak, learn, and have sophisticated mental programs for sussing out the thoughts of others and figuring out how to relate to others in small groups.  We’ve mastered fire, which according to Richard Wrangham freed up our brain to become more complex under real selection pressures.

And once we have a complex brain, capable of learning, speaking, and working out strategies to hunt and to live in small social groups, it becomes capable of doing things beyond what it evolved for. In other words, chess, math, and building spacecraft are what Steve Gould called exaptations: those features that can be used in a beneficial way but evolved for other reasons. Once the brain crossed a certain threshold of complexity, these things became possible, but those abilities are epiphenomena.

With Wallace, Polkie and Beale see the brain’s ability to do math as something inexplicable by natural selection. Ergo Jebus.  But lots of animals have abilities that are similar exaptations.  We can train parrots and mynah birds to talk. Is their talking evidence for God? In England, blue tits learned to open milk bottles and drink the milk.  They didn’t evolve to do that!  Their ability to scan the environment for possible food items, and their possession of a nice bill and ability to wield it dextrously, was an exaptation for drinking milk.  So it is with tool-using in animals, from chimpanzees to crows to the cactus finches of the Galapagos: animals can put their already-evolved equipment to new uses.  And so it is with the human brain.  It hasn’t changed much in the last couple million years, but oh what we have done with it!

Sadly, one of the things we’ve done with it is invent the idea of God, and then, in a curious and invidious recursion, use our ability to conceive of God—and mathematics—as evidence for God himself.

h/t: Andrew Berry for the Wallace quote. I highly recommend his book on Wallace, Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Collection. It puts together snippets of Wallace’s writings along with commentary by Berry himself.  It’s a must-read for evolution aficionados.

The NYRB reviews E. O. Wilson’s latest

June 11, 2012 • 10:52 am

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books contains an appraisal of Ed Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, by Steven Mithen, a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading.  Mithen seems a strange choice given that he’s not an evolutionary biologist, but it turns out that his expertise enabled him to catch some errors that might elude most biologists. His review, “How fit is E. O. Wilson’s evolution?“, is behind a paywall, but sufficiently industrious readers can get a copy from me.

Mithen begins by touting the importance of Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, as a landmark in how we think about the evolution of behavior.  He’s right.  But after extolling the book, he gives a taste of what is to come:

. . . how marvelous it felt a few months ago to have received an email from the man himself asking if he could reproduce a diagram relating to human evolution from one of my own publications in his forthcoming book, The Social Conquest of Earth. What an honor to then be invited to review the book for The New York Review. And how awfully disappointed I have been.

Wilson’s book, of course, is about the two pinnacles of social evolution—humans and “eusocial” insects (those species, like honeybees, that have a division of labor, castes, and sterile workers)—and how those groups became so successful.  One of the vehicles for that success, in Wilson’s view, was group selection, the differential reproduction of groups of individuals having different traits. (In this case, traits like altruism in humans or sterility in insects.) This puts him, at least in the insect case, at odds with the vast majority of other evolutionists, who see selection among groups as an ineffective way of evolving anything, and see no evidence that it has occurred in nature.  Rather, selection based on relatedness—kin selection—seems more plausible. I’ve written about this at length, and won’t reproduce my critique here. I’ll just remind you that when Wilson (along with Nowak and Tarnita) published their “group-selection” theory for the origin of eusociality in Nature in 2010, about 150 biologists, including nearly all the luminaries in the field of social evolution—wrote letters to the journal criticizing Nowak et al.’s assertion of the primacy of group selection over kin selection.

According to Mithen, Wilson’s group-selection arguments are also the centerpiece of his book (I haven’t yet read it).  Although he doesn’t pronounce on who gets the upper hand in the kin selection/group selection dispute (kin selection wins, by the way), he finds Wilson culpable for not even mentioning the extensive criticism, which apparently could have been included in the book:

Now, it is not the purpose of this review to pronounce upon the validity or otherwise of inclusive fitness theory and Wilson’s alternative theory of multilevel selection. Indeed, I would not presume to have the expertise to do so. Wilson develops his case by referring to scientific matters on which only experts can make judgment, such as the demise of the “haplodiploid hypothesis” and new mathematical work allegedly exploring inherent weaknesses in “Hamilton inequality.” I have, however, remained unimpressed by multilevel selective theory and persuaded by the weight of academic opinion in favor of inclusive fitness, dogma or otherwise.

My greater concern is about the responsibility of the scientist writing for the general reader, especially a scientist of Wilson’s academic reputation. Such readers, the type targeted by Wilson and his publisher, may never have heard of Nature and would be unlikely to consult endnotes. Such readers, owing to his failure to acknowledge the extent of opposition to his views, would be entirely misled into thinking that Wilson had indeed “demonstrated that inclusive fitness theory, often called kin selection theory, is both mathematically and biologically incorrect.”

I recognize that there might be an issue of timing: The Social Conquest of Earth may have been so far into production by the time that the 2011 issue of Nature was published that citation was impossible. I suspect not: it was a March issue and Wilson’s book cites several 2011 publications. Even if this was the case, Wilson would have been quite aware of the vast weight of academic opposition to his views, since he has been promoting them since 2005 at least. I cannot avoid the impression that the manner in which Wilson presents his views verges toward polemic rather than providing a responsible work of popular science.

Mithen’s expertise enabled him to spot some embarrassing factual errors in the treatment of human evolution (I can’t judge these issues):

I am tempted to think the same [i.e., the trend toward polemic] about Wilson’s characterization of the archaeological record for human evolution. While he correctly identifies the key themes of human evolution—big brains, bipedalism, control of fire, shift to a meatbased diet, adaptive flexibility—his account is marred by a succession of factual errors. “Spear points and arrowheads are among the earliest artifacts found in archaeological sites.” No, the earliest artifacts are from around 2.5 million years ago, but spear points are not made until a mere 250,000 years ago and arrowheads might have first been manufactured no longer ago than 20,000 years. “Archaeologists have found burials of massacred people to be a commonplace,” while “archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflict.” No, both are quite rare, especially in prestate societies, and those that are known are difficult to interpret. “Homo erectus…was able to shape crude stone tools.” No, many of the hand axes made by Homo erectus are quite exquisite. “Axes and adzes [were] invented in the Neolithic” and “Neolithic toolmakers invented the concept of a hollow structure, with an outer and an inner surface.” No and no. These are elementary errors that could have been avoided by consulting any undergraduate textbook.

Elsewhere, the language Wilson employs provides a completely erroneous impression of the past. He remains wedded to antiquated phrases from a time when cultural evolution was envisaged as an inevitable progress toward Victorian values, as in the “dawn” of the Neolithic and the “ascent to civilization.” Wilson writes how Homo sapiens “slogged cautiously on foot” when dispersing from Africa; while this may have often been literally correct, the archaeological evidence—that Wilson goes on to accurately summarize—reflects an astonishingly rapid global dispersal with that of Australia at least involving the use of boats. On the next page, Homo sapiens have quickened their pace to become “skilled warriors” who outcompeted the Neanderthals. That phrase implies warfare and a distinct class of person within a tribalbased society specializing in combat: neither of these can find any supporting evidence in the Palaeolithic archaeological record.

Wilson’s factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the past are especially infuriating because in his own specialist field of insect evolution he meticulously attends to the data. . .

Finally, Mithen argues that Wilson’s treatment of human social evolution is superficial:

But what of human eusociality? While Wilson argues that the first three of his stages may be applicable to human evolution, he recognizes that the final two stages could have only happened in insects and other invertebrates. So the final section of his book returns to humans with a few short chapters that attempt, no less, to explain “What Is Human Nature?,” “How Culture Evolved,” “The Origins of Language,” “The Origins of Morality and Honor,” “The Origins of Religion,” and “The Origins of the Creative Arts,” before ending with “A New Enlightenment.”
Even for a double Pulitzer and Crafoord Prize winner such as Wilson this is too much to take on, especially as there have been several complete books published on each of these topics in recent years. There has been a great deal of work on these issues from an explicitly evolutionary perspective, some of which Wilson appears to be unaware of—such as that about the evolution of music and its relation to language. Hence one gets a taste of the issues involved but without much satisfaction, always sensing that one is engulfed by the enormity of the issues—perhaps rather like E.O. Wilson sampling the aphid excrement below the canopy of a rainforest.

Mithen concludes, as do I, that no matter how bad the book is, Wilson’s place in the pantheon of great biologists is secure.

It is often said that you are only as good as your last book. That too is now falsified: E.O. Wilson is far better than The Social Conquest of Earth. For me, he remains an intellectual hero.

Wilson is an engaging and admirable man who has done great work in conservation, in ant biology and systematics, and in synthesizing behavior and evolution. Pity that at the tail end of his career he’s engaged in such a debacle.

Another review of Wilson’s book, by James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California at San Diego, has just appeared in Nature. It’s more positive, but really is just a recounting of what’s in the book, though he does take Wilson to task for giving short shrift to inclusive fitness theory:

Many of Wilson’s ideas in this book will stand the test of time. However, he is perhaps a bit too assertive in the way he frames his theory. He is excessively critical of inclusive fitness theory, repeatedly claiming that it is “incorrect”, and saying that the literature on it has produced “meager” results. Yet inclusive fitness theory has prompted much empirical and theoretical investigation, with more than 1,000 articles published in the past 40 years. Albert Einstein, after all, didn’t disparage the numerous physics experiments showing that Isaac Newton’s simple formulae work remarkably well under specific conditions.

Wilson would, I am sure, object to this characterization on the grounds that inclusive fitness theory accounts for a much smaller subset of his own theory than Newton’s work does for Einstein’s. In fact, Wilson continually claims that inclusive fitness theory works only “under stringently narrow conditions”. But there is no empirical evidence for this.

Still more sophisticated theological gibberish from Polkinghorne and Beale

June 11, 2012 • 7:57 am

Another quote from the Polkie and Nickie show, i.e., from their joint book, Questions of Truth (J. Polkinghorne and N. Beale, 2009, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky). This bit of Sophisticated Theology® is from page 88. Once again they try to put the lucubrations of ancient and illiterate goatherds on par with modern science.  Here the duo ponder exactly why the crucifixion of Jesus should be the route to our union with God and personal salvation.  There’s no obvious reason, of course, and Polkie and Nickie realize this.  But they try to explain it away by making an analogy with physics!:

He [Jesus Christ] is therefore the unique link between human life and divine life, the living means by which our relationship with God can be restored. It has been the witness of the church through the centuries that Christ’s solidarity with us, even to the point of his painful and shameful death on the cross, is central to this process of restoration (atonement). Nevertheless, there has not been one single and universally accepted theory of exactly how this works.  In science, we are familiar with the fact that there can be phenomena that cannot be denied but that are not wholly understood theoretically—quantum physics is a good example.

My response to this is similar to that I made to Beale’s last plaint (in a comment he made on an earlier post): how do you know that Jesus’s resurrection and our acceptance of him as savior is the means to our salvation and to a one-ness with God?  How do you know that you’re right and that the Jews, Muslim, and Hindus are wrong?

If you read the book (and I pray that you won’t have to), you’ll see that he doesn’t even proffer good evidence for God’s existence, so the whole question above becomes irrelevant.  In contrast, we can observe quantum phenomena.

A defense of philosophy against the attacks of physicists

June 11, 2012 • 4:31 am

In Sunday’s New York Times there was an op-ed  by author Jim Holt called “Physicists, stop the churlishness.”  It’s a defense of philosophy against its denigration by physicists, of course inspired by Lawrence Krauss’s ill-advised rant against philosophy in The Atlantic (see below) and a negative review of Krauss’s latest book by physicist/philosopher David Albert. (Holt’s own book on the origin of the universe comes out next month.)

Here’s the part of Krauss’s interview that started the fracas, which has now spread to various academic quarters of the internet.

Krauss: . . . Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it’s fairly technical. And so it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.

Holt is hurt:

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science.

And he has two plaints about those mean physicists:

1.  Philosophy helps physicists think about their discipline.  

Physicists say they do not need any help from philosophers. But sometimes physicists are, whether they realize it or not, actually engaging in philosophy themselves. And some of them do it quite well. Mr. Weinberg, for instance, has written brilliantly on the limits of scientific explanation — which is, after all, a philosophical issue. It is also an issue about which contemporary philosophers have interesting things to say.

I’m not sure exactly what Holt means here, for many of us who talk about science and how it works do so without much formal knowledge of the philosophy of science.  Is a doctor who talks about how medicine works, or about treatment plans, also engaging in philosophy? Perhaps, if you construe “philosophy” broadly enough to include talking about how one does science, or how one should interpret the bizarre observations of quantum mechanics. But this kind of thinking can be done without invoking (or even knowing) any formal philosophy of science. As Russell Blackford has pointed out several times, in some ways philosophy is coterminus with physics; indeed with all of science. That’s because when a scientist thinks about how she does the next experiment, or what she needs to find out something, philosophers construe that as “philosophy.”  As Richard Feynman said in “The meaning of it all”:

There are a number of special techniques associated with the game of making observations, and much of what is called the philosophy of science is concerned with a discussion of these techniques.

I’m not dismissing all of philosophy of science: as I’ve mentioned before, philosopher like Dan Dennett (on evolution and consciousness) and Phil Kitcher (on sociobiology and evolution) have made me think more deeply about my own work.  The formidable logical skills of trained philosophers can sharpen our wits and arguments.  But I haven’t gained much from vaunted philosophers like Feyerabend, Lakatos, Popper, or Kuhn, except for the notion that a theory can explain everything explains nothing. (Yes, I know some readers will disagree about even that pronouncement.)

2. Philosophy is essential in helping physicists push their field forward.  (Note that the header of the NYT piece is: “What physics learns from philosophy.”) Holt argues;

Today the world of physics is in many ways conceptually unsettled. Will physicists ever find an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes sense? Is “quantum entanglement” logically consistent with special relativity? Is string theory empirically meaningful? How are time and entropy related? Can the constants of physics be explained by appeal to an unobservable “multiverse”? Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.

I’m not aware of the “sophisticated and illuminating work” that is produced by philosophers who aren’t also physicists, but I’m willing to hear about it. Still, I’m a lot more dubious about this claim than I am about #1.  Certainly although I’ve benefited immensely from reading the philosophy of science, I can’t think of a single instance where it’s influenced the science I actually do.

However, a recent piece on Edge (well worth reading) by Carlo Rovelli, a well-known Italian physicist who works on quantum gravity, also claims that philosophy is essential for the progress of physics:

This may take me to another point, which is should a scientist think about philosophy, or not? It’s sort of the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude very naïve for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back. Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy. Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and have a head full of philosophy. Galileo would never have done what he had done without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher, and started by discussing this with Descartes, and had strong philosophical ideas.

But even Maxwell, Boltzmann, I mean, all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical mind. He says in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading of him that allows him to construct this fantastically new physical theory, scientific theory, which is quantum mechanics. . .

When you want to apply thes[e] ideas, when you do atomic physics, you need less conceptual thinking. But now we are back to the basics, in a sense. When we do quantum gravity it’s not just application. I think that the scientists who say I don’t care about philosophy, it’s not true they don’t care about philosophy, because they have a philosophy. They are using a philosophy of science. They are applying a methodology. They have a head full of ideas about what is the philosophy they’re using; just they’re not aware of them, and they take them for granted, as if this was obvious and clear.

Holt echoes this view:

Today the world of physics is in many ways conceptually unsettled. Will physicists ever find an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes sense? Is “quantum entanglement” logically consistent with special relativity? Is string theory empirically meaningful? How are time and entropy related? Can the constants of physics be explained by appeal to an unobservable “multiverse”? Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.

Here Rovelli includes both conceptual thinking and application of a methodology under the rubric of “philosophy.”  Well, that wasn’t my definition, but since “philosophy” is an ill-defined concept, by all means let him call it what he wants.  Yes, many scientists engage in conceptual thinking (that’s how the notion of inclusive fitness—indeed, of evolution itself—was born in evolutionary biology) and they also “apply a methodology.” But to claim that that is truly philosophy smacks a bit of turf defense.  What I wonder, in the end, is whether progress in physics would have been retarded had there not been a formal field of the philosophy of science.  I’m open to arguments either way, but for now I’m unaware of any advances in physics that wouldn’t exist in the absence of the philosophy of science as a discipline.

There is much else that is good in the Rovelli article, particularly his emphasis on science as a way of knowing rather than as the accumulation of a body of facts (although this may seem a semantic question, I think the method should be emphasized when teaching), and of the importance of doubt in science as opposed to its function in religion. I’ll have more to say about those issues in another post.