Greg Priest

Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants Children as young as 18 months can acquire novel words by overhearing third-party interactions. Demonstrating similar learning processes in nonhuman species would indicate that the social-cognitive sk...

New study finds that some dogs are able to learn new words from overhearing conversations not directed at them, with a facility comparable to that of 18-month old human infants.

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“Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations.… The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations … has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' [and] this name may well be given to it.”

🌱🐋 #philsci 🧪🌎🦋🦫

View of Earth as photographed by the Apollo 8 astronauts during their lunar orbit mission. NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Kenneth Boulding—philosopher, #complexity theorist, and mystic—was born OTD in 1910.

“The earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything … and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.”

🌱🐋 #philsky #philsci 🧪🌎 #STS

“Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”

#philsky #booksky

Ernest Shepard, Pen and ink on board, "Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent," original signed artwork from A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. Bonham’s. “Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.” #philsky #booksky

AA Milne was born on this day in 1882.

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.”

🌱🐋🧪#PhilSci #booksky

Photo of Weinberg. Photographer unknown.

OTD 1908 Willhelm Weinberg gave a talk to the Society for the Natural History of the Fatherland in Württemberg giving the population genetics equations GH Hardy would independently publish 5 months later. It was 35 years before his work was recognized in the Anglophone world.

🐋🌱🥢🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Photo of Feyerabend, www.pkfeyerabend.org.

Paul Feyerabend was born OTD in 1924.

Knowledge is not a body of consistent theories converging on truth. It is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible … alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation.”

🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #STS

Mine too. He kind of still is. Dreamy!

1865 photo of James taken on an expedition to the Amazon under Louis Agassiz. MS Am 1092 (1185), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

William James was born OTD in 1842.

As important as “pragmatism” to understanding James is “meliorism,” the idea that improving the world is possible, but not assured. We have to fight for it.

“We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.”

#philsky

An ecologist “lives alone in a world of wounds…. [He] must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

🌱🐋🌎🧪

Photo of Leopold in horseback. The Wilderness Society.

Aldo Leopold was born OTD in 1887.

“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

#HpBio #HistSTM 🌎 #philsci #STS 🧪

Caricature of Wallace, including the words “After you, Mr. Darwin, kind sir.” By David Hughes for the New Yorker.

Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823.

He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.”

🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Wegener's (1915) depiction of the breakup of Pangaea. (a) the Carboniferous, (b) the Eocene, (c) today.

OTD in 1912, Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture propounding the theory that our modern continents were formed by the splitting and drifting apart of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangea.

Due to his failure to offer a plausible mechanism, he was widely ridiculed.

🧠🗃️⚒️ 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Arthur Danto, Spinoza as a Young Man 2011. Woodcut. Credit: Wayne State University Art Collection.

Arthur Danto was born Jan 2, 1924

To call a car “dented” is to implicitly refer to an earlier undented state.

Stories “have a beginning, a middle, and an end. An [historical] explanation then consists in filling in the middle between the temporal end-points of a change.”

🧠🗃️ 🦋🦫 #PhilSsci #PhilSky

Thanks for the feed boost!

Photo of Fred Korematsu, and a copy of FDR’s internment order.

OTD in 1944, in Korematsu v. US, SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of FDR’s order that US citizens of Japanese descent be involuntarily interned.

The decision has come to be seen as one of the lowest moments in the Supreme Court’s history.

Cartoon by Wilkins on our failure to reconcile science and religion.

Maurice Wilkins was born OTD in 1916. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the structure of DNA using X-ray crystallography.

He did not start out in biochemistry. He changed fields after being disillusioned by his work on the Manhattan Project.

🐋🌱 #HistSTM #STS 🧪 🐡

I might do. Darwin‘s demon was actually fascinating. He started out as sort of an amalgam of Laplace‘s demon and Paley‘s God. But by the 1860s and 70s, he had lost both the omniscience of Laplace‘s demon and the omnipotence of Paley‘s God, and replaced them with a being firmly situated in history.

In my dissertation, I compared Darwin’s demon to Laplace’s—favoring D’s. I didn’t discuss Maxwell’s.

Cartoon of the operation of Maxwell’s demon, by User:Htkym, via Wikimedia Commons.

Maxwell's Demon was born OTD in 1867 in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait. M called it only a “finite being.”

Lord Kelvin named it a “demon,” presumably referring to its apparent unearthly power to (locally and temporarily) violate the second law of thermodynamics.

🦫🦋 #HistSTM #philsci 🧪

An article I saw today details a debate (in Heisenberg’s old stomping grounds of Helogland) in which Carlo Rovelli and Chris Fuchs argue about how best to interpret Heisenberg’s intuition.

🦫🦋🧪 #philsci
https://www.science.org/content/article/100-years-quantum-mechanics-redefining-reality-us-center

On this day

Caricature of Didion by Fabio Miraglia for the Brazilian literary journal rascunho.

Joan Didion was born OTD in 1934.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

#BookSky #Lit 🦋🦫 🗃️🧠

Caricature of Heisenberg by David Levine for The New York Review of Books.

Werner Heisenberg was born OTD in 1901.

“What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” We are “asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer … by the means that are at our disposal.”

🦋🦫🧪 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Claude the alligator’s cause of death revealed: ‘There was nothing we could have done’ As Bay Area residents mourned the death of Claude the albino alligator this week, the California Academy of Sciences received the results of a necropsy.

Claude the albino alligator, the unofficial but very real mascot of the California Academy of Sciences, has died at 30, apparently of liver cancer. I’m kind of broken up about it.

In all seriousness, may his memory be a blessing.

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In honor of Tom Stoppard’s life and work, I just reread Arcadia.

Here’s Hannah: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

🦫🦋 #PhilSky #BookSky

Mivart seemed to believe that Darwin‘s theory entailed that if a suite of traits would be advantageous to an organism, they would necessarily evolve. This was a misunderstanding of Darwin‘s ideas. Darwin pointed out that many advantageous traits will never appear in a lineage.

An AI (Perplexity)-generated giraffe/hippopotamus hybrid.

St. George Jackson Mivart, one of Darwin’s fiercest critics, was born OTD in 1827.

If long necks favor giraffes on the African savannah, M asked, where are the *other* long-necked ungulates? Why are there not vast herds of giraffopottamuses sweeping across the veldt?

#QED

🧪 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #EvoBio

#HPBio

Expression was also important in the history of the book, being an early instance of a book that included photographs, notwithstanding publisher John Murray’s worry that including photos would “poke a hole in the profits.”

🧪🌱🐋 #HistSTM #Evobio #Psychsky