[lit-ideas] Re: Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2011 09:28:02 -0700

I'm not understanding the "it is not vacuous."   We could better say that
this is the case today, but it wasn't always so.  There was a time . . . 

". . . researchers believe that key versions of immune system genes in
modern humans appear to have been passed down by archaic relatives,
including Neanderthals, after all. . ."

". . . DNA inherited from Neanderthals and newly discovered hominids dubbed
the Denisovans has contributed to key types of immune genes still present
among populations in Europe, Asia and Oceania. And scientists speculate that
these gene variants must have been highly beneficial to modern humans,
helping them thrive as they migrated throughout the world. . . "[from
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-neanderthal-immune-genes-20110826
,0,377237.story ]"

In another article,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/26/MN971KQCVQ.DTL
we read, 

"A fast-growing population of modern humans eventually drove the
Neanderthals to extinction 30,000 years ago, but the benefits of those early
dalliances between the two groups live on.

"The Neanderthals, it seems, passed on to humans many of the genes that now
mark our greatly improved immune systems, according to an international team
of researchers led by a Stanford group."

The most telling bit of information insofar as this discussion is concerned
comes from
http://www.dailytech.com/Neanderthal+Genome+Complete+Provides+Evidence+of+Ev
olution+Interbreeding/article18326.htm : "Researchers found that sequenced
human genomes from one San from southern Africa, one Yoruba from West
Africa, one Papua New Guinean, one Han Chinese and one French person shared
1 to 4 percent common genomic material with Neanderthals, the result of
these people's ancient ancestors interbreeding with the close relative.  The
genes appear to offer no benefit and be randomly placed.  Additionally the
transfer appears one way, from Neanderthals to humans."

Note the last sentence.  Thus, the mother raised her half-Neanderthal child
in a human environment.   It grows and has some advantage over its 100%
human kin and passes on the Neanderthal benefits.  But what happened to the
Neanderthal father?  Did he stay in the human tribe with his human wife or
did he merely rape her and return to his Neanderthal tribe?  I am inclined
to think the latter even though the articles written by the scientific
journalists call it "romance."  But if so, why wasn't the transfer two way?

In any case, there was a time when a human mother had a child that was
half-human and half-Neanderthal, thus falsifying, at least for a time,
"HUMANS HAVE HUMAN OFFSPRING AND ONLY SO."

Lawrence

 

 

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Adriano Palma
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2011 7:44 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Necessity is not an established fact, but an
interpretation
Importance: High

 


note simple cases of necessity

 

 

1. people (as in humans, homo sapiens etc.) are born of people (vastly non
refuted conjecture, to keep a popperian view of the matter)

hence

(2) stronger conjecture [it involves all sorts of observable, and some
observed and some not and some never to be observed, events

HUMANS HAVE HUMAN OFFSPRING AND ONLY SO

then [the conclusion[

it is a necessity given "humanity" (the property of being human) that humans
have human offspring

 

 

notice that it is not vacuous since (Darwin docet) there appears to be )or
have been) cases of people with non human parents (Mrs. Lucy of africa..)

 

 

>>> Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> 8/27/2011 4:31 PM >>>

--- On Sat, 27/8/11, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Leaving aside "Geary should think", which might lead us back on the road to
whether it follows that he "..should think or subscribe to JLS' webcoven of
Griceans"; and leaving aside what Nietzsche had in mind; and a few other
things..

Cannot "necessity" be both a fact [e.g. it is the case that there is a
universal law such that "All Xs are Ys"] and also an interpretation [i.e. we
interpret, or theorise, the correlation between X and Y as one of
'necessity', as opposed to contingency]. If neither excludes the other, then
the fact 'necessity' can be regarded as an interpretative device does not
exclude it being also regarded as a fact, and indeed being a fact. When we
ask whether interpreting a relation in terms of 'necessity' is correct, we
are asking whether it is true that such a relation holds, and if it is true
it holds then it is a fact that there is such a relation.

This leaves open in what way is 'necessity' "established". Taking the
"necessity" in a 'universal law' or, better perhaps, 'universal
generalisation' ['UG']:- such a UG as "All swans are white" cannot be
established by induction though it may, conjecturally and non-inductively,
be falsified by a counter-example such as a black swan. But even if we had
empirical omniscience, so that we could survey the whole universe and
observe that the only colour swans came in was white, this would not be
enough to establish "necessity" in the sense of law: it would not show that
a non-white swan was not a physical possibility. So there is a further sense
in which "necessity" cannot be "established": to assert "necessity" as a
relation between phenomena is to assert something beyond a universal but
contingent link between phenomena - yet what we observe, even if it were the
whole universe, is consistent with any UG that holds being only contingently
true.

Thus Popper rightly claims that the whether there exists even one natural
law, or natural "necessity", is a metaphysical question. It cannot be
"established" empirically. All that can be "established" empirically, and
then only conjecturally and non-inductively, is the non-existence of a
claimed 'natural law' by adducing a falsifying counter-example.

Can we establish the existence of natural laws by metaphysical argument? Not
conclusively, but the balance of the argument favours it as Popper sees
things. In any case, the search for UGs would be fruitful even if their
truth were contingent, for it would still be universal. And so the absence
of a clear metaphysical proof of the existence of any natural laws (which is
not a disproof of their existence), does not affect the rationality of
searching for such invariants.

This argument can be reworked even for 'propensities', that is probabilistic
relations between phenomena that fall short of necessity.

As to whether the search for some kind of "regularity" is itself a
'necessity' of some kind, Popper would affirm for Kantian reasons: without
being oriented to interpret the world as forming patterns we would be lost.
But this does not mean we are lost because our world lacks _complete_
regularity; only that it is necessary that we search for some degree of it
and that there appears [contingent or not] to be some degree of it.

Donal
Your friendly neighbourhood Popperian
Ldn

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