 Here we go, we're going live on it. The Radical, Fundamental Principles of Green Book, National Self-Interest, and International Watch, Fundamental Principles of Green Book. This is the National Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to your one book show on this Thursday, July 13th. Thanks everybody for joining us. I'm excited. We have Jim Lennox here today with us. Jim is a emeritus philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a renowned expert in the history and the philosophy of biology, published extensively both on the philosophy of biology and also on Aristotle, particularly Aristotle's philosophy of biology and an expert also on something that I'm going to ask him some questions about because I find really interesting on Darwin and on evolution, which is fascinating and the relationship between the biology and philosophy, I think is really super interesting. Jim is also an objectivist. He's contributed to scholarly books on Iron Rant's philosophy, including a companion to Iron Rant, concepts in the world and knowledge, and Metaethics Egoism and Virtue, the last two of which he co-authored with the late Ellen Gotthel. So welcome, Jim. Thank you, y'all. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for joining us. So as you all know, you can ask questions. The super chat is available. And let's stick to questions about topics we're talking about. We can broaden it later, but feel free to ask questions on Aristotle biology, philosophy, and then as we go along, you guys can make this a broader. So Jim, maybe you can start with telling us a little bit about how you discovered Iron Rant and maybe about the impact Iron Rant's had on your thinking. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, well, the impact was immediate. When I was 17 years old, someone I was rooming with at the time, I had graduated from high school. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life other than surf. I was living in Southern California at the time and I love surfing. He seemed to understand something about me because he had read The Fountainhead. He disliked it and he threw it on my bed. He was my roommate and he said, I hated this book, I think you'll like it. And indeed I did, as I said, it had an immediate impact on me and sort of at a very visceral level, the message that I took away from it and from Howard Rourke and the way he was living his life was that I wasn't living my life that way. That I hadn't chosen a purpose for my life. I hadn't taken control of my life. And I sort of started reorienting myself in that direction from that point on. For reasons we can get into if you want they're sort of secondary, but I Canadian and didn't end up in Southern California until I was a teenager. I returned to Canada, started my undergraduate collegiate work at York University, which was a new university in the Toronto area at the time. And I had now been reading more of Iron Rand and I very quickly discovered that there was a guy named John Ridpath in the economics department who was an objectivist and he introduced me to objectivism as a philosophical movement. At that point, I hadn't understood that. I loved the novels, I knew that there was philosophical meaning and thrust to those novels, but that objectivism was this organized philosophical system I hadn't realized. And he put me in touch with other people who were interested in objectivism in Toronto. And eventually, when I decided that philosophy was what I was really interested in intellectually, he introduced me to Alan Godhealth. I had done an honors thesis on Aristotle in the philosophy department at York. And he said, if I would like, he would ask Alan if he would be interested in reading my honors thesis and giving me comments on it. Alan did that. We actually met at John's house to talk about it. And eventually Alan encouraged me to think about doing graduate work in philosophy. I had a super ancient philosophy professor at York who was really a specialist in Aristotle. And that combined with Alan's influence led me to that particular focus in my philosophical work. Both Alan and I, I think this is true of Alan, certainly true of me. My interest in Aristotle was at least in large part due to Ayn Rand's praise of Aristotle and the importance of Aristotle to Western civilization, both for the new intellectual and more specifically her review of John Herman Randall's Aristotle, which I read around that time as well. So what year was this? What year was it that you'd met John and discovered it as a kind of system? Yes, I went back to Toronto in 1967 I probably met John either that year or the following year. And when I was a senior, he actually invited me to be his teaching assistant in his course on the history of Western culture and Western civilization. And so we became pretty close. We had other interesting relationships. He was a competitive swimmer. I had been a competitive swimmer all my life. He had grown up spending a lot of time on the lakes in Northern Ontario. My parents had a cottage in Northern Ontario when I was growing up. So there were a lot of sort of emotional and other athletic relationships that we shared. Did you get a chance to meet Ayn Rand? No, I regret, I actually had a chance. I went to a Ford Hall Forum. Walter Hoobshire and Pat, my now wife, and I went down to a Ford Hall Forum. And I think if I had been a little pushier, I had enough connections with people that knew her that I probably could have. I was too timid to be that pushy at that point. So that was probably my only good shot at meeting her and I blew it, so to speak. So when you started studying Aristotle, or maybe even today, I mean, is your view of Aristotle, is it the same as Ayn's? Is your view now stronger, weaker than the way she presented? Have you really delved into it deeply as a philosopher? What's your estimation now of Aristotle? That's a really good and complicated question, complicated in my own sort of psychopistemology. If you look at the essay that I wrote for the companion to Ayn Rand that Greg and Alan edited on Ayn Rand and her understanding of the history of philosophy and the importance of studying the history of philosophy, there's a point in that essay where I sort of summarize each of the things that she takes to be essentially Aristotelian in For the New Intellectual. And I think she's absolutely right on that. And I don't think I fully recognize that until years after I had recognized the relationship between Aristotelianism and Objectivism, the place where, so I think what really struck me in her review of the John Herman Randall book was her reference to his metaphysics, his philosophy as biocentric, that life was at the very center of both his metaphysics, his ethics, even his epistemology. And that led me, also led Alan Godhelf, of course, to really focus on Aristotle's biology to see whether you could gain insight into his metaphysics and his ethics by looking at the way in which he approached living things, the way in which he approached the study of living things. And so I think fundamentally she was dead on about Aristotle. The one place where I think in his practice so if you study the way in which he does science, the way he does scientific inquiry, he's closer to her epistemology than you would ever imagine from looking at his theoretical epistemological works like the analytics, we can delve into that a little bit. That the kind of the scholastics and the way he was interpreted later on was inconsistent with his actual practice. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think to some extent, you have to realize that the scholastics, though even Thomas Aquinas, but less Thomas Aquinas than a lot of the others had a very heavy influence from Neoplatonism. And they tended to read Aristotle even when they were very appreciative of Aristotelianism, they tended to read him as a kind of modified blatantist. And I think that's much less true of Thomas Aquinas, probably because of the influence of Thomas's teacher, Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great, as he sometimes called, who really understood Aristotle's biology and did this huge work called on animals that was based on Aristotle's biological works. And I think he had a major influence on Aquinas and made Aquinas sort of more, read Aristotle more as an inductivist than a blatantist, if you like. So can you give us, this is hard, I assume, but kind of a summary of Aristotle's biology, what did you write about biology? What was his approach to the field? What makes it interesting? Right, yeah. Yeah, that's not too hard. So the major works are the Historia Animalium, which is, I think the longest of all of Aristotle's works, the largest of all of Aristotle's works. And it's kind of the work that takes everything that Aristotle knew about animals, organizes it, formulates as many broad generalizations as he thinks he can inductively be sure about on the basis of all of the information he's gathered. And then there's a work I translated and did a commentary on for Oxford University Press on the parts of animals, which is broadly speaking, it's what we would today call comparative anatomy, something like that or functional anatomy. It talks about the organic systems that make up different kinds of animals and what those various organ systems are for and how they're related to one another. And a work called On the Generation of Animals, which is about biological development. And this is really sophisticated stuff. There isn't anything the equivalent of these works until the 17th century. And what you find in the 17th century that as a development is actually based on Aristotle's work, it's William Harvey, who was the person who discovered the circulation of the blood and so on. He was an Aristotelian. He went to Padua, which was the hotbed of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, studied medicine there. His teacher told him, you have to study Aristotle's biological works. That's what's going to tell you the right way to go about doing biology and medicine. So those are the major works. There are a number of minor works as well. But what he did was he organized all of this information around what he called four fundamental differences that you find in the animal kingdom. So animals differ with respect to the parts they have, he said. They differ with respect to the fundamental activities that they perform in living. They differ with respect to character traits and they differ with respect to their ways of life. And so the Historia Animalium is organized around those four basic categories. So there are four books that go through his primary groups are what we would call mammals, live-bearing four-legged creatures. What we would call reptiles and amphibians, four-legged egg-laying creatures, birds and what am I leaving out? These are the blood, what he called the blooded animals, are vertebrates and fish. And then he had what he called bloodless animals are invertebrates and basically they're organized very much the way ours are. So there were the mollusks, the cephalopods, the crustaceans, the insects. And I'll tell you, if you look at a work in the 18th century, say by Cuvier or somebody like that, you'll find that the way living things are organized is fundamentally Aristotle had already discovered that way of organizing living things. I mean, it's unbelievable. He died when he was in his early 60s. And he also invented deductive logic basically. I mean, it's just ethics, politics, economics. And the amazing thing about that is that that is science. It's not just philosophy of science, but it's also science. Oh yeah, no, his, the discoveries he made at the level of very specific details about, I'll give you one example that I use a lot in my own writing, he knew an amazing amount about cephalopods, about octopuses and sepia and the various kinds of cephalopods and knew about five or six different kinds of octopuses and talked about how each of them goes about hunting, goes about reproducing, how they copulate. I mean, it's really remarkable. He talks about dissecting elephants. I mean, it's, yeah, no, it's really quite remarkable and stunning. Presumably, he had a lot of help doing this. I'm sure he wasn't doing it all himself, but works that we don't have of his, many volumes of what are described in the ancient library systems as dissections, which were presumably volumes of diagrams of what he discovered when he was dissecting the various organisms. Do we know if he dissected human beings? Pretty sure he did not. He actually comments in the history of animals about the fact that we have to infer a lot of what's going on inside human beings from closely related animals. It was considered defiling a human body to do that in the Greek city-states, little historical tidbit. Alexandria, which was founded in Northern Egypt, became the center for theoretical medicine in the third century BC, right after Aristotle died because dissection was permitted there because it had been used for embalming in Egypt for a couple of thousand years. So all of a sudden, it was okay to dissect human beings and they discovered a whole lot of things that Aristotle didn't know. So what do you take as the kind of, what's the border between the philosophy of biology and biology? So what is it, we'll put it another way, what is it that philosophy of biology studies? Yeah, good. Well, one way to approach that is, I mentioned this work that I translated on the parts of animals. It turns out that the first book of that is not actually part of, on the parts of animals. It's a philosophical introduction to how to study living things. So Aristotle, so this is a way of just introducing your subject. In that work, Aristotle talks about causality. Are there distinctive kinds of causes in living things as opposed to non-living things? And if so, which causes should be given priority? Should we pay more attention to what he called the final cause? Should we pay more attention to the purposes and goals of biological activities and the activities of order and so on? Then we, you know, should we focus on that rather than on the mechanics of how the part works, for example? Should we think about necessity in the same way when we're talking about living things as opposed to when we're talking about, say, the interactions that take place in the hemisphere when thunder is happening or something like that. And he thought there was a completely distinct kind of necessity that operates in living systems that we have to take account of. And did he think that was life? I mean, did he think that that was, that the cause was ultimately human, not human, but life? Yeah, so the idea that I think is really fundamental to him is that living things are self-maintaining systems. And not only in the life of the organism itself, everything it's doing is contributing to maintaining the life of that being. And even when it's reproducing, what it's doing is sort of continuing the kind of life that it's been maintaining its whole time. So Aristotle thought that when the male and female get together to reproduce, what they're doing is continuing, maintaining that way of life, if you like, but in the next generation, in another organism. And that's why that work generation of animals was so important to him. It was, for him, it was the study of how life, the continuity of life, how life continues, how life is passed on from one generation to the next. And he was really very, very intrigued by that and trying very hard to figure out how that happens. And how it is that the life of the organism and how it is that the offspring have both, they both continue the nature of the thing that's reproduced them in that, if an octopus copulates, lays eggs, what comes next are more octopuses. But he was also fascinated by the fact that, yeah, but not exactly the same. So the fourth and fifth books of the generation of animals are about how it is that Socrates and his wife can have children and some of the females look like the male parent and some of the male offspring look like the female parent and some of them don't look really like the parents at all but look more like the grandparents and so on and so forth. So he whole book of the generation of animals is about this, about that. So he was both aware of the fact that there's this similarity that gets passed on generation on generation, but also this variation that gets passed on from generation to generation. And we didn't really get an answer to that until the 20th century. No, that's right, that's right. And there was a geneticist who got a Nobel Prize and gave the Nobel Prize lecture and it was called Aristotle, Tothel, Tothel, Tothel. And he said, Aristotle should be getting the Nobel Prize in genetics because he figured out so much of what we now understand much better. So anyway, now to the more systematic way of answering your question rather than the historical way. I see the philosophy of biology as very continuous with the more theoretical aspects of biology, but it's asking questions about the nature of biological systems, what makes them different from non-living systems. It's asking questions about the nature of the causes that operate in living systems and whether there's something fundamentally different about the causation that takes place. Questions about the relationship between, that's the right way to put this, the relationship between the way in which living things are organized on the one hand and the materials out of which living things are constituted on the other hand. A day-to-day biologist working in genetics or ecology or functional anatomy or whatever they might be working on will all be making baseline assumptions about those kinds of things, but they won't be asking questions. They won't be challenging those assumptions. They won't be asking questions about those assumptions. And, but those assumptions will be determining how they approach their subject. And so they need people thinking philosophically to ask them, well, why are you making that assumption about the way living things operate? Why are you ignoring these questions and focusing on those questions? So I think it's the very best philosophy of biology. The people that do it are interacting with the more theoretical people in the biological sciences all the time. I think that's the way it should be done. I don't think it should be a separate subject. It strikes me that maybe some of the people panicking about artificial intelligence need to talk to some philosophy of biology because when you talk there about causation and the biology deals with certain materials or certain processes that maybe don't exist elsewhere. This assumption that everything is zero one, zero ones and that the computer is just gonna wake up any minute now and gonna be conscious and have life and values and wanna kill everybody or whatever that is fascinating. And it seems like what they've done is a real, they're ignoring all that causation, all those questions. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And to their credit, there are a number of philosophers that have realized that there are a lot of really kind of unquestioned assumptions going on in the debate over artificial intelligence and it's value or disvalue to humans and people need to be challenged to think a little more deeply about that stuff. So yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, I find so much of what these people do is devoid of kind of that philosophical knowledge and that philosophical thinking. Yeah. So you got interested in biology. Were you interested in biology before or did you interest in biology come from your interest in Aristotle which kind of came from my mind? I mean, were you always kind of fascinated by biology? Yeah, I've always been fascinated by biology since I was a young kid. I remember that when I was, you know at a certain point when you're, I don't know, eight, nine, 10, you start, people start asking you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And my inclination was always in the direction of paleontology. So, you know, that eventually I realized, well, that's actually evolution, you know? That's actually the study of how things evolved and what things were like before and how they changed and so on. And all the way through high school, the only subject that actually really grabbed me in the sciences was biology. And when I sort of refocused my life and started thinking about, okay what do you want to do with your life when I got to college? I started sort of thinking in that direction but everywhere I went, whatever subject I was looking at, I found people would say to me, that's not, that's really not the kind of question we ask. That's a philosophical question and I sort of began to realize the kind of life that sort of nuts and bolts lab bench biologist would be participating in was not of any interest to me. I had different kinds of questions that that wasn't going to satisfy. So, that was certainly in the background when I got to college, when I'd already read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and was starting to read some of Ayn Rand's nonfiction. And I could see that life as the sort of foundation of value and foundation of ethics was key to her view. That clicked pretty quickly. How exactly that work took a very long time and I'm still trying to figure that out. But that was very obvious to me. So, thinking about that in relationship to her referring to Aristotle's philosophy as biocentric, that led, okay, let's take a look at this Aristotle guy. And once you look at Aristotle seriously, you fall in love. I mean, I was just, I was just blown away. And I've never gotten over that. I should mention, Yaron, for your viewers, listeners, I mentioned to you, we lost internet just before we came online and I got it back just in time. I'm looking outside the window right now and the winds are blowing at about 40 or 45 miles an hour. Everything's going sideways. So, if we lose our connection, that's why. Okay, go ahead. So, what's your assessment of the field? So, as objectivists, we're typically very critical of philosophy of contemporary philosophy and is philosophy of science better? Is philosophy of biology within the philosophy of science better? And if so, why do you think that is? Yeah, it's hard for me to evaluate the whole field and say it's better. What I will say is that the grip of quote, unquote, analytic philosophy, the kind of philosophy that was heavily influenced by Hume and Kant and kind of dominated throughout most of the 20th century, that has lost its grip. There's a lot of work going on that's just straightforwardly fundamental metaphysics and epistemology and nobody is making any apologies for doing that. There's a lot of increased influence of Aristotle on contemporary philosophy. There's a very active neo-Aristotelian movement both in metaphysics and philosophy of science. And some of the people in the philosophy of biology have been strongly influenced in that direction. And I'm happy to say that a number of them are interacting with me. I've been, since I retired in 2018, I've been actively reaching out to the people in the neo-Aristotelian areas of contemporary philosophy. And they've been referencing my work and become somewhat influenced by it. And so things are, I think, on the whole going in a good direction there. I mean, I said this to you in an earlier discussion. I think before Ayn Rand's philosophy is going to sort of have a central place in contemporary philosophy. There's a lot of reasons why that's gonna always be problematic, I think. But one thing that needs to happen is the dominant influence of David Hume and Immanuel Kant on philosophy has to be set aside and things have to go in a more Aristotelian direction because once that happens, the way she approaches ethics, the way she approaches metaphysics, the way she approaches epistemology won't seem as alien as it does to someone that's been educated in thinking that Hume and Kant are sort of the paradigms for how to go about doing philosophy. So to the extent that I can have any influence in making that happen, I'm happy to do so, it has been happening to some extent. I've maybe had a little bit of influence on that. Greg Salmiari has also had, I think, a very important influence in that direction. Allen must have had some- Allen had a major influence in that direction, absolutely. And yeah, so I mean, I think things are, in some respects, better. I think, however, the influence of critical theory and the way in which it's been influencing the academic world is having some unfortunate influence even in philosophy departments and that's disturbing to me. And that, of course, if you want to trace the history of that, it's Neo-Parcists going back to Marx, going back to Hegel, going back to Kant. And escape, the bad philosophers always go back to the same place. And to Plato, in some sense, all of it goes back. So tell us about your interest in Darwin, how that evolved, and to what extent do you think Darwin was a central figure, not just in science and biology, but also in a philosophical approach to science? Yeah, okay. By my own influence, the interest in Darwin really started in graduate school. When I got to the University of Toronto, there was a wonderful philosopher of science there called Thomas Gouge, who had written a book in the mid-60s called The Ascent of Life. And it really was one of the very first works in the sort of revival of interest in the philosophy of biology that came along in the 1970s and 80s. And I spent a lot of time taking graduate courses with him, but just spending time talking to him and so on. And he really got me hooked into the philosophy of biology. I already was looking very seriously at Aristotle's biological works, thanks to the influence of Alan God health. He'd read my honors thesis, which was on Aristotle's Deanima. But I had been influenced by my undergraduate Aristotle teacher to, if I was gonna understand the Deanima, I needed to look at Aristotle's biology, not just at the Deanima and his philosophical work. So I had this interest in sort of the history of biology already and he influenced, he, Thomas Gouge really got me interested in Darwin and how Darwin changed the nature of biological inquiry and biological explanation and the whole sort of shifting the whole approach to biology. So that's how I got interested. It was really in graduate school and that interest just became more and more and more intense as I got more and more into Darwin. Now, I think the relationship between Darwin and the 19th century philosophers is a really interesting one. I think Darwin was a much more philosophical thinker than he's often given credit for. He stays away from those topics in his published work, but we now have nearly 30 volumes of correspondence of Charles Darwin and we have all of his private notebooks. He kept every scrap of paper he ever wrote anything on. So we've got all his Beagle notebooks, we've got all of his what are called the species books that were the books where he kept the notes that led to his theory of evolution by natural selection. And what you see in the correspondence and in those notebooks is somebody thinking very deeply, philosophically about the nature of life, the nature of causation. My work on Darwin has had sort of two branches and I'm focused on things about Darwin that people have tended to ignore. So one is his inductive method and where he learned that inductive method and what's different about the way he approaches his inductively grounding a scientific hypothesis compared to other people working at the same time and later. And particularly I've been focused on his use of thought experiments and the way in which he ties his thought experimental thinking to other kinds of evidence in support of a theory. And the other thing is that I became aware very early on that the idea that many 20th century evolutionary biologists were trying to promote that Darwin killed teleological thinking in biology. So he was the one who gave us a completely mechanical explanation for all life and all living things. It was clear to me that Darwin didn't think that. Darwin was very aware of the fact that goals and functions play a very important explanatory role in biology. And he realized that what differentiates what traits get passed on from one generation to the next as opposed to those that get weeded out is what value or function they perform for the living thing. So the traits that have more value or more advantageous provide functional advantages to the organism are the ones that are selected and the ones that are disadvantageous don't have value for the organism don't play a functional role in the life of the organism are the ones that get weeded out. And he saw that as a, that's teleology and right to the end of his life he was saying so I've now told you what the final cause of this particular structure is. I've now told you what the goal or purpose or end is served by this particular function. And all these 20th century Darwinians were saying, yeah, he killed teleology. We don't need that anymore. It's, it's so. They're opposing their views on him because he, this is not in Darwin. Well, that's right. And I think where they went wrong is they were aware of the fact that Darwin got rid of natural theology. He got rid of divine design. But they were assuming that the only kind of teleological explanation is that that is underwritten by the idea that God designs things for a purpose. They weren't aware of the fact that if you go all the way back to Aristotle and look at all the people he influenced throughout the history of biology, there was a completely different kind of teleological explanation that didn't depend on divine design or anything like that. And so they were throwing out the baby with the bathwaters the way I like to put it. And is that just a version of materialism? Yeah. It's a version of materialism. But I think there's a sense in which you can be a materialist and be fully on board with technology. So what I mean by that is it depends what you're contrasting materialism with. If you're contrasting with some kind of spiritualism, then I would say Darwin was a materialist. But another way of putting this is I don't see that there's any conflict between mechanism and teleology. And a lot of people see those as antagonists. I think you can understand better and better and better the mechanisms by which a biological function is performed. That doesn't take away the fact that it performs some kind of function that serves the life of the organism. You're just understanding how it goes about doing that better and better and better. So what is your sense, what is your estimation of the state of evolutionary biology today, both as a science and from a philosophical perspective? Yeah. I think something really important happened starting, I think you can see the very beginnings of this in the 1980s, but it really takes hold in the 1990s. The central role of developmental, understanding developmental biology, takes on a real central importance in evolutionary thinking starting, especially in the 1990s. You get this movement that is popularly referred to as evo-devo, which is the various ways in which you can integrate the new molecular level understanding of developmental biology with evolution. What developmental biology is? Yeah. Well, it used to be called embryology. So it's the study of how individual organisms develop from basic fertilized egg all the way through to the fully developed organism. And that was fundamentally ignored by evolutionary biology from the 1920s through the 1960s. Darwin didn't ignore it. He paid a lot of attention to it, but there was a basic understanding during that period that there was a more or less of a one-to-one relationship between genes and some phenotypic trait or other, like eye color or shape of your nose or the number of teeth you have or whatever it might be. And that it really didn't make much difference to our understanding of evolution to know how the genes brought about those traits. All you needed to know is that experimentally, you could demonstrate that there was a connection between the genes and the trait that developed. What gradually became clear in the 1980s and 90s and going forward much more so was that actually what's going on at the genetic level is heavily influenced by various things going on within the cell, various proteins sending messages basically to the genome about, okay, that gene needs to be turned off now. This one needs to be turned on. It changed the whole way of thinking about the relationship between genetics and evolution so that development now became absolutely fundamental to understanding the relationship between genetics and evolution. And I think that's had a wonderful influence on evolutionary biology. It's gradually shifted the focus to the whole organism again that it's the whole organism as a self-maintaining autonomous system that is in control of the developmental processes, the genetic processes and so on. It completely rejects the Dawkins idea that the genes are in the driver's seat. Evolution is all about just which genes get passed on and whole organisms are just the vehicle that is rumbling along. It's all about the genes. That just doesn't work as a way of understanding the evolutionary process anymore. So what is replaced that, a view of life or of the entire organism? How does that play out? Yeah, so there's a lot of emphasis now on whole organisms as autonomous self-regulating, self-maintaining systems and how there's a kind of complex network view of causation that you're getting all kinds of feedback from different levels of organization, from the cellular level down to the genetic level, from the organ system level down to what's going on in the cells of the different organs in that system. And even feedback from interactions between the organism and its environment that can actually influence what's going on even at the cellular level. So it's shifted the emphasis to whole organisms and it's also revived a view that I think is very Aristotelian that organisms are centers of agency. The way in which evolutionary biologists tend to describe organisms in the 1940s, 50s and 60s was they were sort of putty being shaped by the environment. And they were kind of passive. And now the idea that's pretty dominant in evolutionary biology is that organisms are centers of agency. They're active. They're interacting with their environment. They're shaping the environment in various ways. They're selectively responding to changes in the environment. And so I think it's a really exciting change in evolution. So when you say agency, you don't mean choice in a free will sense. What do you mean by agency in this context? So the basic distinction is between agent and patient. Or organisms sort of being pushed and pulled by the environment in various ways. Or are organisms actively perceiving what's going on in the environment? Responding selectively to what's going on in the environment? Are they goal directed systems that don't just passively respond but actually go out seeking? Well, let's think about just foraging behavior. There's a really interesting question about organism birds. Let's take birds as an example and watch them a lot. They are constantly attuned to whether there are predators in their environment. And even attuned to whether there's a likelihood that there's predators in the environment. If you watch small songbirds, they never stay in one place for very long. And their heads are always going like that. They're always watching. They're always looking around to see whether there's danger. They are very attuned to when a particular environment is becoming less and less rich in the resources they need. So populations of birds will move from one place to another. As soon as they become aware of the fact that the resources are becoming less and less available in a particular place, it's agency in that sense. No, not free will, not choice in that sense. But there is a selective reaction to the environment. And even in pretty simple organisms, very simple unicellular organisms will respond selectively when the amount of light changes in the environment, they'll react to that. So it's just agency in that sense. And a good introduction to this I should mention. I hope that I recommend all the time. By Dennis Walsh is called organisms agency and evolution. And he actually argues that the new way of thinking about evolution puts organisms as one of the crucial factors in evolutionary change, because of the way in which they selectively respond to what's going on in the environment and can even change the environment in really radical ways. An obvious example of this is the way in which beavers completely change an environment by building dams in order that they can have a place to build their hut and a place where they can get into the hut underwater and so on and so forth. And by doing that, they not only transform the environment for themselves, they transfer the environment for a whole bunch of other organisms as well. So they're playing a really active role in the evolutionary process and doing that. Interesting. I never thought of their actions as playing a role in the evolutionary process, but that makes sense. So people are using evolutionary biology to try to explain human behavior. They call it evolutionary psychology or whatever they're calling it. So what do you, you know, obviously you're not a, that's not your field directly, but what are your thoughts or broadly on using evolution in that way? Yeah. All right, let's start at the broadest level. One of the things that attracted me to evolution from a very early time was that the idea that human beings are at home on this earth. And to understand that, you know, we are just a recent product of the evolutionary process is, I think, fundamentally important to doing away with the idea that there's, you know, some divine spark in us that, you know, we have one foot in the supernatural realm and one foot on earth, but we're not really at home here. Home is up there with someone else. So the idea that we're evolved beings, I think, is absolutely fundamentally established. There's, you know, I don't think any reasonable doubt about that at this point. And so, all right, we have a very unique form of consciousness. We are conceptual beings. We know how to, we have the ability to learn how to form concepts to produce propositions. We clearly have free will. We have the ability to either, you know, use that conceptual ability we have or to just blank out on it and not use. That clearly has some kind of neurological basis. That neurological system has to have come about by evolutionary processes. Having said all that, to try and pick some particular piece of human behavior and offer some kind of evolutionary explanation for that particular behavior, I think is fraught with almost insuperable difficulties. A really good, you and I talked about this a couple of days ago. And I went and looked at a few things that I have on the shelf, so to speak. And I did find a really good discussion at a fairly introductory level about all the problems that would face somebody trying to play that game. So I'll mention the book and for your audience, because I think it's quite good. So it's very, it's title is intended to grab you. It's by Kim Strelny and Paul Griffiths. Paul used to be a colleague of mine. It's called Sex and Death, an introduction to the philosophy of biology. It's a good title. And there's a really good section right near the end of the book called From Sociobiology to Evolutionary Psychology. And they basically go step by step through all of the difficulties and problems that anybody trying to give an evolutionary explanation for a specific human behavior would face. And it's basically just problems that you can imagine if you just think, how do you ordinarily try to confirm and substantiate a hypothesis in a science? These evolutionary psychology is often trying to imagine what life was like in the savannah 250,000 years ago that would lead to certain people behaving in a certain way, being selected against and other people behaving in a different way, being selected for. But what they're often doing is just telling what Steve and Jay Gould referred to as just so stories. And the problems in trying to confirm any of those just so stories are, yeah, I mean, they're, I think, overwhelming. There's, one of the things they point out is one way in which you might try to confirm a hypothesis of that kind if you were talking about ants or bees or spiders or something is the comparative method. So look at a whole bunch of very closely related species to the one year studying and do a comparative study of the genetics and the behaviors of these various things. You can't do that with evolutionary psychology. Our nearest ancestors died out a few hundred thousand years ago. We don't have anybody that behaves remotely like us that we can do a comparative study like that too. But that's just one that they go through a very long list of problems that that kind of attempt at explanation goes through. And so in general, I think where you have to stop is in order to get a good understanding evolutionarily of how the neurological system of human beings came about and how different it is and what the differences are from organisms that don't have the intellectual capacities that human beings have. Beyond that, I think it's a non-starter. That's not the way psychology should be done, I don't think. All right, so we have a bunch of questions. So let's start going over these. First, I've got two people, Wes and Marilyn who, Wes says, I loved your talk on the inductive origins of Darwin. Thanks for that. Marilyn says, basically the same thing, Dr. Lennox, I loved your O'Conn talk on Darwin. So very much appreciated those talks. I had a lot of nice feedback on that talk, so that made me happy. Good, and that is available on YouTube, on the Ironman Institute's website. So those of you interested, just look up Lennox on the Ironman Institute website and you'll find that talk. Let's see, Michael asks, I've heard it argue that human emotions evolve to enable successful group behavior. Is there some truth to this? Although human emotions may also destroy group behavior, emotions do not always create a positive response. Ah, boy. So again, I think what we can be sure of is that the neurological system that underwrites all of our cognitive behavior, including our emotions, certainly evolved. What it means to say our emotions evolved is not clear to me, and it's absolutely not clear to me how you would go about confirming our hypothesis about that. There is something, there are people who Darwin wrote a work on emotions in humans and other animals. And there's a sort of Darwinian theory of the emotions that's come along in the 20th century, but that theory primarily is focused on establishing that there are certain very basic fundamental emotional reactions that you can argue are evolved because you find them in all human societies. So, and people have tried to test this by basically showing people various vignettes. And then showing them how people react in different cultures and then asking them what emotion is that projecting. But that's really, I think, as far as you can go. And basically it's just saying, well, there's a good argument that these are evolved because there doesn't seem to be any major cultural influences on these things. They seem to be kind of hardwired in the sense that certain kinds of scenarios will events a certain kind of reaction, whether you live in Japan or China or Iran or Afghanistan or the United States or Brazil. So beyond that, I don't think that there's much going for that. There's a lot better ways of understanding emotional behavior than that, I think. I mean, what's the consensus or what are the thoughts about whether animals have emotions and to what extent those emotions related to the emotions humans have? Yeah. A lot of the work that's been done on emotions is done on rats and mice. And so you can imagine what kind of emotions they're talking about. It's basically fear responses. Yeah. I mean, that would be my guess is the kind of... Yeah. Nothing like the sort of joy you feel when you're proud of an accomplishment that you... It's not like human emotions. There are very fundamental reactions that other organisms have. And I think those that are closer to us, like the other primates, they seem to show emotions that are much more similar to ours. The kind of affection they show towards their young and that sort of thing. So, you know, I'm perfectly happy to say that there's a continuum here, but the kinds of emotions associated with human life, I think, are just fundamentally different than that. Upton asks, consciousness and the ability to experience quality are very expensive capabilities. Basic problem did they solve for that made them viable evolutionary paths? Yeah. Well, that's the kind of question that evolutionary psychology sometimes asks. And I'm inclined to say I don't have a clue. I mean, you know, I can make up a story, but how would I confirm that story? That's the point. I mean, I could tell you a story right now about why. Yes, I guess I need to know what you mean by expensive. What costs are involved. But even if I get a reasonable answer to that question, I'm left asking, how would I confirm a hypothesis about what value they conferred on organisms that overcame that particular cost? And I just, I don't know. I can make up stories about that, but I don't think I could do any, anything more than that. So that I tell a just so story. Upton also asked, what are your thoughts on the concept of, oh God, we've got these words I can't pronounce. Athropocene? Oh, the Anthropocene. This is the idea that there's a whole new, if you like, geological era. Like the Jurassic. That's the world now that human beings have had this amazing impact on it. And it usually is used in a negative way. Alex Epstein, I would be quite happy to say, yes, there's a completely new era on the earth because of the impact that human beings have had on the earth. And I'm inclined to say that's great. That impact is what makes life livable in the 21st century in a way that nobody can imagine in the 18th century. For human beings, which is all standard of value. Yeah, exactly. Because it assumes that there's some external standard of value of some kind of sacred nature in it. Yeah. And we're in the process of destroying it. Maybe we are, but we're making our lives better. Well, I think if we destroyed it all, it probably wouldn't make our lives better. I'm pretty sure we're not. Kate says, how prevalent are teleological views of revolution today? The statements like ex evolved do why imply a teleological view? Or is such phrasing just using used by convention? Maybe I'm reading too much into the two. So. The way I think about this. And for those people who are sort of involved in objectivism, Harry bin swangers, a book on teleological explanation is, I think, really, really valuable here. Is that when you think about a particular evolutionary moment in time, if you like, when there's a population of organisms, the population of organisms has. Variation with respect to a lot of their traits. And ways of behaving. And those traits can be, I think, measured in two different ways. I'll use a very simple baby example supposing you're talking about a population of finches on the Galapagos Islands. And there's an environmental change taking place. That allows finches with larger, deeper, harder beaks to eat food that the ones with smaller, less deep can't eat. So you could talk about those beaks just in terms of the depth of the beak, the length of the beak, the hardness of the beak in Newton's, all kinds of different purely straightforward metrics like that. But I think there's also what I'm Rand Wood refers to as teleological measurements going on here. You can measure all of those things in terms of their relative value in acquiring food. In that particular environment that's undergoing that particular change. And the organisms that are going to have the higher probability of surviving and leaving offspring in the next generation and reproducing are those with the beaks that have better survival value for that organism. So I think that's where the teleological concepts come in in evolutionary biology. It's in saying that larger beak serves the purpose or value of acquiring food better than this beak, this comparable beak. And that's why it's being evolutionarily favored. That's why it's being preferentially selected as opposed to the other one. So that's where I think the teleological concepts come in is in saying that beak is better for the sake of acquiring food than this other beak. And then when you're just looking at populations without worrying about evolution very much, that's where the adaptational description of organisms comes in is saying well, that organism is very well adapted to that particular environment. That way of behaving performs this valuable function. For the life of that organism. And I think Darwin was absolutely, if you read Darwin's work after he published on the origin of species, he wrote at least a dozen books after the origin was published. And all of them are just filled with this kind of teleological description of the populations that he was studying. Let's see. Adam says, is objectivism relevant to the study of evolution or in the sciences more broadly? Do you think science eventually removes all doubt in most humans that there is no God? Well, those are two different questions. So the first one, I think the primary value for me, and if you want to see my work in this respect, the paper of mine that's in the second volume in the Iron Rant Society Philosophical Studies series that Alan, God, Health, and I founded, and I want to mention something about that series in a minute, you're on, but let me answer this question first. There's a paper that I wrote in that volume, volume two, concepts and their role in knowledge about how understanding concepts as open-ended allows you to understand scientific change in a way that doesn't make scientific change seem like it's some kind of paradox and problem. And I don't know any epistemological system prior to objectivism that gives you that tool to understand scientific development and progress the way objectivism does. So that's the value, one very important value, I think, is that the theory of concepts that Iron Rant developed and the way in which it allows you to see how concepts aren't frozen in time once you define a concept that concepts develop through time, that new knowledge gets added to the file folder that a concept represents. All of that is, I think, absolutely crucial to understanding the way science works. Now, the other issue of... Science and God. Yeah, science and God. I just... I mean, my immediate reaction to that is I don't think there's ever been a really good reason for a belief in God. So this idea that at some point in time evolution came along and all of a sudden all the good reasons for a belief in God were put into doubt. I don't think that, to me, that's not the way it works. It's certainly true that we had a puzzle about adaptation, how it comes about, and evolution gives us a really great answer to that question that we didn't have prior to evolution by natural selection, but yeah. Yeah, so all science does. Yeah, that's right. Everything. Religion, in a sense, is a lazy answer to it all. God did it. Yeah. As Darwin liked to say, that answers everything and nothing. I mean, my response to that is always, I became an atheist before I knew any science. Yeah, I did too. Very, very sure there was no such thing as God when I was 13 or 14 years old. Yeah, me too. All right, let's see. This is, it calls himself Aristotle against Plato. Am I understanding Aristotle correctly to say that an actuality is prior to a potentiality? That what actually is is prior to what potentially could be. And thus, as Aristotle said, man is prior to seed. Then the chicken came before the egg. Yeah. Remember, Aristotle is, he's not an evolutionist. He's an eternalist as far as the world is concerned. And there's a couple of people prior to him that had what could vaguely be referred to as sort of evolutionary idea of human origins. But he quite rightly rejected them as wildly speculative, the views of Empedocles and so on. So yes, he does think that actuality is prior to potentiality. And so if you want to explain the development of an organism, you explain it by reference to what it's developing into. That's one of the fundamental premises of his teleology is that in order to understand all of the stages and changes that take place during the development of an organism, you have to understand that it's directed toward producing the actual organism at the end of the process. And then if you asked him, well, yeah, but where did that impetus in the seed come from? He'll say it came from the actual parent that produced the seed. And he never actually engages in this, but if you then asked him, okay, but where did that actual parent come from? Didn't that come from a seed? And he'd say yes, but the potential to create that parent in the seed came from a prior parent. So yes, he does actually hold the view that actuality is prior to potentiality. It's explanatorily prior, conceptually prior. And I think he holds that it's also metaphysically prior. Same person asks, am I understanding Aristotle correctly to say that when he says there are three kinds of substances, the sensible, the elemental and the immovable, that the immovable are the principles of the first two? I'm not sure what passage this person has in mind in Aristotle. He certainly thinks that form, the form of a substance explains why the material has the material structure that it does. And it explains why that material develops the way it does and so on. So form is prior and there's a sense in which you can say form is immovable. But again, I'd need to know, is there a particular passage this person is thinking about and that would be a tough one to answer just off the top of my head because I'm not quite sure what the topic is. Maybe you'll give us a passage, you will see. Ian says, do you have any thoughts on Perperian philosophy of science? Yeah, I do. I've published a paper in, I think the objective is form when Harry Vinswanger was editing it on, called the Anti-Philosophy of Science. And it's primarily focused on, sorry, on Kuhn and Fierroben. But I also talk about Perper there. Perper was an anti-inductivist. He was very heavily influenced by Kant and Hume. He thought you could never support any hypothesis or theory inductively. He had a view that hypotheses come about by conjecture. And the best you can do in, it's not really confirming them, but the best you can do is to test them. And if they hold up to test for a certain period of time, then they haven't been falsified. And he arrives at that view because he's given up on induction completely. And he says, Kuhn has shown us that, you can never support a hypothesis with any kind of degree of certainty by inductive methods. So that's my view of Pauper. Why do you think he became, I mean, how influential is he in biology? Certainly there are fields in which he became unbelievably influential. Yeah. So he's not had a big influence in the philosophy of biology. And actually, he's had far less influence in the philosophy of science than he has in the sciences, interestingly enough. And I think there's something about what he's saying that resonates with the psychology of certain scientists, that they do maybe have the view that the best they can do is to sort of come up with a hypothesis and then test it and test it and test us. And to the extent that the tests keep confirming it, they hold on to it. But I think if you dig into sort of what Pauper is actually saying, I mean, it's part of this whole view of that was very, he's a kind of variant of logical positivism, basically. The idea that we have philosophy has nothing to say about how hypotheses are formed or grounded. That that may be an interesting subject for psychology, but philosophy is only about testing, testing, testing, testing. And to the extent that scientists bought into that, and an awful lot of them did, especially in the physical sciences, Pauper's going to sound reasonable to them. Very influential in economics, I mean, basically all. Yeah, that I wouldn't have known, but doesn't surprise me, doesn't surprise me. Let's see Aristotle gets played again. Aristotle and his peers thought of political parties as a disease. Has there ever been a discussion among your peers to consider the removal of political parties from politics? No. I mean, they were very anti political parties as well. Madison and some of them. Is that true? That wasn't aware of that. They were very much against the formation of political parties. They hoped people would just run on ideas and as individuals didn't last very long. I think by the first election there were political parties. They also knew that our system would be in trouble if people of honesty and integrity weren't attracted to be politicians. They seem to be right about that too, unfortunately. Justin asked what are your thoughts on evolutionary psychology? I think we covered that. Let's see. Michael says life is about balance. Nothing to the extreme is great. What's wrong with this formulation? Everything? A lot. I mean, living things are, as biologists like to say, far from equilibrium systems. They are very highly complex entities that fight against entropy constantly. And to the extent that they do a bad job at that, they don't last very long. So in that sense, I guess there's a kind of balance there. They have to, this is what I mean by saying they're complex, self-maintaining autonomous systems is that everything they do has to be integrated and working properly or their life is in jeopardy. That's true of us and it's true of pretty much all living things. And it's one of the things that I think distinguishes living things from the rest of the universe. Justin asked, was Aristotle a misogynist? To some extent, yes. I don't know if misogynist is the right word, but he certainly was part of a culture where women were treated as second-class citizens. And insofar as he talks about them in his ethics and politics, he thinks they're capable of virtue, but not at the same level as males are. He thinks there are certain activities that females are simply not capable of doing. He doesn't think they're non-human or anything like that, but he does think there are certain limitations that females have that males don't have that suits them to manage households and things like that and raise children, but not to take part in political systems or scientific activity and so on. Me down your hand. Or lots of other women in the world. Lots of women scientists. Exactly. So, okay, Michael, the question you're asking, I'll answer another time, not relevant to today. Let's see Alejandro. Could you talk about the value of Aristotle's politics? How did he impact the Enlightenment philosophers? I'm no specialist in Aristotle's politics. I mean, I've read the politics. There are certain parts of it that I've studied fairly carefully. I don't know very much about the influence of his political ideas in the Renaissance or the early modern period, but I'd be surprised if the politics didn't have a fair amount of influence because by that point in time, people were reading the entire corpus of Aristotle and studying it. I hear other people like Cicero mentioned much more often in the Enlightenment than I hear Aristotle being mentioned on political topics, but as I say, it's not something I've ever really studied carefully, so I could be all wrong about that. Let's see, Justin says, what are your thoughts on the current philosophical landscape in America from a philosopher's point of view? Sorry, thoughts of the political, not philosophical, come political landscape, more fun, from a philosopher's point of view. I don't know that, I mean, I think there are people involved with objectivism including Iran who are probably better at answering that kind of question than I am. I'm pretty disturbed by the entire political landscape in this country right now. I think the absolutely worst elements of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have control of those two parties right now, and I think it's really a sad situation. And I don't see any short-term solution to it, but I hope there's a long-term solution that objectivism plays a role in. Yeah, Frank asks, are the thumbs and cocky signs of human evolution, a thumb? I mean, our hands are somewhat different than the hands that you find in other primates. I think way too much emphasis is put on the importance of the human thumb for tool use and how important that was to human evolution and so on, if that's what's in the background of the question. I think with our conceptual development, I think that probably came about independently of the evolution of the human thumb. But again, these are the kinds of questions that I think, how would you come up with really good evidence? That's what I want people to be thinking about. How would you come up with really good supporting, rigorous evidence about hypotheses about that kind of thing? Other than storytelling. Yeah, other than storytelling. And that's not evidence, that's storytelling. Let's see, Justin says, does evolution select for survival or reproduction? Yeah, that's a really tricky question, I think. I should say I get up at 5.30 in the morning, so it's getting late for me. But I mean, that's an issue that I think is a really serious question for evolutionary biology to be thinking about. Because a lot of times fitness, evolutionary fitness is characterized in terms of how many offspring. A particular variant in a population leaves. And so the organism that leaves the organism of the type that has a probability of leaving a higher number of offspring is treated to be more fit than the one that doesn't. But of course, at least part of what makes an organism fit in that sense is that it's more robust, its ability to survive to adulthood, its ability to attract mates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is fundamental to its ability to leave more offspring. So I think the two questions are related. I think the two issues are related. But I do think that's an issue that I think philosophy of biology, philosophers of biology have talked a lot about it. And I think it's an issue where philosophers can actually chime in and have some theoretical influence on the way biologists define fitness, think about fitness, think about the nature of selection, and so on and so forth. Good, so let me just say to the audience, let's no more questions. It's getting late. So we'll run through what we have if you have a few more minutes, Jim. Yeah, sure. K-Fax asks, which one of your published books are you most proud of? I think... Published books, I guess, are broader than books. Yeah. So I'll say three things on that topic. So I can't say one thing on it. I'm very proud of the translation and commentary on the parts of animals. I doubted whether I had the skills in classical Greek to translate an entire work of Aristotle's. And I have to say, I think I developed those skills while I was actually doing the work. And I realized how hard and how subtle Aristotle's Greek is in the process of doing it. I also think the commentary will outlast me. I go back and look at the commentary I wrote, and it's very much a line-by-line commentary. So almost every paragraph in that work has a few paragraphs in the commentary about it on my part. So I'm very proud of that work. Two years ago, I published a work called Aristotle on Inquiry, and it's a sort of summation of thinking I've been doing about Aristotle as an inductive inquirer for the last 20 years or so. And I'm very proud of that work. It's sort of my swan song as far as books on Aristotle is concerned, and sums up a lot of my thinking on Aristotle. But the thing I wanted to mention, and I said to Yaron, I want to make sure I get a plug-in on this, is the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Study series. That's a series which I want more and more objectivists to get into. It has a very important framework. Alan got help, and Alan came to the University of Pittsburgh when he retired from his job at the College of New Jersey. Yaron was one of the people responsible for this happening. He and I met over lunch one day with John McCaskey and talked about, can't we get an anthem fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh for Alan? Yeah, I think we can. And we did. And a few years after he came, we had this idea of maybe we can take some of the papers that had been delivered at the Ayn Rand Society of the American Philosophical Association, which he and I were founding members of, and use them as the core for a series of books on different topics related to objectivism. And that was the core idea. We took that idea to the University of Pittsburgh Press. They liked the idea, and that series got started. The fourth volume will be coming out soon, I hope. Greg Salmiari and I are going to be the co-editors of it. It's a volume on the relationship between Aristotle and Ayn Rand. And I've got a paper in there on metaphysical axioms in Aristotle and Ayn Rand. Greg has a paper on life as a standard of value in Aristotle and Ayn Rand. There's a lot of great papers in it. But the whole idea behind that series, and this is what I want people, why I want people to look at it carefully, is we have people who know objectivism give a paper on a topic that's very important in philosophy at a particular point in history. And then we invite non-objectivists who are specialists on that topic to respond to the paper. And then in the volume, we allow the person who gave the original paper to react to that response. So what you see in those volumes is respectable, respectful interactions between objectivists and non-objectivists on specific topics. And what you'll see over and over again is these are highly, highly respected people in the different fields of philosophy. You'll see how much respect they have for the ideas of Ayn Rand once they actually are introduced to them and hear them being delivered. And so I think those volumes show you how it's a model for how objectivism could be playing a major role in academic philosophy at some point down the line. I'm very proud of that series. Even though I was co-editor of the volumes, all except the one that Robert Mayhew and Greg co-edited. I only have one paper of my own in there, but I think the interaction between myself and the philosopher of biology, Richard Burian, in that volume is sort of a paradigm of how I think this kind of interaction between objectivists and non-objectivists could go. That's exciting. All right, let's see. In the ethics, Aristotle concludes that we must make ourselves a model. He meant this ethically, but given life extension technologies and biotech, would the double in human life span conflict with Aristotle's biological view? I think what he had in mind in that passage was that when we use our theoretical intellect, we are most like the divine, Aristotle thinks. So when he said that, he was thinking to the extent that we live the theoretical life, rather than the practical, productive life, we are becoming like the divine, like the immortal. Greg Salmiari has some really interesting current work on sort of the philosophical underpinnings of Aristotle's denigration of productive work. It's an interesting aspect of Aristotle's philosophy that he really doesn't have the kind of respect you might expect him to have for people who produce the goods that make life possible. So I think that's what he has in mind by saying we should make ourselves immortal. We should, as much as possible, live the life of the theoretical intellect. Justice, what is the philosophy of science view of RFK Jr. and the end of this movement? I don't know what the general philosophy of science view of it is, but I have zero respect for that guy, so I'll just leave it at that. Yep, I share that. Justin Oste says, what is your evaluation of Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene? Yeah, good. I think it was wrong when it was written, but I think it's been much more thoroughly shown to have a completely erroneous view of the relationship between the genetics of an organism and the life of an organism now than was obvious at the time he wrote it. And in general, I think this use of the concepts of altruism and selfishness in biology is confusing. And I think in some cases it's intentionally confusing. Interesting. Do you think Dawkins recognizes that the science has passed him? I don't know. I mean, he's really moved into more sort of other areas of writing and sort of more pop areas of writing recently. So I don't even know if he's keeping abreast with the developments that have made his views seem sort of out of date. But I mean, I think this whole idea of the genes, you know, driving this rumbling beast around and making it do the genes bidding and everything is always a pretty lame metaphor. Let's see. Kelsey says, you mentioned Dawin's thought experiment. Do you have a commanded reading on this topic? Is there an example that might expand what is interesting about his use of them, of thought experiments? Yeah, I mean, I've published four or five papers on the use of thought experiments by Dawin. And I think if you want to look at Dawin specifically, here are two places you can look at the end of chapter four. So chapter four on the origin of species is his introduction of the theory of natural selection. He's set up the ingredients in the first three chapters. And then in chapter four, he says, well, if you take all the ingredients that I've talked about in the first three chapters, put them together, what you have is this process I'm referring to as natural selection. And after he presents it, he says, I hope you will indulge me if I give you a few imaginary examples of what I'm talking about. And then he talks about this population of wolves that vary with respect to the length of their limbs and the speed with which they can run and the size of their, the strength of their bodies and so on. And he talks about them. So imagine now that they are faced with a population of deer. And some of them are more capable of chasing down those deer than others. And he, sorry, boxed through a whole scenario. And I mentioned earlier, Yaron, that he will tell these, he'll give you these thought experiences. Now imagine this happening generation after generation after generation for thousands of generation. And then he talks about this population. It says, can you doubt that the organism, the wolves that are faster and stronger and fleeter will survive and lead more offspring and so on and so forth. But then he says, and there's actually a population of wolves in the northeastern United States, where the smaller slimmer wolves that are predominantly populated by rabbits and things like that, and this larger, stronger in an area that's populated by deer and elk. So he'll tell you the thought experiment and then he'll say, so what he's doing there is he's saying, so that could be the result of the kind of process that I was asking you to imagine earlier. And then he does that over and over again in chapters six through nine, which he says are chapters where I'm going to look at problems for my theory. And he talks about things where people have said, this couldn't possibly come about by natural selection. And so they'll say, look at the vertebrate eye. It's so perfectly designed and every feature of the design has to be exactly right, or the eye wouldn't function properly. So how could that have come about by natural selection? So he'll tell a story about how that could have come about by natural selection, but then he'll say, and now look at the eyes in nature. Some of them are just a little bit of light sensitive skin on the surface of the organism. And then some of them are, you know, maybe have a very thin lens, but no cornea, no retina, you know, he'll say if you look at nature, there's a whole continuum of eyes. And, you know, only a few of them are these beautifully complex design things. And yet couldn't you imagine that that's the series by which that more complex eye, you know, so it's very, very clever with these thought experiments and interlacing them with actual examples from nature that sort of underscore how it could have happened the way he's asking you to imagine that it happened. So that's where I would look in Darwin. I published a paper in studies in the history and philosophy of science last year, 2022. Yeah, last year called Accentuate the Negative, Locating Possibility in Darwin's Long Argument. And it's a discussion of how Darwin evolved this way of arguing this thought experimental way of arguing. Well, this has been a real pleasure, Jim. Thank you. I agree. Thank you very much for inviting me, Aaron. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. And hope to have you back again. Well, there's, I think there was a lot here. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's just fascinating stuff. Yeah. Good. All right. Thank you. Have a great night. My pleasure. And bye guys. I'll see you guys in the morning. For my, for our news shows. Kayfax, thank you for the support there. Thank you. Well, who just did his first super chat. And with that super chat took us over the limit over our goal. We are where we need to be. Thank you guys. Kayfax for the $200. All great questions. And don't forget to share like before you leave. And I will see you all tomorrow morning.