Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman           Despite all of the posturing about, “interactionist,” models of phenotype (to say nothing of pure, “environmentalis,”) all of the theories of biology (and much of the controversial hypotheses still being argued over) are integrally genetic. You wouldn't know it from most discussions of behavioral genetics, but there are indeed reports of, “vacuum behaviors,” in the animal kingdom (let alone the obvious cases of vacuum morphology). i Richard Dawkins writes:           The urge to feel 'grateful' in a vacuum, when there's nobody there to thank, is very strong. Animals sometimes perform complicated patterns of behavior in a vacuum – they are even called 'vacuum activities'. The most spectacular example I know is from a German film I once saw of a beaver... Beavers probably don't understand why they do it. They just do it without thinking, because they have a mechanism in the brain that goes off ...

          “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”           — Ernest Rutherford I           The key dichotomy in philosophy of science, that of epistemology and ontology, gives rise to many other interesting manifestations.  One, which scientists often argue over today, are laws versus facts.  In the past, it was understood that laws—the mechanical philosophies by which the world unfolded, were fundamental and gave rise to facts (the empirical measurement of which could be used to falsify or verify such mechanical hypotheses).  This is the correct understanding, epistemologically, as it actually explains rather than merely describes the world (it describes the relationships between objects and their dynamics over time, not just the state of an object at a given time).  In this way, we may grasp causes, not just effects.       ...