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The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality.

Elliott Sober

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Elliott Sober
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 6
Philosopher
University Teacher
Baltimore
Maryland
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Biological
Reality
Racial
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America
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Sometimes
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More quotes by Elliott Sober

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When I was in high school I found literature and history interesting, but science not at all. Literature and history obviously involved thinking, but science seemed to be all about memorizing facts and doing mindless calculations.
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Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.
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Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic defenders of the theory do the theory no favor when they agree.
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I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.
Elliott Sober
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Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.
Elliott Sober
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When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.
Elliott Sober
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This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.
Elliott Sober
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In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.
Elliott Sober
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I think that some interventionist theisms are compatible with evolutionary theory. (By intervention, I don't mean that God violates laws of nature I mean that God affects what happens in nature in ways that are additional to the ones that deism recognizes.)
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Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.
Elliott Sober
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I have spent a lot of time arguing that the theory of group selection is not the stupid, pernicious doctrine that many biologists once claimed it to be. The theory is not just conceptually coherent there are adaptations out there in nature (like reduced virulence in some viruses) that evolved because there was group selection.
Elliott Sober
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If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is natural, but it often isn't true!
Elliott Sober
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Deism claims that God creates the universe and the laws of nature and then is hands-off, with everything that subsequently happens in nature being due to natural processes.
Elliott Sober
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It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).
Elliott Sober
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Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.
Elliott Sober
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Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an environment that has properties E. The theory of natural selection is filled with statements of this form.
Elliott Sober
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Tiger is a natural kind and Tiger is a historical particular are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.
Elliott Sober
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From the fact that E is evidence for T and the fact that T entails M, it doesn't follow that E is evidence for M.
Elliott Sober
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The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of in virtue of relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties.
Elliott Sober
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Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.
Elliott Sober