different. Why not add the magisteria of science and religion to this venerable and distinguished list?
1 I apologize to colleagues in philosophy and related fields for such an apparently cavalier “brush by” of an old and difficult topic still subject to much discussion, and requiring considerable subtlety and nuancing to capture the ramifying complexities. I recognize that this claim for separation of the factual from the ethical has been controversial (and widely controverted) ever since David Hume drew an explicit distinction between “is” and “ought.” (I even once wrote an embarrassingly tendentious undergraduate paper on G. E. Moore’s later designation of this issue, in his
Principia Etilica
of 1903, as “the naturalistic fallacy.”) I acknowledge the cogency of some classical objections to strict separation—particularlythe emptiness of asserting an “ought” for behaviors that have been proven physically impossible in the “is” of nature. I also acknowledge that I have no expertise in current details of academic discussion (although I have tried to keep abreast of general developments). Finally, I confess that if an academic outsider made a similarly curt pronouncement about a subtle and troubling issue in my field of evolution or paleontology, I’d be pissed off.
I would, nonetheless, defend my treatment not as a dumbing down, or as disrespect for the complexity of a key subject, but as a principled recognition that most issues of this scope require different treatments at various scales of inquiry. Broad generalizations always include exceptions and nuanced regions of “however” at their borders—without invalidating, or even injuring, the cogency of the major point. (In my business of natural history, we often refer to this phenomenon as the “mouse from Michigan” rule, to honor the expert on taxonomic details who always pipes up from the back of the room to challenge a speaker’s claim about a general evolutionary principle: “Yes, but there’s a mouse from Michigan that …”) Among experts, attention properly flows to the exceptions and howevers—for these are the interesting details that fuel scholarship at the highest levels. (For example, my colleagues in evolutionary theory are presently engaged in a healthy debate about whether a limited amount of Lamarckian evolution may be occurring for restricted phenomena in bacteria. Yet the fascination and intensity of this question does not change the well-documented conclusion that Darwinian processes dominate in the general run of evolutionary matters.) But the expert’s properly intense focus on wriggles at the border should not challenge or derail our equally valid broad-scale focus on central principles. The distinction of “is” from “ought” ranks as such a central principle, and this little volume has been written (for all intelligent readers, and without compromise or dumbing down) as a broad-scale treatment.
To cite an analogy: At the Arkansas creationism trial (discussed in detail in chapter 3 ), philosopher Michael Ruse presented the famous Popperian definition of falsifiability as a chief criterion for designating a topic as scientific (with unfalsifiable “creation science” banned by this standard). Judge Overton accepted Ruse’s analysis and used this criterion as his main definition of science in reaching his decision to strike down the Arkansas “equal time” law. But falsificationism (like the is-ought distinction, and like Darwinian domination versus a little bacterial Lamarckism) represents a good generality, subject to extensive debate and controversion for several borderland subthemes among professional scholars. Some academic philosophers attacked Ruse for “simplifying” the subtleties of their field, but I would strongly defend his testimony (as did, I believe, the great majority of professional philosophers) as a valid analysis for the appropriate general scale of broad
1 I apologize to colleagues in philosophy and related fields for such an apparently cavalier “brush by” of an old and difficult topic still subject to much discussion, and requiring considerable subtlety and nuancing to capture the ramifying complexities. I recognize that this claim for separation of the factual from the ethical has been controversial (and widely controverted) ever since David Hume drew an explicit distinction between “is” and “ought.” (I even once wrote an embarrassingly tendentious undergraduate paper on G. E. Moore’s later designation of this issue, in his
Principia Etilica
of 1903, as “the naturalistic fallacy.”) I acknowledge the cogency of some classical objections to strict separation—particularlythe emptiness of asserting an “ought” for behaviors that have been proven physically impossible in the “is” of nature. I also acknowledge that I have no expertise in current details of academic discussion (although I have tried to keep abreast of general developments). Finally, I confess that if an academic outsider made a similarly curt pronouncement about a subtle and troubling issue in my field of evolution or paleontology, I’d be pissed off.
I would, nonetheless, defend my treatment not as a dumbing down, or as disrespect for the complexity of a key subject, but as a principled recognition that most issues of this scope require different treatments at various scales of inquiry. Broad generalizations always include exceptions and nuanced regions of “however” at their borders—without invalidating, or even injuring, the cogency of the major point. (In my business of natural history, we often refer to this phenomenon as the “mouse from Michigan” rule, to honor the expert on taxonomic details who always pipes up from the back of the room to challenge a speaker’s claim about a general evolutionary principle: “Yes, but there’s a mouse from Michigan that …”) Among experts, attention properly flows to the exceptions and howevers—for these are the interesting details that fuel scholarship at the highest levels. (For example, my colleagues in evolutionary theory are presently engaged in a healthy debate about whether a limited amount of Lamarckian evolution may be occurring for restricted phenomena in bacteria. Yet the fascination and intensity of this question does not change the well-documented conclusion that Darwinian processes dominate in the general run of evolutionary matters.) But the expert’s properly intense focus on wriggles at the border should not challenge or derail our equally valid broad-scale focus on central principles. The distinction of “is” from “ought” ranks as such a central principle, and this little volume has been written (for all intelligent readers, and without compromise or dumbing down) as a broad-scale treatment.
To cite an analogy: At the Arkansas creationism trial (discussed in detail in chapter 3 ), philosopher Michael Ruse presented the famous Popperian definition of falsifiability as a chief criterion for designating a topic as scientific (with unfalsifiable “creation science” banned by this standard). Judge Overton accepted Ruse’s analysis and used this criterion as his main definition of science in reaching his decision to strike down the Arkansas “equal time” law. But falsificationism (like the is-ought distinction, and like Darwinian domination versus a little bacterial Lamarckism) represents a good generality, subject to extensive debate and controversion for several borderland subthemes among professional scholars. Some academic philosophers attacked Ruse for “simplifying” the subtleties of their field, but I would strongly defend his testimony (as did, I believe, the great majority of professional philosophers) as a valid analysis for the appropriate general scale of broad
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