I agree with a few things in this article although I don't think in the way the author intends. I've said before that IMO there is no major difference between science and philosophy. The difference is that what we call philosophy are topics where science is very immature such as the study of human ethics. Similarly, I think that there is no one "scientific method" but rather science is a combination of various methods such as peer review, data analysis, theory development, mathematical analysis, experimentation, falsifiable hypotheses, etc. For some disciplines (e.g., physics and chemistry) we can use all of these tools for others (e.g., psychology and even history) we can only use some. We use as many as we can for any problem. Some will object that for example it is impossible to do experiments regarding history but in fact I've seen various experiments done to attempt to answer questions such as "Where was the battle of Cannae actually fought?" or "what was Greek fire?".

I also think there is no question that science can apply to the study of ethics. Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm, Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, and a paper I wrote based on some of Hauser's ideas and research in evolutionary psychology: https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/umg_ontology

I also think that there is a lot of overlap between good science and being (what I consider) a good person such as rationality, accessing arguments rather than the status of those who make them and so on. But (as I argue in my paper) there is one fundamental difference between what we consider morality and what we consider science. That is that morality is about value judgements. There are many scientific theories that can make one feel uneasy. Saying "if X is true then Y is true and Y is something I consider fundamentally immoral regardless of any arguments" is not a valid scientific argument. This is what Hume called the Is-Ought problem. We can't go from the domain of analyzing the universe (is statements) to what is moral and right (ought statements). Thus, any coherent moral system must start with at least one axiom that says I value X because I value X. E.g., a Utilitarian values maximizing well being. If you ask them why, although they may attempt at an explanation, what it really comes down to will always be that there is some core value (ought statement) that they take as a given. That's the fundamental difference between morality and science. Science strives for objectivity, morality can still strive for rationality and coherence but ultimately morality must be founded on some core axiom(s).

BTW, if you want to see an alternative point of view to what I just said in another post I recommend reading Saul Alinksky's Rules for Radicals. He gets quoted by the right so much... not so much anymore actually but for a while they were always referencing the book as the bible for all left wing people so I gave it a read. To my surprise I didn't like it much. It was a fun read and Alinsky did some amazing things but it was all about how it's important to present people with someone to hate and make politics personal. E.g., if some company is polluting the drinking water then Alinsky says to demonize the CEO of the company and what a creep he is rather than emphasizing all the bad consequences of not having clean water. Maybe that's why I would never make a good politician, I like to think that down deep most human can be reached by rational arguments. Which is also why I thought Trump would never be elected so I should probably admit defeat but I'm stubborn... kind of irrational that way... no one is completely consistent... ;-)

I know that many people won't agree but I think the Enlightenment was a pretty cool movement and that one of the values of the Enlightenment is that reason matters more than myths. The thing about a myth is that if it is an effective enough story it can justify whatever you want. There are probably comics somewhere in the middle east that portray the 9/11 hijackers as noble heroes who sacrificed their lives for Islam (which is how they saw themselves).

So, much as it is out of fashion in a lot of ways these days I think reason and facts in the long term trump (no pun intended) myths and stories and people who argue for social justice, environmentalism, universal healthcare have reason on our side. Even from a purely selfish standpoint these things make sense, especially from the long term point of view of future generations and (although their behavior often isn't consistent with it) everyone, especially those on the right, love their children and want a good life for them.

Just a few examples of facts you virtually never hear in the Main Stream Meida: 1) A gun in the home is far, far more likely to be used to injure or kill a friend or family member (either due to accident or rage) than it is to defend the family from an intruder. 2) People talk about government healthcare in fiscal terms saying the US "can't afford it" but universal healthcare is both more cost effective and gives much better outcomes. When you look at how much the US spends on healthcare as a percentage of GDP we are either at or very close to the top of all nations. While our outcomes are down at the level of 3rd world nations (there are standardized metrics that healthcare professionals use to rate everything from individual hospitals to the healthcare system of a nation) 3) Alternative energy is already as or more cost effective than fossil fuels if you take away things like the tax subsidies the US government still gives to companies like Exxon for looking for new sources of oil. Paying Exxon to look for oil is like paying me to look for attractive, single intelligent women. I'll take the money but I'm already looking as hard as I can.

>but it remains intriguing to look at a beautiful rose and wonder what forces, or perhaps intelligence, led its stem to be studded with protective thorns that say to the observer, “keep your distance.”

But we already know what force "led its stem to be studded with protective thorns" That force is evolution by natural selection. At some point a mutation led to roses with very minor thorns but those thorns gave the mutated rose a slightly better change to reproduce so eventually the mutation spread through all roses. Then another mutation happened to make them longer and/or sharper until we got modern roses.

>chemical or physiological considerations coupled with mere chance

This is a common misconception about evolution by natural selection. Dawkins talks about this in his book Climbing Mount Improbable. It's not "mere chance". It's "mere chance" (aka randomness) coupled with natural selection that selects adaptations that increase Reproductive Success (RS). But that last part is essential and it is an error to just say "mere chance" results in anything.

>It is nonetheless difficult to set aside the possibility that the fish transformed its fins into legs because it somehow wanted to get out of the water,

The only reason it is difficult to set aside the idea that the fish "wanted" to get out of the water is ignorance of Biology and the fact that people have a tendency to see agency even when there isn't any. That actually is also a result of evolution. If a hunter gatherer hears rustling in the forest the cost of thinking it might be a predator when it is just the wind is far less than the cost (again in terms of RS) of thinking it is the wind when it is actually a predator.

>Schopenhauer offered a number of images to represent the cannibalistic reality of life,

Schopenhauer didn't have the benefit of Neo-Darwinism. In the early days of Darwinism when he lived the thought was that "nature red in tooth and claw" was all that drove natural selection. We know better now. Cooperation and synergy are just as important, especially for social animals such as primates. And synergy doesn't happen just within conspecifics but across species as well. Robert Trivers in his seminal paper on Reciprocal Altruism had several examples such as little cleaner fish that swim into the mouths of much bigger fish (that could easily eat the small fish) but the larger fish let the cleaner fish act as their dentists, cleaning out the little bits of food in their mouths. When the big fish suddenly has to move (e.g., because an even bigger fish like a shark is around) it could quickly shut its jaw and get a little meal but instead it signals to the little fish (via a change in coloring) that cleaning time is over and it's time to get out ASAP which they do.

>Upon realizing that we are all made of Will, a sense of deep guilt about our very constitution follows.

What does it even mean to say we "are all made of Will"? And whatever it means assuming for the sake of argument that it is true why should that make us feel guilty if that's the way nature made us? One of the amazing things about humans is we can override our genetic predispositions (if that weren't the case there would be no market for contraceptives) so assuming we "are all made of will" (again whatever that means) we can change that if we want to.

Also, I don't agree at all that individualism is completely bad. I think it's clearly wrong to take it to extremes the way people like Ayn Rand do but that doesn't mean that individualism is completely wrong. People make scientific discoveries, beautiful art and music even do altruistic acts at least partly because they are driven by a desire to express their individuality. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. At least I find no compelling argument in this article that supports such a conclusion. Just statements that it is true with no real justification.

I do think that there are good ideas in Buddhism. I try to meditate every day and I've found meditation helps me with impulse control, anger management, substance abuse and in general to do a better job of understanding what I really want rather than being driven by short term gratification. But ultimately the reason I do that are at least partly selfish, because I want to lead a better life and part of that better life includes doing research, publishing papers, and getting recognition for my work which to me is an example of how individualism can be a good thing.

As I said in my original post, an organism has to reproduce. There are other factors but that one by itself is sufficient. Every organism from single celled life to plants to humans reproduces. The Earth doesn't generate baby Earths that go out into the solar system and compete for resources with the offspring of other planets.

Regarding your second question if a theory can't be objectively proven or disproven (i.e., it isn't falsifiable) then it isn't what I consider a theory. It may be a metaphor or a literary device or something else but it isn't a theory. Note: this doesn't mean there has to be technology that we have at the current time that can falsify the theory. A good example is Einstein's theory of relativity. When he first created it the theory made predictions (e.g., that light from the sun would bend around Mercury) that couldn't be tested. Einstein and the world were lucky that technology became precise enough to measure the miniscule effects of a gravitational object on light shortly after Einstein published his work and experiments validated that Einstein's theories were correct.

Freudianism is another example of something that doesn't qualify as a theory because it isn't falsifiable. Kuhn and Popper first pointed this out using the Freudian example of Phobias and Reaction Formation. If the hypothesis is that a patient has a fear of intimacy and they are a virgin (demonstrate phobic behavior) that shows the hypothesis is correct according to Freudian theory. But if they go out and have sex with anything that moves that is reaction formation and also confirms the hypothesis. The hypothesis can't be proven wrong and hence the theory isn't scientific. That doesn't mean Freud wasn't brilliant, nor that he didn't make some important discoveries. The concept of the unconscious and that it could play a major role in human behavior was a major leap in psychology and virtually everyone accepts it now. But virtually no one doing experimental psychology takes Freudian theory seriously since Kuhn and Popper (many people in clinical psychology and the humanities unfortunately haven't embraced the scientific method). And yes, I think even the humanities can be done scientifically. I gave examples of one of my favorite bible scholars: Bart Ehrman (I forget if it was here or in another thread where I used Ehrman as an example) as someone who IMO clearly takes a scientific approach to his work. That also illustrates what I mean by science: not just the natural sciences and for something to be scientific doesn't mean it has to use every technique of science. Ehrman doesn't do experiments but he does rely on data, creates hypotheses, and tests them against the known facts.

And the only method that I'm aware of with a track record for testing objective truth is science. So if the Gaia concept inspires people or makes them think in new ways that's fine and I'm all for it. Just don't distort it by claiming it is a theory because it isn't... unless you want to distort the concept of theory to something that is essentially subjective to each individual. And if you want to do that I can't say it's wrong. There is no right or wrong when it comes to every day discourse. Lewis Carrol recognized that (Humpty Dumpty's speech) as did Wittgenstein and Chomsky. Natural language is context dependent and you can use theory in everyday speech anyway you want. But if you want to have serious discussions that are rigorous it seems to me that a definition of theory that most intellectuals would agree with is that it is falsifiable and is objective and that makes it science.

One last thing: I realize some people will quibble with the word "objective" and point out that no individual is completely objective. And I agree with that. That is why I think it is so important to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Because we all have biases we need processes that have demonstrated over time that they enable us to see beyond them and lead to objective truth. We'll never completely get there. But it is the striving via the use of practices such as peer review, rigorous definitions, and experiments that enable us to make progress toward it.

I'm not that adept at Reddit but I think this will take you to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/xuk9yk/comment/irsc9ui/?context=3

>Ok, so we now know that Dawkins did not scientifically disprove it, which means it remains within the realm of plausibility.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. Dawkins showed that the Gaia theory is, to use a phrase that people sometimes use to criticize String Theory, "not even wrong". I.e., it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the concept living organism means in Biology. It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.

>Is "debunk" synonymous with "scientifically disproven"?

No. To be disproven a theory needs to be coherent and falsifiable. For example, the Ptolemaic model of the solar system was coherent and made predictions that were pretty accurate but as we could measure more precisely it was clear the Copernican model was more accurate. Debunk means that the theory isn't even coherent or falsifiable. Dawkins debunked the idea that the Earth could be considered a living organism the way a nematode or human are. He showed quite clearly that by many criteria this simply isn't true.

>Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?

I discussed this in another forum. I see the scientific method as something that can encompass all disciplines. For me science consists of a series of methods: experiments, peer review, analysis, math,... Not every discipline uses every method but one can study any topic that seeks objective truth scientifically. What's more I maintain that science is the only method that has shown it can lead to objective truth.

Having said that, not everything is science. One can write essays that are meant to inspire people or motivate them to contemplate certain aspects of the universe or their life. But when people use the word theory for me the only thing that can justify using that word is science. So if Gaia is a literary device meant to encourage people to think about how the entire planet is one biosphere and that small changes can ripple and affect us all then I'm fine with it. But when you call it a theory you are saying it can make predictions and explain things in a way that is also falsifiable. So yes for me theory and scientific theory are the same thing but I don't consider it conflating. I think that some academics (e.g., Postmodernism is notorious for this) like to call things theories when if you examine them closely they are just polysyllabic jargon for fairly straight forward ideas (e.g., that we live in a sexist, racist society, that colonialism was unjust, etc.).

I'm not a biologist so you make a good point, I can't give specific examples of how Smith's ideas are falsifiable. However, I do know that when I read other books by anthropologists who analyze Late Pleistocene human behavior (e.g., Christopher Boehm) or books on game theory and animal/human behavior they always cite Smith's work and I've read other things on information in biology that cites Smith's paper. In both cases that's why I read them because I kept seeing them cited so often.

As for philosophy and pseudoscience. I guess I am harsh because I see much (not all) of modern philosophy as pseudoscience. I have a thread in another group meant for longer discussions (I think it is /askphilosophy) where I raised this issue and tried to explain my ideas but I gave up because it seemed no one was really understanding what I was trying to say. Either because what I said wasn't clear or because it challenges some of the assumptions that many modern philosophers take for granted and don't want to give up. I would like to think it's the latter but of course I would think that.

Gould is someone I don't have much respect for. The thing that he's most well known for (Punctuated Equilibrium) is a kind of theory that I call "either trivial or wrong". I.e., the way Gould describes exactly what he means by Punctuated Equilibrium isn't very clear. If you interpret it one way (that mutations happen more often during certain times in history, i.e., those where there is massive climate change or other changes to the environment) then it is obviously true but trivial. Everyone already knew that when Gould published his work. If you take the more extreme interpretation, that adaptations ONLY occur during such periods then it is a new theory but is clearly wrong. I think many people don't realize this because the way Gould writes isn't very clear so he can provide evidence that supports the trivial version of his theory and pretend that it supports the more extreme version.

Another reason I don't care much for Gould is that I think he behaved in a very unprofessional manner in his criticism of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology. He equated Sociobiology with all sorts of ideologies that is has nothing to do with. It got to the point where Wilson (who politically is far to the left) couldn't give presentations on college campuses without being disrupted by people calling him a fascist and much of that was based on Gould's unfair and incorrect criticism of Wilson's work. For more detail on this I recommend reading the first chapter in Cosmides and Tooby's excellent book on Evolutionary Psychology: The Adapted Mind. There is a PDF of that chapter here: The Psychological Foundations of Culture. It's worth reading for other reasons as well, it is an excellent introduction and overview to the relatively new field of Evolutionary Psychology (which IMO is mostly Sociobiology rebranded with a more acceptable name).

BTW, I'm not a fan of Wilson's latest work on Group Selection but I still think he was brilliant and a pioneer and was treated very unfairly by Gould. That was a complete tangent because you mentioned Gould, I'll reply to your main point in another comment.

Gaia may be an interesting idea to make people think about how connected everything is on the planet but it is at best poetry or a literary device not a theory. The Earth isn't a living organism and it doesn't evolve in the sense that organisms evolve with natural selection. For that to be true the Earth would have to be competing with other living planets for resources, it would need to generate other planet organisms, there would need to be random mutations in the planets generated by the Earth that would be selected for, etc. None of this is my idea it is all in an essay Richard Dawkins wrote a long time ago debunking the Gaia hypothesis.

I realize what I discussed above is the version of the Gaia Hypothesis that the author of the article rejects but I wanted to get that out of the way first and then address the actual article. My problem is that if that isn't what the Gaia hypothesis is, it isn't clear what it actually is. I read the article and it seems that he's claiming it's a new way of thinking about life and that distinctions such as cell are artificial because the cells (at least in an animal body) are all dependent on each other. Which is all true (more or less) but it is hardly new. There are all sorts of theories that look at the organism not at the individual cells that make up its body but in terms of higher level organs comprised of millions of cells working together. The brain is probably the most interesting example. Neurologists don't just study individual neurons but layers and columns in the brain that do things like edge detection (in the visual cortex).

I say more or less because you can take individual cells from a body and keep them alive outside the body. So it can make sense to talk about an individual cell in the body or even to go smaller and talk about the mRNA in a cell and how it helps make copies of that cell. I found nothing of any scientific value in the article. I agree with the sentiment but I disagree with calling something that is a literary device a theory. If it's a theory it makes falsifiable predictions better than other theories of standard biology and I couldn't find any such predictions.

Actual biology is beautiful and mind blowing. The fact that in every cell you have a complete blueprint for the entire organism (the DNA in each cell) is incredible and also there are amazing parallels between information in computer science and in biology. John Maynard Smith wrote a fascinating paper on that where he talks about how Shannon's model of information (measured using the same formula as entropy, indeed information is a kind of anti-entropy, information is order and entropy is disorder). This stuff is just as poetic as the pseudoscience in this article and it actually is real not some poetic musings.

Addendum: the idea of looking at an ecosystem rather than just an individual organism is also not new. Again, there is actual science on this and again I recommend John Maynard Smith as a good place to start. Smith wrote a wonderful little book called Evolution and the Theory of Games. He shows that evolution isn't just about competition as is often incorrectly assumed. He uses mathematical game theory to model various types of both competition and collaboration. For example, Smith's game theory models explain (in a falsifiable testable way) why conspecifics who compete (e.g., for mates) seldom fight to the death or even to the point where they injure each other. Again, I find real science more beautiful and poetic than pseudoscience.