Why I am not an animalist

Bullfight in Benavente
in honor of Philip I.
Attributed to the Flemish painter
Jacob van Laethem

I have written two previous posts in this blog (this one and this one) attacking animalism in its inflamed form, which occasionally makes its way into the media. These two posts have given rise to many comments in their Spanish version, as some of my readers identify themselves rather with the animalistic position than with mine. In this post I’ll try to explain some of the reasons why I think as I do.

First, as my readers know (for it’s the subject of the most read post in this blog, about 35,000 visits), I don’t consider man as just another animal (as some, but not all, animalists think, and they use this argument to deny that man can have more rights than other animals, or to assert that animals should have the same rights as we do).

Space as a point of concord for humanity

Start of a V-2 rocket in 1943

The exploration of space began some seventy years ago, as a continuation of the Third Reich’s war effort to develop ballistic missiles (the V-2 rocket) to bombard Britain and other places without the need of airplanes.

At the end of World War II, the two new great powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) recruited the scientists and technicians who had carried out the German advances in that field, took them to their respective countries and started programs of space exploration, whose first objective was, of course, to obtain military advantages in the cold war that had just begun. As a result of Operation Paperclip (the US recruitment program), German scientists as important as Werner von Braun went to work in the United States. An equivalent Soviet program (the Operation Osoaviakhim) did the same with other German scientists, perhaps less known, but equally efficient. With their help, both superpowers began a space race that would last several decades.

The extinction of the dinosaurs

Since their discovery, at the beginning of the 19th century, dinosaurs have always awakened human imagination. The past existence of such large animals, which seemed to have left no trace in the current fauna, is quite suggestive. In the multitudinous field of science, dinosaurs have always occupied an extremely attractive place. Dinosaurs have appeal.

On the other hand, the mystery of the disappearance of dinosaurs was soon posited. What could have caused their extinction? In the next century and a half, various possible causes were proposed, such as the following:

• It was said, for example, that primitive mammals could have caused the extinction of dinosaurs by eating their eggs. The trouble is, both groups of animals lived together for a hundred million years without any problem. In fact, mammals were cornered by their giant neighbors and could not develop and spread until they disappeared.
• It was also said that the apparition of flowering plants (Angiosperms) during the Cretaceous period, the last when dinosaurs lived, could have caused their extinction by a change in their diet. The trouble is, the Cretaceous period was very long, and flowering plants appeared thirty million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. If they could put up with that diet for so long, why should it suddenly be fatal for them?
• Another reason adduced was a change of climate. During the Mesozoic Era (the age of the dinosaurs) the Earth's climate was quite warm. Then, in the Tertiary period, it was colder. The bad news is that climate changes are usually gradual, while the disappearance of dinosaurs does seem to have been quite fast. Therefore it was proposed that the cause of the extinction could have been a sudden catastrophe that would have caused a sudden climate change.

Climate change

From a comic strip by Quino:

Mafalda, her little brother Guille, and their friend Felipe, are sitting on a doorstep during a very hot day.

Felipe: Bother! It’s really hot!

Guille: It’s the fault of the government, right?

Mafalda: No, it's the fault of the summer.

Turning toward Felipe, she adds:

Mafalda: He’s a small boy, he still can’t put the blame right.

Listened in a radio station news in June 2017, on a very hot week:

Announcer: The cause of the heat we are experiencing is the climate change.

Like Guille, this announcer (or the person who wrote what she said) can’t put the blame right.

Nobody doubts that climate change is a fact. In recent decades there have been some evident changes in the global climate: the average temperature of the planet is rising; the glaciers are receding; the polar ice is melting; the distribution and intensity of extreme weather events (storms and hurricanes) is changing. What we must discover is the cause of these phenomena. Regarding this, there are two main theories:

Pierre Duhem, Popper’s predecessor

Karl Popper

In a previous post in this blog, I mentioned how Karl Popper defines what is, and what is not, a scientific theory:

A theory is scientific if and only if it is possible to design an experiment that demonstrates that this theory is false.

I also said there that, according to Popper, a scientific theory can never be considered completely confirmed. In other words, we can never be absolutely sure that it is true.

After writing that post, which I published almost one year ago, I have discovered that these two Popper’s fundamental ideas had been anticipated by Pierre Duhem, to whom I dedicated the previous post in this blog.

Popper detailed both these ideas in his book The Logic of Scientific Research, published in German in 1934 and in English in 1959, both versions written by himself. Duhem, however, had anticipated them in 1913, in a letter addressed to Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, which the latter published in his book Dieu. Son existence et sa nature (1914). By then, Popper was about 12 years old. Did Popper read Duhem? Perhaps not this letter, although other works certainly, since in The Logic of Scientific Research he quotes Duhem five times, usually to show his discrepancy. The problem is that misunderstanding Duhem is quite easy. To avoid it, one should probably read his whole work, which not everybody can do.

Pierre Duhem: Realist or anti-realist?

Pierre Duhem

Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) can be considered one of the last nineteenth-century physicists. Specialist in Thermodynamics, the branch of physics that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, introduced the idea of the ​​chemical potential at the same time as William Gibbs, expressed in the Gibbs-Duhem equation, which connects the chemical potential with magnitudes such as the volume, pressure, entropy and temperature of a chemical mixture. He is considered one of the creators of physical chemistry and was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In his scientific work, Duhem confronted Marcellin Berthelot, whose principle of maximum work he opposed. This led to his doctoral thesis being rejected, and he was denied a teaching position at the University of Paris. Duhem was finally shown to be right, as Berthelot’s principle is not generally applicable, for it has many exceptions.

Anti-realist answers to the no-miracles argument

Hilary Putnam

The previous post described the no-miracles argument, proposed by Hilary Putnam. The article ended thus:

What do anti-realists answer to this argument? Are they convinced?

I guess the readers have deduced that the answer to the second question must be negative, otherwise the debate between realism and anti-realism would have ended. Let us look, therefore, at the answer to the first question. Faced with the abductive argument of no-miracles, anti-realists answer in two different ways:

1.      Bas van Fraassen is an anti-realist American philosopher who criticizes Putnam’s argument, arguing that scientific theories are successful because unsuccessful theories have been eliminated by natural selection (i.e. scientists have ruled them out). Therefore, asking why science is successful is similar to asking why basketball players are tall: because they have been selected. Let us see how Fraassen describes his theory, which is called constructive empiricism: