Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 November 24

= November 24 =

Popular contemporary political philosophers
I'm looking for political philosophers (broadly interpreted) whose names have exceeded 0.000250% on http://books.google.com/ngrams/ at some time since 1980. To clarify, this would be searching by their full names, rather than surname alone. Gabbe (talk) 07:52, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Pen names surely. Noam Chomsky fails at 0.00003% in 1994. Sleigh (talk) 09:18, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Rush Limbaugh. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:59, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * He only gets 0.000019 (1997), I'm afraid. Tevildo (talk) 16:38, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Karl Marx squeaks in with 0.000258 in 1980. Dalliance (talk) 13:11, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Plato is comfortably above 0.001 and Socrates above 0.0005 for the entire period, but do they count as "full names"? Tevildo (talk) 13:50, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Y'all are missing the word "contemporary" in the thread title. --Viennese Waltz 13:54, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, but no contemporary political philosopher (Rawls, Nozick, Marcuse) get above 0.00005 with the "full name" restriction. Even "Ayn Rand" (who takes the OP's "broadly" to its ultimate limit) only gets 0.00002, an order of magnitude away from the target.  I think the bar may be set rather too high. Tevildo (talk) 16:25, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Agreed. A better proxy for current public interest might be number of mentions per year in e.g. New York Times or Washington Post or other prominent newspapers. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I've run through the list in Political philosophy (not, I emphasise, List of political philosophers). Excluding the classical philosophers who are only known by one name, and excluding Voltaire ("Arouet", let alone "François-Marie Arouet", is out of contention), the winner is Thomas Jefferson (0.000253, 2001).  If we're allowed surname-only searches, we have three twentieth-century candidates - "Dewey" (0.000692, 1991 - although I think this is a case where the surname-only search is likely to be a bit too generous), "Habermas" (0.000525, 2000), and "Rawls" (0.000307, 1998).  Top of the list with no restrictions is "Marx" (0.00289, 1982).  Tevildo (talk) 21:32, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The full table! Political philosophers rated above 0.00025.


 * * - Likely to contain invalid references.
 * ** - Almost certain to contain invalid references.
 * Tevildo (talk) 22:26, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks, everyone! My suspicion that no one active after the nineteenth century would surpass the likes of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx seems to be correct. (The reason I was reluctant to search for merely "Marx" is that it is impossible to distinguish hits for "Karl Marx" from those for "Groucho Marx"). Gabbe (talk) 12:14, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
 * It is perhaps the case that philosophers generally become famous after their death. That would be a potential explanation as to modern philosophers' lack in the list. Munci (talk) 10:01, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Tools used to create Ancient Roman inscriptions
What sort of hammer and chisel (or other tools) were used to create stone inscriptions of Roman square capitals? Did the tools more or less resemble the more modern ones in the photo shown here? If not, where can a find a freely licensed or public domain photo of the sort of tools the Ancient Romans used for inscriptions? —Psychonaut (talk) 13:37, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * DO any of these sources help:, ? -- Jayron 32 13:46, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Close enough; thanks. :) —Psychonaut (talk) 12:19, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

What's the point of "bringing back" extinct species?
You may have heard that the northern white rhino is basically history. Now people are talking of "bringing it back" using IVF and southern white rhino females as surrogates. But what exactly is the point? Note I do understand trying to prevent a species from going extinct by preserving their habitat, by preventing animals from being killed, poached, etc. I can understand trying to bring a species back if it is vital to some ecosystem and that ecosystem is likely to suffer in the absence of that species. But some ecologists are talking as if bringing a species back somehow "undoes" the destruction, the suffering and the fear inflicted on the extinct animals, as if it was a moral duty somehow to bring species back just for the sake of it. Now that is entirely unintelligible to me. So does anyone know of any sources that discuss the rationales of bringing species back and specifically the ethical aspects of the question? (I'm posting this here rather than at the science desk because I'm asking here about the ethical aspect, not the technical one). Contact Basemetal   here  15:52, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * When you mention "[undoing] the suffering and the fear inflicted on the extinct animal", I think you might be misinterpreting the point of the moral duty (if any is implied) which the ecologists are referring to. That is, it seems like you're interpreting the moral duty as being restitution or compensation to the extinct species itself. Generally, that's not the case. Instead, think of a car that someone has destroyed or damaged. The moral obligation to restore the car is not toward the car itself, but rather to the owner of the car. You might not be able to "undo" the destruction, and there is no suffering or fear inflicted on the car, but you can "make whole" the car owner by repairing or replacing the car - and most people would argue that the party which destroyed the car would have the moral (if not legal) duty to do so. It's likely this context in which you should be viewing these arguments. The complication is that instead of a clearly identified car owner, it's a more nebulous "humanity" which has suffered the loss. A world without northern white rhinos is less of a world than one with them, and by not having them humanity is deprived of something. This may be argued to cause a moral obligation on the part of the causative agent ("humanity") to do something to fix it. Which means that "humanity" is responsible in paying back "humanity" for the loss - which can certainly add to the confusion. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 16:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * There are also many more utilitarian and pragmatic reasons one might support de-extinction efforts, see refs below. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:39, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * (EC)We have an article on De-extinction that touches on some of these issues. The proponents would probably say that they are attempting to fill an ecological niche that had gone empty due to human activity. This is similar in spirit (though of course not technique) to Reintroduction. Consider the wolf - for a long time it was absent (or nearly so) from Yellowstone park due to human hunting. After reintroduction, some tree populations became much healthier, because the wolves pressure the elk, and the elk damage on willows goes down. This is an example of top-down control in the ecosystem (surprising redlink top-down and bottom-up design is relevant but doesn't mention trophic cascades, so see e.g. here for the concept in ecology). Similarly, putting Wooly Mammoths (which may be successfully cloned this decade) back on the taigas and tundras may well reduce the shrubification going on there (see e.g. here  and here ), and in other ways return the landscape to a more productive state, which helps humans via ecosystem services. The shrubification of the arctic is a positive feedback to global warming via albedo effects, so conceivably (WP:OR, complete speculation for the sake of illustrating a point) mammoth de-extinction could help mitigate effects of climate change! So one way to frame the ethics of de-exitinction is to help restore function to ecosystems that humans depend upon. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:39, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * (EC) For a requested source that discusses ethical aspects of de-extinction, see, for starters, -- Paulscrawl (talk) 16:46, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * More academic sources found with Google Scholar search terms ethic de-extinction -- Paulscrawl (talk) 17:05, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Fascinating topic, thanks for extincting my morning free time!
 * See TEDx DeExtinction for a series of conference videos that are all freely available or, better yet, choose viewing options by perusing brief textual meeting notes. That widely cited 2013 National Geographic-sponsored conference apparently first popularized the term "de-extinction". To cut through popular press FUD distortions, see the balanced and select references in Notes to chapter 11, "Should We?", in recent (April 2015) book by one of the participants/organizers:
 * Besides conference, she cites as "excellent" the coverage by Carl Zimmer in National Geographic (April 2013 Bringing Them Back to Life) and Nathaniel Rich's article of March 2, 2014 in The New York Times Magazine (first published online Feb. 27 as The Mammoth Cometh). I thought her final chapter note was especially noteworthy — the exchange between Paul Erlich and his former student (and an organizer of the 2013 conference) Stewart Brand:
 * Point:
 * Counterpoint:
 * Put these resources to use while they still exist. ;) I hope to see some improvement to our de-extinction article soon. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 19:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Added above book by Beth Shapiro to new Further reading section in article, and just another:
 * -- Paulscrawl (talk) 03:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
 * -- Paulscrawl (talk) 03:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Wow. Lots of stuff. Thanks to everyone and especially to Paul. You guys are great. Contact  Basemetal   here  15:14, 25 November 2015 (UTC)