evolvingthoughts

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John Wilkins

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August 7, 2009
For those who come here from old links, my new blog address is evolvingthoughts.net This blog is no longer active.
May 23, 2009
So it is farewell... I have enjoyed blogging here at Seed, who have been generally very good to me given the constraints of herding cats with string they are working under, but it is time to move on. The neighborhood became a little hostile to old fashioned fogies like me, and that's all we need to…
May 20, 2009
There's some reorganising of my life and blogging going on. I'll announce all the changes to links and stuff in a fortnight or less. Please excuse the dust and noise of the construction behind the plastic sheets.
May 19, 2009
In addition to the "missing link" trope that is being dished out about the new primate fossil, is another one, more subtle and insidious: it's the ancestor of all primates. How do they know that? Consider a biologically realistic scenario: at the time there were probably hundreds of species of…
May 18, 2009
May 18, 2009
One of the problems that many people have with evolution is not religious, but philosophical. If evolution is true, they think, then we are at sea - nothing is fixed, nothing is determinate, all coherence is gone, as Donne famously lamented of the death of the two-sphere universe and physics. This…
May 18, 2009
Anyone who has had to order textbooks for students knows how expensive they are. Here's something that I hope may end up a trend amongst academics: Creative Commons licensed texts. P.D. Magnus wrote a logic textbook, forall x, which he made available under the CC license; and now David Morris of…
May 18, 2009
The wonderful Project Gutenberg has just released a fully HTMLised version of R. C. Punnett's (he of the famous "square") 1911 book Mendelism, which shows how quickly the implications of Mendelian genetics, rediscovered 11 years earlier, were worked through. It's a wonderful read, and anyone with a…
May 17, 2009
The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous…
May 16, 2009
I find it highly ironic that the people taking the moral stand here are the atheists: It does not matter if it prevented some sort of attack. It is still a crime, it is still wrong, and those responsible for it deserve criminal prosecution. No amount of talk about 9/11 can change this. "It", is…
May 16, 2009
This is to note that u n d e r v e r s e, the blog that uses nineteenth century German emphatic spacing, has been added to my blogroll (I hope - I'm not good that these customisation things), wherein you can read deep, intelligent and Chamberlainist musings by Chris Schoen. Highly recommended.
May 16, 2009
Leiter reports that Benson Mates has died, and links to the UC Berkeley short obit: The Department announces with great sadness the death, on May 13, 2009, of Prof. Emeritus Benson Mates. Born in 1919, Prof. Mates studied at the University of Oregon, completing the B.A. degree there in 1940 (in…
May 16, 2009
Chris Nedin has another post of great interest (even if it is for a late period, the Pleistocene) which goes into my file of "the older naturalists were great observers", as he shows how modern chemistry supports Richard Owens' diagnosis of Thylacoleo as a carnivore, even though it is in a clade of…
May 13, 2009
In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means. If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I…
May 11, 2009
It is often the case that when non-academics, or even non-humanities academics, talk about my generic field, they refer to it as "arts", and mean by this the creative arts, like performing arts, crafts, and corporate accounting. So they justify the funding for the "arts" (or "the yartz", as a Barry…
May 11, 2009
Again, the press are talking about "the missing link". Let's get one thing clear. There is no missing link. Rather, there are an indefinite number of missing branches. To have a missing link, you need to visualise evolution as a chain. If there's a gap in the chain, then you have a missing link.…
May 10, 2009
Before this text in 1686, the term species just meant some sort or kind of organism. It was a Latin word in ordinary use without much meaning in natural history, but then arguments began whether or not there were one or more species for this or that group, and so it became important to know what…
May 8, 2009
As the science of order ("taxonomy"), Systematics is a pure science of relations, unconcerned with time, space, or cause. Unconcerned with time: systematics is non-historic and essentially static; it knows only a simple juxtaposition of different conditions of form. Unconcerned with space:…
May 8, 2009
There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD…
May 8, 2009
It's called Philosophy and Theory in Biology. This is based on some heavy hitters: Massimo Pigliucci, Jon Kaplan, Alan Love and Joan Roughgarden are the editors, and the editorial board looks like a Who's Who of philosophy of biology. No apparent page charges, and it's online only (I hope they take…
May 7, 2009
I was going to do a long screed on the efficacy of hygiene but this is much clearer. But NSFW, it is below the fold.
May 6, 2009
My union is calling a strike next Tuesday. I'm not sure what to do. I don't teach, and have no administrative duties, so should I stop thinking from for 8 hours? I'm not sure the administration would notice... Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has a series of podcasts from the series of lectures on…
May 5, 2009
Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms has an absolutely stunning review of the origin of chloroplasts in eukaryotes. It's so good I thought it was from Elio Schaechter's blog Small Things Considered when it first popped up in my reader - higher praise there is not.
May 5, 2009
Asks MSNBC's Chris Matthews of the GOP's Mike Pence. The latter dances around it, trying to avoid asserting what science knows to be true, but this raises an interesting problem: does one have to "believe" in evolution? I mean it's a physical process (the "fact" side) which has a number of…
May 5, 2009
I told 'em! I told 'em! So I did. Millennium hand and shrimp!
May 5, 2009
Many years ago, ians, really, I naively asked my lecturer who I thought knew everything in the field, how he kept up with the literature. He shrugged and said he couldn't, and neither could anyone else. I thought he was just being self deprecating. Experience taught me better shortly. But there are…
May 4, 2009
The host ISP of Electronic Frontiers Australia has been served a take-down notice for linking to an R-rated "blackbanned" site, itself not in Australia, in a page that was a political comment on the merits (or demerits, rather) of mandatory internet filtering in Australia. I put the entire text of…