One man's struggle against impermanence
John Wilkins is an aged, eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Queensland, in Australia. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts, which he is working into two books. One has been accepted for publication, and will come out in 2008; the other may be contracted soon. He is also interested in cultural evolution, philosophy of religion, Macintosh computers and his kids (they sort of make it a necessity, you know?).
If anyone knows of a tenurable, or even medium term, job in philosophy of biology, let me know. Have library, will travel. The contract runs out soon...
This blog is designed to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality
Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series)
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
June 25, 2006
Category: Administrative
I suppose the regulars have noticed that I've dropped off a bit lately. I can explain... The next few weeks are mad for me. I have two papers to write, and deliver, one in Canberra at the Australasian Association of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:08 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Here is a paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology which documents learned hunting behaviour among Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin, in Western Australia....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:22 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 23, 2006
Category: History
Yahoo news is reporting that Harriet, the world's oldest tortoise, has died aged 176 Harriet was collected by Darwin on the Beagle voyage in 1830, when she was about 2 inches. She found her way to Brisbane, where I currently...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:27 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2006
Category: Creationism
The Interacademy Panel on International Issues has issued a statement on evolution:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:17 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2006
Category: Creationism
Courtesy of Panda's Thumb, a link to this wonderful short OpEd: The York Daily Record - Coulter mangles Dover case, by Mike Argento. It includes many beautiful zingers about the mad blonde, but the best is this: ... that brings...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:38 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
... while I adjust my professional career. Please check back in a little while for more ranting....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Well after reading many papers by various bacteriologists, mycologists, and other non-vertebrates specialists, I have come to the conclusion that there is no single set of conceptions or criteria (that much abused word!) for something being a species in...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:11 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2006
Category: Evolution
When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems. The Recombination Model is...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:06 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2006
Category: Evolution
The second main approach to a natural conception of microbial species (by which I mean, as opposed to operational, practical or conventional ones, collectively called "artificial" conceptions) is what I will call the Quasispecies Model. According to the concept...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2006
Category: Evolution
The cluster of genomes of asexual organisms forms what is called a "phylotype" (Denniston 1974, a term coined by C. W. Cotterman in unpublished notes dated 1960; I like to track these things down). Phylotype is a taxon-neutral term,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Reposted from the old blog. OK, this is one of a series of posts in which I will play with ideas that might will become a paper. The problem is this: usually we define a species as a group...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:35 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2006
Category: Politics
Courtesy of Unscrewing the Inscrutable, comes this video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland about a Bill he sponsored for putting the Ten Commandments up in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Wtach what happens when he...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:50 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I recently [some time back now - this being a repost] received this question in email. I hope the correspondent doesn't mind my posting it anonymously. I notice from www.dictionary.com that the word "Devolution" is a term in biology which...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:56 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Diversity changes through time at all levels of biology.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:23 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2006
Category: Evolution
A recent paper in Nature, Speciation by hybridization in Heliconius butterflies is getting a fair bit of comment on the internet. This is a case where the researchers, wondering if an Andean butterfly species was a hybrid of two others,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:13 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
The new challenge is this: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically? Answer, as anyone who knows...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:09 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
This, to a Mac OS X user, seems strangely apposite. It appeared in The Monthly, June 2006. Windows is Shutting Down...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:25 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2006
Category: Politics
It seems the Republican party in the US is continuing its war on science they don't like. The Sex Drugs and DNA Blog reports that House Republicans vote AGAINST science integrity amendment. The amendment would have protected scientists from censorship...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:25 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Reed, who was a doctoral student at the genetics department of the University of Georgia, is no longer. Now he's Dr Cartwright to you. The author of De Rerum Natura, one of my favourite blogs (understandably a bit sparse lately),...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:21 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2006
Category: History
[This is another repost from my old blog. I am sitting at home suffering with a hole in my jaw where a tooth, or its remnants was extracted with extreme prejudice, so I don't feel much like blogging.] The evil...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:44 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
"Living fossils" are an artifact of the way we classify species and higher taxonomic groups.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:36 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2006
Category: Politics
No comment needed: Gitmo Suicides Comment Condemned, U.S. Official's 'Publicity Stunt' Remark Draws International Backlash - CBS News...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:27 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
The Public Library of Science, which as I noted recently has started a project of Open Access review of articles with its PLOSOne, has also begun a blog on it, divided into technical and publishing streams. There's not much there...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:26 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Species and systematics
An archival post from a year and a half ago. I recently attended my last Systematics Forum at the Melbourne Museum. This lovely little series covers issues at a technical and theoretical level to do with classification in biology, which...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
To be sure, there are grey areas in science itself. We don't know which avenues will be fruitful to pursue ahead of time - success is measured after the fact, not before it. So there are many claims in the literature that might be true, but which aren't yet substantiated. Science needs its greay areas. But there are black areas too, and ID and creationism (which are the same thing anyway) falls squarely in the black.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:30 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2006
Category: Humor
So, Janet posed the meme (or something with the same name) to enable us newbies to introduce ourselves. And because I'm a follower, not a leader, I have to offer up my predilections to you all....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Race and politics
When I was sixteen, I was rebelling against whatever society had got by getting stoned, generally screwing up, and eventually getting thrown out of high school six months before I graduated. Laurie Pycroft on the other hand, decided enough...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:06 AM • 14 Comments •
June 10, 2006
Category: Evolution
Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has an excellent roundup of recent work on the group of monkeys named in the title, following the discovery of a new mangabey monkey called a kipunji. He notes that molecular data suggest a diphyletic...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:30 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Here is a nice site showing dinosaur skeletal fragments and the reconstructions. Go check it out....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:24 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
Statistics, calculus, you name it, I don't know it.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:19 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Originally, science began when people started to give their papers and results publicly, for discussion and correction. Back in the days of the Royal Society and other subsequent bodies, a talk would be read to the society and then...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:41 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2006
Category: Race and politics
Suppose you come from Mars, freshly minted with your PhD degree in the ethology of terrestrial mammals, and you decide to study this ape species that uses language and technology. Suppose further it's about 10,000 years before now. What...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:45 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:04 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2006
Category: Evolution
So [Natural Selection] is a theory of science, it does help research, and it is to be preferred, says Popper, even before his recantation.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2006
Category: Politics
I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the extreme laisse faire capitalist...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:44 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
I was bemoaning to Paul Griffiths and Sahotra Sarkar, admittedly over a beer, that unlike them (they are both birdwatchers), I lacked a special organism I could be expert about. This is a grievous fault in a philosopher of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:16 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 5, 2006
Category: Humor
Diseases are threatening the production of chocolate. What will I do to stave off Nietzschean despair? There's always beer, I guess......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:42 PM • 2 Comments •
