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Grumpy 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...

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August 31, 2006

Naish on the babirusas

Category: Species and systematics

Go check out Darren Naish's excellent series on the south east Asian wild pig, the babirusas, at Tetrapod Zoology, to see an excellent example of scientific blogging....

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Google books - a boon to the historian of science

Category: Philosophy of Science

One of the problems of living at the edges of empire as I do, is that often you want to have access to older books that are hard to come by. Anything from about 1870 is pretty easy to get,...

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August 30, 2006

Darwin and the Holocaust 2: Christians and Jews

Category: Race and politics

Well, we have established that the subhuman thesis is not of Darwinian origins, and made a start on showing that the eugenics thesis isn't either (more to come later), but while we're all waiting, Daily Kos has an interesting article...

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August 29, 2006

The terrorists really have won

Category: Politics

A recurring theme in the blogosphere is that our reaction to the terrorist threats is disproportionate and fundamentally subversive of our social structure and freedoms. This is usually cast in terms of the rollback of civil liberties, the denial of...

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August 28, 2006

Going round and round

Category: Humor

In line with condemning past science for present day ills, the Daily Kos correctly identifies the reason why all coherence is gone, as Donne put it, and blames the slave trade on Copernicus....

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Darwin and the Holocaust - what's the real story?

Category: Creationism

I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some...

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August 25, 2006

Yet another "new" species concept

Category: Species and systematics

Another group (in this case, pair) of scientists have come up with a species concept. In this case, it's published in the Journal of Mammalogy [304kb PDF], and it turns on species being protected gene pools. It's not new. It's...

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August 24, 2006

Prokaryotes and defining a negative

Category: History

evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear...

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On the death penalty

Category: Logic and philosophy

Shelley of Retrospectacle has asked us: Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty? I am absolutely...

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August 23, 2006

Dating the earth's surface

Category: Philosophy of Science

Well, first there's flowers and chocolates, and then a nice restaurant... Or, if you want the cheaper option, go to EARTHTIME and download the files that describe both the best modern results and the techniques used....

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The problem of Pluto is self-resolving

Category: Humor

There's been some debate over whether or not Pluto is a planet. But it turns out that the problem will soon resolve itself. A paper written by the father of Andrew Dessler, back in 1980, shows (using the same logic...

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Paramount flicks Cruise... what took so long?

Category: Humor

Paramount studios, that bastion of sensible and intelligent divertisements, has cut ties with Scientologist moron Tom Cruise, taking its lead from Nicole Kidman. Now, ordinarily what an idiot member of a stupid religion does or has done to him would...

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Australian wins the Fields Medal

Category: Philosophy of Science

For some reason, Alfred Nobel didn't endow a mathematics prize, but John Fields, secretary of the International Mathematical Union in 1931, did, and the Fields Medal is the math equivalent of the Nobel in that discipline. Four winners every four...

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August 22, 2006

They don't write 'em like that any more

Category: Humor

Mike Taylor on the Dinosaur list has this in his signature: "Conclusion: is left to the reader (see Table 2). Acknowledgements: I wrote this paper for money" -- A. A. Chastel, A critical analysis of the explanation of red-shifts by...

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Woo wooing Madonna

Category: Humor

In yet another demonstration that celebrity is no reliable guide to intelligence, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, her husband, have tried to lobby British government officials to use a magic Kabbalistic water to clean up radioactive waste. It was amusingly stymied...

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August 21, 2006

New Open Access site for scientific papers

Category: Philosophy of Science

The organisation that brought us BioMed Central has aggregated its open access journals. So far, BioMed Central (150+ journals), Chemistry Central (5 journals) and PhysMath Central (none yet) are linked here. BMC has a host of nice addons, some of...

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Catholics retreat into dogma again

Category: Creationism

This, from LifeSite: The Jesuit priest-astronomer who vocally opposed the Catholic understanding of God-directed creation, has been removed from his post as head of the Vatican observatory. Fr. George Coyne has been head of the Vatican observatory for 25 years...

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Pictures of Snowflake, the albino gorilla

Category: Humor

Acute readers may have noticed that I greatly resemble an albino gorilla (and that is only by those who have met me). But truth to tell, my picture at left is an avatar. I'm actually much grumpier. Anyway, below the...

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August 20, 2006

Reflections on suicide

Category: Logic and philosophy

A friend of mine just attempted suicide. When I was in my teens, I attempted suicide several times. It wasn't a cry for help, because nobody ever knew I tried. It was a reaction to the bad situation I found...

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August 19, 2006

A croc is a fish?

Category: Species and systematics

Lawmakers ponder the meaning of fish ......

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August 18, 2006

The Quote meme

Category: Humor

Hell, everybody's doing it, so why not me. The rules: "Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe." A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science...

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August 16, 2006

Ten things about evolution

Category: Evolution

Razib at Gene Expression has called for a followup to the "evolution in ten words or less" post he previously had and which I responded to (linked in his post above) with a call for "ten assertions about evolution". So...

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August 15, 2006

The Christian Science Monitor reviews Darwin

Category: Evolution

The Christian Science Monitor has a reasonable review of David Quammen's latest book, The Reluctant Mr Darwin, but there are a couple of interesting tells. One of my pet hates is this sort of journalistic boilerplate: Centuries before, Copernicus removed...

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Tales of the barnacle goose

Category: Evolution

Occasionally one comes across odd stories in the late medieval literature on natural history, and one is inclined to dismiss them as fablous stories born of credulous superstition. But they illustrate a much more important phenomenon - the shift from...

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Some judges have no sense of humour

Category: Politics

Here's a nasty case of a child custody case that has been fought over whether or not the mother's involvement in the Church of the Subgenius makes her an unfit mother. The Church is of course a parody on organised...

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August 14, 2006

Niles Eldredge has a blog

Category: Evolution

Just saw this link at The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould archive. Eldredge was Gould's collaborator on punctuated equilibrium theory, and is a deep thinker about matters evolutionary. It contains discussions of many topics - go check it out....

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August 13, 2006

Ode to a tree

Category: Humor

Burning silo is holding the next Festival of the Trees and coturnix suggested a poem. So I wrote one: I think that I shall never see A definition of a tree For trees evolved in many ways With diff'rent forms,...

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August 12, 2006

Evolution in Greek schools

Category: Evolution

The Greek English language newspaper Kathimerimi is reporting that there is a problem in Greece teaching evolution to secondary students. Not because of religious opposition, according to the way the article is phrased, but because of disorganisation in the curriculum....

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Christian theology in the news

Category: Design

PZ Placeholder at Pharyngula is reporting that evangelical churches in Kenya want to shut down the rich human fossil exhibit at the Kenya national museum. He's concerned that a rich heritage of all humanity will be Talibanised (remember the Buddha...

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August 11, 2006

Ask a ScienceBlogger - AIDS

Category: Politics

This week's question is To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?... I was in my sexually active 20s when AIDS hit, but it was a distant thing,...

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New microscope technique allows visualisation of cell contents

Category: Philosophy of Science

New Light Microscope Images Cellular Proteins with Near-Molecular Resolution. Advances in microscopy have fuelled biology. Here is a new approach that allows the visualisation of individual proteins, using fluorescent in situ hybridisation techniques. What's even more interesting is that the...

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August 9, 2006

An exotic mix

Category: Creationism

One of the pitfalls of blogging is that you can go for days without finding anything worth saying, and then get a bunch of things worth noting all at once. Today is such a day. So here is a heterogeneous...

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August 7, 2006

An evolutionary timeline

Category: Evolution

Here is a very nice cosmological and geological evolutionary timelien in Flash format. It has sliders that allow you to move from one era to the next. Be aware that nothing much happens until the Archaean, so it's not broken...

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History never repeats

Category: Philosophy of Science

When history rhymes, it is because we have not attended to the differences between particular historical institutions or processes, but the similarities.

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August 4, 2006

Niches and theology

Category: Philosophy of Science

Science & Theology News has an article on "evolutionism" that is replete with historical errors and other misdemeanors. But it indicates some nuances of the evolutionary biological debates are starting to have some impact. The author, Gennaro Auletta, is a...

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August 3, 2006

Ask a ScienceBlogger - what film?

Category: Philosophy of Science

This week's question is What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally.......

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Biodiversity and species

Category: Philosophy of Science

Here is a worthwhile short essay on biodiversity and the role of social norms in science. I particularly liked these paragraphs: To begin with, it is apparent that "biodiversity" is not a factual observation, but a cultural construction. One way...

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August 1, 2006

On philosophy, humidity and equanimity

Category: Administrative

In which our hero rediscovers history and sociology and damned hot weather... My travels continued with the usual boring flight to Heathrow, thence to Chicago, and a train trip to visit David Hull, as I said. As I flew...

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Buy biodiversity bionomially

Category: Humor

COSMOS magazine is reporting that the local bank, the Bank of Queensland, has bought a Linnean name for themselves. Yes, that's right: they paid for a spider to be named after them officially. Now, I don't know what you think...

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