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.
August 31, 2006
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:25 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:13 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 30, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:06 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 29, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:24 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 28, 2006
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:52 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 25, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:02 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:48 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:41 AM • 49 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 23, 2006
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:06 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:47 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 22, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:13 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:37 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:37 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:45 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:03 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:38 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 19, 2006
Category: Species and systematics
Lawmakers ponder the meaning of fish ......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:21 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:43 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 16, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:49 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:41 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:12 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:42 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 14, 2006
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:02 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 13, 2006
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,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:35 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 12, 2006
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:53 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:05 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 11, 2006
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,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:06 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:02 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 9, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:01 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 7, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:19 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:47 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 4, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:56 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 3, 2006
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.......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:32 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:23 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 1, 2006
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:19 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:18 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
