Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
One man's struggle against impermanence
John Wilkins is an 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 worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up a research fellowship at the University of Sydney. 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 in 2004, which he has worked into two books.
This blog is designed evolved to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
I also have an Australia-focussed blog: The Drought Resistant Philosopher
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
November 30, 2006
Category: Administrative
In case anyone thought that I had given into existential despair or had a major infarct or something, the answer is yes, I did, on both counts. Or, in other words, I moved house. It took five days, and I...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:37 AM • 10 Comments •
November 25, 2006
Category: Administrative
Ignore what's below the fold, unless you are one of those who just can't not look......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:21 AM • 4 Comments •
November 23, 2006
Category: Creationism
Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does. Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:29 PM • 39 Comments •
Category: Evolution
This is such a cool site: the Biology and Palaeontology Qs and As site is for UK school students to ask questions of experts. And some of those questions are way sophisticated. Kids are always dinosaur nuts (or at least...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:43 AM • •
November 22, 2006
Category: Philosophy of Science
Our Lords and Masters ask Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed? According to the dictionary, a "laureate" is "someone honored for great achievements; figuratively someone crowned with a laurel wreath". We can read this...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:39 PM • 1 Comments •
November 19, 2006
Category: Evolution
Just because a bunch of German, French and British people invented geology some 200 or more years ago, all the "type locations" for the geological column have been defined in terms of Northern Hemisphere locations. Finally, though, we Australians...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:40 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Evolution
Some time back, I was doing driving duty for a conference of philosophers (that's the collective noun; another is a dispute of philosophers) on a skin diving trip, and one of my passengers was Jonathon Kaplan (actually, if I'd crashed...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:20 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Philosophy of Science
One of the points made by Rabbi Slifkin in the article I cited recently is that if you insist on using God as an explanans in the aspects of the world we do not yet understand, that is going to...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:27 AM • 5 Comments •
November 16, 2006
Category: Creationism
My favourite rabbi, Natan Slifkin, has a piece in the Jerusalem Post entitled "The problem with intelligent design". In it he distinguishes between thinking that evolutionary processes involve randomness and thinking that a universe that can evolve living things is...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:54 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Creationism
The Knoxville Metro Pulse Online has a nice guest opinion piece by Rikki Hall that uses Zeno's paradox as an analogy for creationists and evidence....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:02 AM • 1 Comments •
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