March 31, 2007
Category: Creationism
None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.... The story is this: Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination inflicted on atheists by the constant celebrations afforded to Christians and Jews with all their holidays while the atheists had no holiday to celebrate.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:46 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life. "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything...
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:30 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 30, 2007
Category: Evolution
Without either downplaying Darwin's contribution or exaggerating it, we can say, Darwin was a scientist in a context, arguing problems set out by others. What else should we have expected?
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:39 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2007
Category: Evolution
Moreover, he happily discusses this developing idea with the leading natural historians and anatomists of the day, including Richard Owen, who was later thought to be an antievolutionist .... It seems likely that Darwin told William Herbert, Hugh Cuming, William Yarrell and John Lubbock At that rate of dissemination, the mere fact that he hadn't yet published his ideas seems irrelevant - most of the scientific establishment already knew.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:57 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2007
Category: General Science
A very bright light, one that illuminated the landscape for kilometers around and was subjectively bright as the sun for a brief second or two, flashed directly in front of me, and as it died, molten pieces fell away, like the shuttle disaster.... As experiences go, it was up there with seeing ball lightning when I was a kid, or the total eclipse in Melbourne that I saw through a break in an otherwise uniform cloud cover, letting me see the umbra move over at speed, while seeing the totality directly.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:28 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Many words in English come directly via Latin or indirectly via French from Latin, and they have a meaning in English that is sometimes quite different from their etymology, occasionally leaching back into French. Two such words are instruction and information, and both have peculiar meanings when used in the context of genetics.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:08 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
Well, it's a nice idea, but they seem to be a bit confused, on the one hand getting the kids to sing about Linnaean ranks, and on the other about five kingdoms, Animals, Plants, Fungi, Archebacteria and Eubacteria. Still, nice to see taxonomy being taught to primary kids, even if the song is excruciatingly cute.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:27 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end].... A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the issues of what, if anything is to count as a microbial species, in the light of modern genomics.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2007
Category: History
To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing, to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bull-rush.... And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:05 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
At Res Ipsa Loquitur comes a tale of a law professor trying to use Cicero to argue that all morality comes from intelligent design.... Read the smackdown by the student, who gives me much hope for the legal profession...
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:53 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
A major argument for the existence of the entities in scientific theories is that if these entities did not, on the whole, exist, the empirical adequacy of the theories would be miraculous.... Alan Musgrave has a new paper out in the online Rutherford Journal (which is of very high quality for an online journal) entitled "The 'Miracle Argument for Scientific Realism" which canvasses these issues.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2007
Category: Creationism
In other words, overall rate of population increase, not the increase of any part of it, is what will make a good nation, and the body structure, so prominent in the thinking of the eugenicists, is not correlated with civilisation. Darwin is as always measured in his tone, and fails to shout out his argument in ways a Dembski might understand, but there it is in black and white. Someone with a PhD in Philosophy ought to be able to read a text better than that. One might think Dembski is deliberately spinning the truth, or as we call it in technical philosophy, lying.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:51 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2007
Category: General Science
Grrlscientist just pointed out that MDs are threatening to boycott The Lancet, because Reed Elsevier, the publisher, supports weapons fairs, including manufacturers of cluster bombs.... Elsevier publishes around 40 journals that have a philosophy component.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:42 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 22, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
The Ranger's Blog has interesting snippets about environmental and conservation issues in the UK (including a nice essay on the way to estimate the age of hedgerows). Genetic Archeology reports on the use of modern forensic and genetic techniques as applied to archeology, and it has a bit of anthropology and primatology as well.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
If certain right-wing and fundamentalist pressure-groups hadn't hit upon it as a way of opposing decades of uncomfortable scientific and social progress, it'd be pushing up daisies!... Customer: Pray, is it part of a theory that unifies the paleontological and biological sciences and leads to a powerful understanding of observed homologies and the nested hierarchy of life?
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2007
Category: Creationism
For those who have not reached Level 9 or higher in the Illuminati, "epistemology" has nothing to do with getting drunk, but with how knowledge is acquired (episteme means "understanding, skill or knowledge of some field").... Scientific American's blog asks if the freeze in NIH grants for medical research is a deliberate attempt to cede the US's lead in biomedical science.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:25 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Root beer products, however, are non-carbonated and do not contain the acids that harm teeth, according to a study in the March/April 2007 issue of General Dentistry, the AGD's clinical, peer-reviewed journal.
...However, diet drinks contain phosphoric acid and/or citric acid and still cause dental erosion—though considerably less than their sugared counterparts.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:17 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
And can somebody explain in non-mathematical terms, why E8 is so important?
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:32 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
It is, as JBS Haldane noted, a fact the whole world knows, which he called "Aunt Jobiska's Theorem" after Edward Lear's poem: The Pobble who has no toes Was placed in a friendly Bark, And they rowed him back, and carried him up, To his Aunt Jobiska's Park. And she made him a feast at his earnest wish Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish;-- And she said,-- 'It's a fact the whole world knows, 'That Pobbles are happier without their toes.'
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:09 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
Courtesy of Moselio Schechter's blog Small Things Considered, is a new report, downloadable in PDF, from the National Institutes of Health, together with the American Society for Microbiology, on research into bacteria, entitled Basic Research on Bacteria.... “...research on topics like evolution and ecology has a direct impact on the advancement of human health.”
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:29 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
So it comes as a great pleasure to read a medical practitioner saying: So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman.... And call it laziness or human nature, but once a person has a diagnosis given by another professional (especially one given by a professional in the same specialty or degree as oneself), that tends to be the starting point for the next professional, not a blank slate.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:24 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
As a native of Victoria - the real one, not that Canadian knockoff - I heartily recommend this wonderfully illustrated blog on Gippsland, in eastern Victoria: Ben Cruachan. Makes me pine for the land of mild weather and lovely wilderness.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:14 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Friends of Mr Darwin may be interested to learn that images of his diary or 'Journal' (DAR158) now join the online transcription (provided by the Correspondence Project)....
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:26 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Species and systematics
Darwin's early evolutionary views of species have been well studied, in particular by Kottler whose comment above shows the "Standard View" with regards to Darwin's conceptual development. In this post, I'll look at the Notebooks Darwin kept from his realisation that species evolved, through to his beginning to work on what he came to call his "big species book".
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:17 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Then along came the Human Genome Project and suddenly we had 30,000 genes, hardly more than your average mouse. Suddenly again, we now have a mere 18,000 genes (well 18,308, but I don't think that will stand for long).
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:10 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 17, 2007
Category: Evolution
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim.... But he does one thing, which Spencer also did, that disqualifies him from being a proper Darwinian, and which was rejected by Huxley, and implicit in the views of many others: he takes what is to be right.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:51 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Funny Slogan of the Week No. This isn't funny.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:40 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
Many people think we silverbacks are kind of dumb - interested only in sex and repelling competing males.... Apparently, according to my informant, Søren Delövenbo Kongstad, this is part of the local Libraries trying to pique people's interests in books by juxtaposing oxymoronic image and idea.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
It is rarely done under any direct funding, instead being done as a side effect of other, mostly molecular, biological research, especially since NASA shut down the bulk of its Astrobiology Program under massive budget cuts.... To do anything, they need to be able to be copied and expressed, and what does this are enzymes known as ribozymes ...
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 16, 2007
Category: Evolution
This has a definite psychological experiential element to it, as all cognitive activities do, and I am sure there is an element to spirituality that is mostly experiential, but I believe that the experience only has spiritual meaning in the context of the culture. This is why Near Death Experiences always have the divine beings of the individual's culture (if Hindus and Jews saw Jesus, I'd be more impressed with the objectivity of the experience, and more-so if they all saw Mary).
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:55 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 15, 2007
Category: General Science
I want you to read me, and the other Science Bloggers, whether they are aggressively atheist or assertively theist, bored, or just good mannered, because discussion is what it's all about.... Where I grew up, the phrase "robust exchange of views", or "full and frank exchange" basically meant a serious dustup that left at least one of the debaters missing a tooth or two.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:55 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Although evolution was clearly constrained, as illustrated by many inaccessible evolutionary paths, the studies also revealed alternative accessible routes: a succession of viable intermediates exhibiting incremental performance increases. Although these findings do not address whether natural evolution proceeds in the presence or absence of selection, they do show that neutral genetic drift is not essential in the cases studied.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Now, take this mild mannered ape and put him or her into a population of hundreds of thousands, or even millions (I don't know what the first city to exceed a million was, but I'll bet it was in the fertile crescent or Egypt).... Now I'm as free of religious ideas as anyone can be who was raised in a sort of religious context (I say sort of, because Australians are rarely enthusiastic about non-sports - the very term "enthusiast" means "imbued with god").
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:13 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Is the plant [Thalictrum lucidum] sufficiently distinct from T.... Linnaeus and the species concept.Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 150 (192-220).
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
This is attempt number 247 or so, but one thing that has motivated this attempt is the danger of passive smoking to my as yet unsullied son, who lives with me (and has a sensible attitude to smoking - it's bad, and you should stop it Dad).... Given the tobacco industry's cavalier approach to truth and scientific integrity, now being replayed, in many cases by the same individuals, by climate skepticism through Exxon instead of Phillip Morris, the question has been raised - should industry funding for tobacco related topics be banned by university administrations?
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:02 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
OK, there is a piece on his legacy to taxonomy in the age of molecular systematics; one on the role and problems of amateurs in systematics and how they may resolve some of the problems of insufficient professionals; Linnaeus' raccoon named Sjupp (not Rocky, alas!); genomes and systematics; information age systematics; also here; how sex sold Linaneus' system; but the piece I want to discuss today is this one - "Species and the specious", by Emma Maris.... Recently, a diagnostic notion of species called the "phylogenetic" conception (people call them concepts, but they aren't - they are definitions or conceptions of a concept "species") has become operationally useful, and there are a slew of computer programs available to analyse and classify specimens on the basis of their traits, phenotypic or molecular.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:22 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 14, 2007
Category: Politics
Marine General, Peter Pace, expressed the official view of the US militaryhis personal opinion that gays are immoral, and shouldn't be allowed to fight. Given that the Australian armed forces, and probably the British, Israeli and other allies all allow gays in their military, it seems to me Gen. Pace is making a statement about who should be permitted to fight alongside the US..
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:31 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 12, 2007
Category: Humor
So, we're discussing, in our deep dark headquarters and in between scheming to take over the world, who should play us when the Hollywood film comes out. See below the fold for the choice made for me......
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:30 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
Here's an interesting paper: it suggests that major catastrophes need not always lead to immediate extinction pulses, but that there can be a lag of as much as 2 million years (in the case of the rise of the Panama isthmus).... Ecosystems generate a lot of their own resources as by products of autotrophic organisms (basically, photosynthesisers and lithotrophs), and so as long as there is a sufficient influx of energy into the system, an ecosystem might be able to persist for some time, buffered by the productivity of the ecosystem itself, if it is rich enough.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:02 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
That's boring (which is why I have a grant application out right now on that topic).... A roundup and prospectus on what the degradation of biodiversity is leading us to.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:09 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Not what best puts the usual creationist canards forward, but which creationist (including ID) book tried to make an intellectually satisfying and honest case. So far I have Wendell Bird's Origin of Species Revisited published about 1983 or so, which was the defendant's brief in McLean v Arkansas.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:47 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 11, 2007
Category: Evolution
I have put a file on my home site that lists as many species definitions, from Aristotle to today, as I can find. It's a work in progress, so if you find any that are significant in the history of biology or the present debate that I have missed, please let me know.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Basic Concepts
There are a cluster of terms used by biologists to describe where organisms live or grow, and they are: sympatric, allopatric, parapatric, peripatric, stasipatric, and dichopatric. This flock of technical terms is confusing to the newcomer (and to some biologists), but there is a kind of logic - as much as in the evolution of any technical jargon - that will make it clearer, and at the same time allow us to set up the alternative views on the fundamental evolutionary process of common descent: speciation.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:57 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
Migrations has this wonderful image of the structure of a yeast cell done by EMBL through electron tomography. You can even see the cytoskeleton.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:49 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 10, 2007
Category: Creationism
Thing is, in a charitable and updated form, Epicurus was right about the natures of living things - science shows us (not just evolutionary biology, but all of science) that the natures of living things really are composed of their parts and the combinations of those parts.... There's no general reason why a certain mutation had to happen, or a given population lost this or that gene, but this is because either we do not know the conditions or because there is a stochastic scatter in physical processes (which does not rely on evolutionary biology, but upon the nature of things - the world is largely scattered as a matter of fact, in physics and sociology as well as in biology).
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:35 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
This naturally led to my reading science fiction or SF (never scifi) and the third book was, as I have said, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, in the Wellsian tradition.... The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras Cities in Flight, James Blish The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester Dhalgren, Samuel R.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:10 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 9, 2007
Category: Politics
The principle of not passing retrospective legislation enshrines a safeguard against this arbitrariness, along with prohibitions against passing laws against individuals rather than the whole of the members of a jurisdiction.These principles of common law are basic, but they have been increasingly eroded in the name of convenience for some time.... Likewise, draconian laws designed to give government agencies control over people's records and lives for actions that are already illegal, such as terrorism laws when acts of murder and conspiracy already exist, are simply government attempts to get around the hedges that evolved to provide protection against arbitrary arrest and prosecution.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social evolution
What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
Read on »
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:57 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 8, 2007
Category: Humor
The Myers Biological Song: You are the very model of a modern biological You've information vegetable, animal and logical You know the ways of genomes and can list developmentical From zygote to fifth instar you can tell if it's pharyngical.... You know the mythic history of religious intransigents You answer hard apologetics offered by evangelists
