April 28, 2007
Category: Humor
Setting up ideas as competitors in the market place is correct in one sense, but there is a very large distinction between an idea that states "all ideologies should be given room to breath, so long as they do not impose their views on others by force or coercion", and an idea that says "all people must adhere to our standards".... Shouldn't all rational believers recognise that even if they could make America or wherever a Christian (Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist) state, they had better not for their own good?
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:18 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
This is a wonderful piece about a man in his late 50s learning to read. Medlar Comfits delivers again.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:15 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2007
Category: Humor
Following Scientific American's blog's description of Shelley at Retrospectacle, in the context of the the Wiley situation, as "seems to be attractive and avian-friendly", I now want it to be known henceforth that your favourite albino silverback is "obviously witty, attractive and good with children and pets". See Zuska's post for more on this.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:39 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Until the current todo started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication.... I would think it very unlikely any mass medium could teach one how to do, say, differential calculus on its own (open university experiments act solely as one-time lectures do, and I don't happen to think lectures are all that good at imparting content either).
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:13 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
It hit me: Pell, like all conservatives, thinks that social cohesion is paramount to political activity (of course, like most, but not all conservatives, it is his form of cohesion that he wants to the exclusion of all others).... They'd add to the cohesion of society if they'd just stop attacking their opponents as terrorist sympathisers, climate nancies, and marriage destroyers, and shut up.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:38 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 26, 2007
Category: History
The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which modern logic was first defined (along with other works by Aristotle), by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Some, for instance Calamus, are critical of the Christian monks that, in the 13thC CE, scraped these works off the parchment to reuse it for a prayer book.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:00 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Some phrases no science or other journalist should ever write about science: "could rewrite theories about evolution" "medical breakthrough" "scientific breakthrough Any suggestions (with links, please)?
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:17 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
I'll be in London (the one in the UK, not any American knockoff) on Sunday 22nd and Monday 23rd July. I'm meeting someone at University College London, but I'll be free in the evenings if anyone wants to meet up (and offer a couch I can sleep on, if possible).
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:21 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
http://earthportal.org is the result of 650 of the world's top scientists in 49 countries (so far) coming together to produce the highest quality, non-commercial, non-profit resource for information about our planet anywhere in the World.... Tomorrow, we will webcast, the press conference in Washington DC at the Press Club beginning at 1 p.m. featuring Jane Goodall, Robert Corell, and Ambassador Richard Benedick among others.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2007
Category: General Science
If an author publishes work and I copy it for my own purpose, then I have stolen something from the author (and publisher, if the copyright is held by both). But if I quote something of the author's for the purposes of discussion, then I have committed no theft, in pretty well every jurisdiction that is cosignatory to the Berne Convention on Copyright.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:36 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Hat tip Dino-L...
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:58 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:54 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
Apropos of the gun control deniers:...
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:37 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 24, 2007
Category: Administrative
Chris Mooney, who is too damned young and handsome, was in Sydney yesterday (well for a few days before that) so I decided the decent thing was to fly down from Brisbane to meet him, given that he travelled across some small bit of water to get here.... I bought a copy of his book, The Republican War on Science which I hadn't previously seen in stores here (republican has a different connotation in Australia), or at least not when the author was available to write a nice dedication.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:34 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
Here's the publisher's blurb: Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional.... Written primarily for graduate students, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the more philosophical and ethical aspects of the neurosciences.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2007
Category: Politics
A prior study had argued that it had no effect on the rate of gun deaths; this study says that around 280 deaths per year have been prevented, both suicides and violent crime-related deaths. At the actuarial rate of $AUS2.5 million per death saved, the $500 million buyback paid for itself in two years or so.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:37 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.... Darwinian thinking can help us better understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with stories.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:58 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
Now Strange Maps publishes the Bellman's Map from Hunting of the Snark, which accompanies the following stanzas: He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs!
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:34 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Species and systematics
Yesterday was Willi Hennig's birthday. Hennig invented cladistics (though he called it "phylogenetic systematics"), which is the foundation for all modern taxonomy.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:50 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2007
Category: Evolution
Given that for any decent length of M, the number of ancestors is going to be very large, and the subsequent number of shared and unshared ancestors is going to be relatively small for a constrained clade, the latter makes almost no difference in the final number.... However, no matter what the speciation rates in unit time for a given lineage, it is on average going to be close to the rest of its clade, unless the concestor of that clade is so far back down the evolutionary tree that it includes bacteria, which have a generation time sometimes of hours, and elephants that generate every 40 years or so, in which case the number is largely meaningless.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
In my opinion, we exceeded the average carrying capacity of this continent about 20 years ago, and as things get worse, and they will due to global warming, which is already interfering with the monsoon cycle in the north, we may very well get to the point where we have insufficient water to maintain the population, let alone meet our agricultural targets.... For if it is threatened, so are all the other endemic species of plants and animals in that area, and we will end up with a depauperate ecology, and that will affect us. So, to my premier, I say - before you build this dam, consider all the other things we can do, however politically unpopular.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:30 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Both of us spent our school years being bullied and rejected by our peers, although he had it a lot worse than I did until fairly recently.... A "man of honour" feels every slight more keenly, and is more aggressive in its defence, than someone for whom honour takes a second place to justice or fairness.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:38 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2007
Category: Administrative
On average around 5000 visits and 8000 page reads a week.... PZ might sneer at such low figures, but then I don't try to earn a second income from blogging, and besides, I try to steer clear of politics, which is where the audience is.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:33 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 18, 2007
Category: Basic Concepts
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear.... But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution. ... The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram. ... That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:21 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 17, 2007
Category: Politics
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, a survivor of the Holocaust and renowned scientist, died in the massacre trying to block the gunman's entrance into the room, and in so doing probably saved some of the students who were able to leave via the window of the second story room.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:41 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2007
Category: Politics
Now the American Constitution was formed when there was no standing army in the United States, and when there was no Police Force anywhere (Robert Peel formed the first proper police in 1829, although there had been officers of civil law and order for centuries), so the provision for citizenry to bear arms against tyrants was not only understandable, it was necessary - if Britain, or France or Russia or Spain, invaded the United States, it would be the citizenry that would need to not only fight, but provide the weapons and know how to use them, in defense of their homeland.... The one real mass murder event in Australia, which itself caused a major buyback by the government of guns, was due to a lunatic (a clear lunatic even to his relatives) being able to gain unfettered access to a range of weapons not even the most ardent farmer needing to control vermin would ever use, let alone a sports shooter.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:36 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it.... Eugenie Scott and Ken Ham posed for a photo before resuming their club-fight, for the BBC, with a picture of the delightful Professor Steve Steve, who visited me and travelled with me through the US, particularly Hawai'i a while back, and more recently I met him in Vancouver.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:13 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
You rountinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:12 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 14, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
All people, including minor teens, have the right to express religious preferences – including atheism – different from any historic religious tradition without fear of reprisal from family, social or political group, tribe, church, or government.... Scientific Integrity: The nonreligious, like all citizens, have the right to expect that publicly-funded scientific research is carried out by scientific principles rather than religious ones, and that medical research and decisions should be informed by science and reason rather than religion.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:43 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 12, 2007
Category: Creationism
The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method publishes (in the same journal as my latest, preen, preen) a paper entitled - I kid you not - "Is the Pope a Catholic?"
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:11 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based on accounts of the events which form this evil history written by the best historians of the evil devices of DARWINISM and EVOLUTIONISM, and based on the best scientific principle of SUBJECTIVITY, and rejecting utterly the ATHEIST doctrine of OBJECTIVITY which clouds the mind of mankind and leads to the rejection of TRUE CHRISTIANITY ™.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:34 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
One of the best of all American writers - I'd put him up with Twain - has died, leaving us all the poorer.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones.... A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:48 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 11, 2007
Category: Evolution
I think that the readers of this pamphlet ('The Religious Views of Charles Darwin,' Free Thought Publishing Company, 1883) may be misled into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr. Aveling: and I say this in spite of my conviction that Dr. Aveling gives quite fairly his impressions of my father's views.... What is interesting about this is that it was Edward Aveling, who was Marx's son-in-law, who wrote to Darwin asking for his approval to dedicate the volume A Student's Darwin, not Marx himself who asked for permission to dedicate Das Kapital as the myth has it.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:19 AM • 70 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 10, 2007
Category: Politics
SYDNEY broadcaster Alan Jones' comments before the 2005 Cronulla riots were likely to have encouraged brutality and vilified people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, Australia's broadcasting regulator says.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:59 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
The PM, the minister for Immigration, and the minister for Foreign Affairs, the leader of the Opposition and various other pollies have called for the mufti of Australia, Sheik al Hilali, to leave Australia.... They do not deserve punishment because Hilali has stupid ideas, and until and unless he is convicted of some crime, he should be left alone for his community to deal with as they see fit.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:13 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 9, 2007
Category: Basic Concepts
Charles Darwin's classic definition of the ecological causes ("struggle for existence") and genetic consequences of selection ... can be restated in modern scientific language as follows: Natural/sexual selection is the ecological interactions an organism has with ((1) the physical conditions of the environment, (2) individuals of other species, and (3) individuals of the same species that affects the number of times the organism successfully reproduces the genes the organism is carrying.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:56 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they think it means, as Inigo Montoya might have said if they were Sicilian.... Kuhn used it in a context (later deconstructed by Margaret Masterman into 21 distinct senses, some subtly different, some radically), but it found its way into popular culture and now can mean anything from a new car model to a drug experience.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:51 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 8, 2007
Category: General Science
But apart from anti-vaccination movements since the late nineteenth century, very little public attack was made on the science itself, and, when it was, it was rarely taken seriously.... Why they think that is due to the use and abuse of science by the conservation movement over many years - now in recession, thankfully - and of course the persistent claims by antiscience movements ranging from GMO oppositions to creationists to antivaccinationists to global warming "skeptics" (who are anything but skeptical) who attack ideas they dislike as "unsound science".
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:05 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 7, 2007
Category: Creationism
Coulter's book Godless isn't what it seems to be - an ill-informed rehash of tired old creationist bafflegab. Instead, it's a Sokalesque hoax designed to make conservatives reassess their own rationality and to expose the idiocy of intelligent design!
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:39 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
For some reason I am finding it harder to get published as I go on, not easier.... However, I just had a paper published in Biology and Philosophy: Wilkins, John S.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:39 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 5, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism - it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:26 PM • 71 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2007
Category: General Science
PHILADELPHIA – Donald Metcalf, M.D., the physiologist renowned as "the father of hematopoietic cytokines" for his pioneering work on the control of blood cell formation, will receive the American Association for Cancer Research Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research. ...The AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research was established and first presented in 2004 to honor an individual who has made significant fundamental contributions to cancer research, either through a single scientific discovery or a body of work.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:51 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
A reworking of the experiment in the 1980s failed to generate amino acids from a more realistic atmosphere (more creationist crowing!). But a simplified atmosphere is not a realistic atmosphere, and one researcher, Jeffrey Bada, realised that adding some iron and carbonates (such as is found in limestone) would change the reactions dramatically.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:03 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 2, 2007
Category: General Science
Revere at Effect Measure has an update and discussion of the Elsevier arms trade issue that is worth reading for its measuredness (natch!).
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
So it is a warming (apologies for the pun) experience to see not one but three governments - those of France, Germany and Britain - attempting to make a continuous review of biodiversity a standing program for advising the present governments. Assuming that no government ever gets as corrupt as the Bush Administration when it comes to environmental sciences (that is, outright denial and suppression of anything that conflicts with their own personal financial interests), this should improve the decision making process in Europe on these matters, and stand out as an example and a resource for politicians with a modicum of responsibility elsewhere.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 1, 2007
Category: Humor
Mind you, they’re a jumpy bunch of garçons, your science boys, and they do tend to worry very easily, and I feel that the very least we can do is to spend a few moments of our very valuable time in quiet and restful contemplation as to what it’s all about and why we’re here - and then after that we can have some lunch.... Now once you start doubting your perceptions you get onto realising that you can’t be sure whether you’re actually here or maybe only think you’re here, which is a bit of a worry and it’s only a matter of moments before you’re picking spots of light off the wall and putting them in a basket and pretty soon you’ll find yourself in a tight white overcoat and a room full of Napoleons and Lord Nelsons - which is the principle fallacy of Rene’s idea.
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Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:16 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
