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.
May 30, 2007
Category: Creationism
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:45 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Consider what happened to the abundant remains of Titanotheres and other magnificent White River fossils in the South Unit of the Badlands in South Dakota: Badlands National Monument was established in 1939, outside of the reservation boundary.... These skeletons were commonly targeted by the bombers.� The US Air Force and, later, the National Guard gunners, deliberately blew to smithereens the fragile bones of great animals that had roamed the earth 40 million years ago. �Hundreds of fossil resources were destroyed in the bombing efforts,� according to the Park Service information sheet.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:28 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2007
Category: Creationism
A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be if Genesis were right?" And so I started casually reading it from time to time as if the final editor of Genesis actually meant the things he allows the text to say.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:10 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
Then stop reading and go think about something [else]. Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:35 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library: Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.... As always I just love it when someone hands me facsimile copies of ancient publications (although they have some more recent stuff too), all under a Creative Commons license.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 28, 2007
Category: General Science
From which this wonderful quote: There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but whenever it matters, there is no alternative.... Even the great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by a crystal ball.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:53 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 27, 2007
Category: Politics
After a slip in which an acquired set of contracts were substantially below what one might expect for trading off terms and conditions, and where her husband opposes such contracts in employment, she has decided, it is reported, to sell off her interest in the Australian company (there's a UK company as well, it seems).... Second, the idea that leaders should be isolated from interactions with the community they are notional representatives of seems to me to imply that we need a professional political class from whom to take representatives.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:07 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing, wondering whether people were properly self-reporting their reasons for believing X, and I suggested that, in matters of justifying behaviours, they took the behaviours for one reason, and then applied the standard tmeplates for justifying such actions afterwards, and that if we did experimental philosophy to poll the "folk" (a sort of philosophical hoi polloi), they would not be able to give you the real reasons why they acted due to false consciousness.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:14 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 26, 2007
Category: Creationism
The recent "What kind of Atheist" posts have led to a discussion on Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog. Go read it, because I'm being as clear there as I'll ever likely be...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:01 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2007
Category: Evolution
I think there will be more atheists than before simply because any increase over nearly none is an increase in absolute terms, but I doubt we will ever see Lennon's society without religion. But secularism - social organisations in which religion does not have undue privileges in setting the policy and law - is, I think, something that not only should be expanded, but can be.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:03 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
Well it evolved into a paper that has just been accepted, with some very constructive criticisms by a reviewer, for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.... This paper had a rough history - it was supposed to be included in another journal's special edition but the editor and reviewers seemed not to get the point of it (and, to be fair, a lot of the early drafts were a bit sloppy).
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:48 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
so it looks like I'll be blogging a lot longer than I had expected. An 81 year old woman with severe Alzheimer's apparently can still make some wicked puns.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 23, 2007
Category: Religion
Talk about skewing the results with a leading question... but anyway: You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:58 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
An oldie but a goodie: With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:15 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2007
Category: Creationism
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review.... I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:12 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named after him. In fact the so-called "Natural System" as it came to be known, was on Linnaeus' own view an artificial one, and it did not spring forth fully formed from his brow, no matter how much he saw himself as a "second Adam".
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:29 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 21, 2007
Category: Humor
Me, I'm on the lower end of the scale... but I think we ought to start metricating gorilla weights: a 200kg gorilla sounds so much more appealing, even for a silverback like me...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
First, having dumped on the Smithsonian in the last post, let me cheer them for putting over 6000 images on Flickr...... Second, let me note the good work of Andrew Bartlett of the Australian Democrats, in raising awareness of the Queensland lungfish that is being threatened by the Queensland government's plans to build a probably useless dam.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
While there is no evidence that the Administration directly threatened the Institute, the atmosphere of "do science our way" is so palpable that even the premier scientific institution of the United States would dumb down its knowledge...... The ESA is based on the following definition of biodiversity: (6) The term "endangered species" means any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range other than a species of the Class Insecta determined by the Secretary to constitute a pest whose protection under the provisions of this Act would present an overwhelming and overriding risk to man.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:15 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Species and systematics
Linnaeus also experimented on propagating a hybrid geranium, with success, in 1759 (Ramsbottom 1938: 210f); he believed that maternal influences of hybrids affected the "medullary substance" and fructification of plants, but the leaf structure was due to the paternal species As time went on, he removed the statement that there were no new species from his 1766 edition of the Systema Naturae, and crossed out the statement natura non facit saltum from his own copy of his Philosophia Botanica.... 3 Huxley describes the initial history of hominoid classification, and notes that while there had been some excellent descriptions of orangutans and chimpanzees in the 18th century, Linnaeus relied on second-hand sources, and classified four species under the genus Homo: Under the specific epithet of troglodytes, he combined the prior "species" of Homo sylvestris (probably a juvenile chimp), and Homo nocturnus (a badly-represented orangutan) (cf. Huxley 1906: 10-13) in the 1758 (tenth edition) Systema naturae (p25), apart from Homo sapiens.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:21 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Or because the US health system, and in particular this hospital, is so stretched that triage is by rapid prejudice rather than medical criteria? As a subsidiary question, how is it that people could ignore a screaming woman on the floor?
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:32 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders: The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population.... Two key results arise from geographic inhomogeneity: the "subsistence boundary," land so poor that the wave of advance is halted, and the temporary "diffusion boundary" where the wave cannot move into poorer areas until its gradient becomes sufficiently large.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:08 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 20, 2007
Category: Evolution
Jason Grossman, sometime commentator and fulltime good guy, sent me this suggestion: I needed a mnemonic for the classification system Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.... The only one I could find which included Domain was "Dear Kate, please come over for great sex", which in addition to being rude (or despite being nicely rude) isn't particularly easy to remember.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:26 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 19, 2007
Category: Humor
I am ashamed to admit I read that tripe by Dan Brown. Please be assured that I have not compounded the error by reading anything else he wrote.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:46 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:08 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2007
Category: General Science
The goals of the new General Education curriculum are to prepare students for civic engagement; teach students to understand themselves as products of -- and participants in -- traditions of art, ideas, and values; prepare students to respond critically and constructively to change; and to develop students' understanding of the ethical dimensions of what they say and do.... The program is consistent with past general education programs at Harvard that prescribe a set of requirements and call for a set of extra-departmental course options, rather than advocate that students have free range across existing departmental offerings in the form of an open distribution system.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:39 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.... Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:31 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2007
Category: General Science
There's a small amount of the surface of the earth, not too high or under water, not too cold or too dry, where humans can live unaided.... So if you concentrated really hard, on the right sort of ideas, they would come true, because of the resemblance between the contents of your head and the world.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:54 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 14, 2007
Category: Creationism
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter.... The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:35 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2007
Category: General Science
It was cited more than just about any other paper ever published, and at one point apoptosis itself had one paper per day being published, around the late 1990s (according to David Vaux, one of the leading apoptosis researchers, who shared his data with me), on account of it being implicated in cancer and possible treatments.... So when you encounter historical claims in a textbook of science, or a work of popular science, and it is written by a scientist, you would do well to recall the words of Thomas Kuhn (who, in a case of historical irony, did some of this very thing himself): Recognizing that scientists are often famous for results they did not intend [the historian] should ask what problem his subject worked at and how they became problems for him.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:33 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2007
Category: Creationism
Sure, nobody expects the president to select the next generation of successful breeders for any generation, but this is a good surrogate test of whether or not the candidate thinks science is to be trusted, or whether they think, as this administration odes, that they can choose the reality in which they operate with impunity.... So asking this question of the next shift of Republicans is in effect asking them whether they are prepared to lie, act on bad advice, and do whatever it takes either to appease a minority of the electorate (fundamentalists) or not.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:53 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2007
Category: Administrative
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion.... That's nothing new - but this one doesn't divide the chloroplast, but one of the daughters acquires a new one from a free living algal cell...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:39 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 6, 2007
Category: Politics
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:46 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2007
Category: Administrative
For the next few days, my beloved Mac 12" Powerbook is going in for intestinal surgery - it seems to have lost connection with its wireless, DVD/RW and microphone, which indicates Major Problems (although I do recall a desktop that had dust gathered on a particular point and shorted it out once, so who knows?).... So I won't be configured to post, or read mail, or do work, so I may as well go for a walk or exercise or eat chocolate.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:13 AM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2007
Category: Creationism
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture.... Again with the repetitive quotes and little bells, and Daniel Dennett gets some airtime to yet again argue that Darwin made design implausible in biology (which it did, of course) but the rest of the show, which is mostly Miller with historians, narrating the rise of unbelief in the 19th and 20th centuries, and returning, this time more effectively, to McGinn, is more interesting.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:32 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
This means that leptin and insulin have different effects depending on early experiences in life, particularly the brain's desire to feed. Worse, it seems that once you have the weight, you are unlikely to get it off, according to this release by the American Physiological Society.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing: ... it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:02 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
