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.
August 31, 2007
Category: Evolution
A lot of people have said something like "species are the units of evolution". What does this even mean? So far as I can tell, nobody has really fleshed this out....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:07 AM • 15 Comments •
August 29, 2007
Category: Creationism
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph: It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:36 AM • 11 Comments •
August 28, 2007
Category: History
So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:41 AM • 25 Comments •
August 24, 2007
Category: Evolution
I'm very late to this, but one of the significant figures in the synthesis, Verne Grant, died in May. Grant's book The Origin of Adaptations (1963) was one that influenced a lot of theorising about evolution. His essay on...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:45 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Politics
As part of the "War on Drugs" an entire family of hydroponics sellers, selling legally available material, were sentenced to prison without parole. Gary Tucker has just been released after a ten year stretch and confiscation of all his...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:09 AM • 1 Comments •
August 23, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them. 1. There is an...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:06 PM • 203 Comments •
Category: Biodiversity
You'll remember, because you have all memorised my blog going back two years, that I blogged on what microbial species are before, and have a paper on that subject coming out in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:29 PM • 7 Comments •
August 22, 2007
Category: Creationism
The National Geographic and the news services are touting a new ape fossil found in Ethiopia as "forcing a rethink on human evolution". As usual, the headlines are hyperbolic. This ape is fragmentary, and so far only teeth and...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:59 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Evolution
Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:14 AM • 3 Comments •
August 21, 2007
Category: Administrative
... I'm teaching. First years. Cognitive science. It turns out that a lot of what I thought was common knowledge isn't common at all. And what I count as a simple introduction leaves a lot of folk behind. Now...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:00 PM • 15 Comments •
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