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.
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2007
Category: Politics
I do not care if a politicians visits a strip club. In fact, a politician that did it and owns up without embarassment would be a good choice to pick, because you know he's not going to pull that...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:47 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2007
Category: Administrative
Dear readers, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has suggested that we have a universally available icon to indicate that the blogger is blogging about peer reviewed research, and he has created a discussion blog at BPR3. Please go make...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:23 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of "species" in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It's designed as a reader for...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:10 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Popper's view of science has been supplanted by a number of later views, not least being the sociological accounts of Kuhn and Lakatos, which, being sociological, don't tell us what is science but only how it proceeds descriptively. Prescriptive views of science are much more nuanced than Popper these days, and they lack a simple slogan like the cry of "falsifiability!" They typically focus on the heuristics (rules of inference) and how they have developed overall and in particular disciplines. If you want to argue that ID is science, go read van Fraassen, or Hacking, or Giere, or Laudan and get back to me.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:02 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 12, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
I have a review of the centenary festschrift for Mayr, published by the National Academies of Science, in the latest Biology and Philosophy here. I worked pretty hard on this one, so it's more than your average dashed off...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:53 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
I had to. They made me do it. Yes, I'm smoking again, but I'll give up soon, I promise. The grumpy expression is because I'm teaching......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:53 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It's...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 11, 2007
Category: Basic Concepts
Rob Wilson has a new entry up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled "The Biological notion of an individual". It discusses an interesting problem, one that goes back to discussions by Julian Huxley in 1911. What is an...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 8, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
Nature [subscription required] is reporting that Brazilian ecologists are threatening a strike if Marc van Roosmalen is not released. You'll recall that I posted on his case before. Van Roosmalen is a maverick primate researcher who has effectively been...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:53 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
I'm home sick, so I'm shirking duties and came across one of my favourite film scenes of all time:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:38 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
Kate Devitt, a PhD student at Rutgers, as a rather wonderful blog, Mnemosynosis, on matters relating to memory. She's got at present a very interesting post on bacterial cognition worth reading....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:22 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 7, 2007
Category: Evolution
I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:33 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
I've been pretty quiet of late. In part this is because I've been travelling with little internet access, but also it's because I'm teaching a subject I haven't studied in years, and because I was asked to write a...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:40 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 3, 2007
Category: Administrative
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid. One thing that I came back fired up over are...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:19 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
