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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.
September 30, 2007
Category: Humor
The arch-Enemy of all humanity, PZ Mocals, has posted what he no doubt thinks is a funny skit. I told him good, I did. There's no way we can tolerate this attack of godlessness....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:31 AM • 9 Comments •
September 28, 2007
Category: Administrative
Stay tuned after the break as we will be showing the following specials, rated R for Reason. Suitable for 15 years and over......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:41 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Administrative
I keep forgetting to check the "unpublished" list. If you put a link in, or use certain terms, the spam filters will hold it for approval. I am forgetful, and haven't checked for a while, so apologies to those...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:56 AM • •
Category: History
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:43 AM • 21 Comments •
September 25, 2007
Category: Administrative
Over the past three years or so I have been trying to get an academic career going, at the tender age of (then) 49 (now 51). I have applied for a number of positions while working as a postdoc...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:30 PM • 37 Comments •
September 24, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
This is a nice post by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms, a kiwi studying spider systematics (and what's not to love about that; cephalopods be buggered!) on the species of moas that used to live in New Zealand....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:50 PM • 5 Comments •
September 23, 2007
Category: Administrative
... an email archiver that sorts through the several tens of thousands of emails I have received in the past fifteen years and makes it all a nice searchable archive. If it would automatically archive from the current folders,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:49 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Humor
It is unclear if he had any last words....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:17 AM • 12 Comments •
September 22, 2007
Category: Evolution
On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism. Then today...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:07 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Biodiversity
One of the things I have previously discussed (see the "Best of ET" tab) is microbial species concepts. Two new papers have come out on this, and it seems to be a hot research topic right now....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:45 AM • 1 Comments •
Neurophilosophy 11.19.2009
The Island of Doubt 11.20.2009
Greg Laden's Blog 11.20.2009
The World's Fair 11.19.2009
Laelaps 11.20.2009
