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.
December 31, 2007
Category: Administrative
It is midnight on January 1 here in Australia. There's a loud party next door (young folks, heh). So I hope you all have a good year and thanks for reading me in 2007....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:00 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 30, 2007
Category: Philosophy of Science
This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret. Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:55 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
The New York Times has a long overdue article on the stupidity of airport security measures for those flying to, within or in markets affected by the United States post-9/11. Pointing out that the security screening at airports in...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:13 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 29, 2007
Category: Creationism
Henry Gee reviews the Golden Compass, and comes up with largely the same conclusions I would have had I been as insightful as he. A quote: It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:05 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
One of the things about being a Mac user, for 20-odd years now, is that you just like your corporate hero. Sure, they stuffed up on a number of hardware releases, and their delay in getting a multitasking OS...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:16 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 28, 2007
Category: History
Found in an old manuscript in the ruins of an old university: Well this year has been pretty much the same as those that went before. We planted crops, most of which failed because we only had the poverty...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:26 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Just to demonstrate that it is not only the Christians who have their religious fundamentalists opposing science, here's a piece that claims that the Vedas are the source of all true scientific knowledge. OK, guys, inventing zero was cool,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:42 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 27, 2007
Category: Biodiversity
Greg Laden is reporting that Rwanda is taxing companies that use gorillas in their advertising, in order to pay for their conservation. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you are an albino silverback in Australia, this only applies to Rwandan companies....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:47 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
The online journal Episteme has a special issue out on conspiracy theories. Examples include God as a conspiracy theory, the 9/11 WTC "controlled demolition" theory and questions of rationality of those who engage in them. Late note: This is...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:53 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated, probably by Islamist extremists. While no saint, she clearly stood for democratisation in Pakistan, and all hell is likely to break out there now. Today, I saw The Golden Compass, after reading the book...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:08 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 25, 2007
Category: Creationism
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:39 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 24, 2007
Category: General Science
OK, so today is Christmas day, December 25. On this day* a man was born who changed the world. He affected a growing tradition that has left no part of the world untouched, for good or ill. He revealed...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:14 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 22, 2007
Category: Creationism
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:07 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 21, 2007
Category: Politics
Well the mills of God and the justice system grind exceeding fine, but they sometimes come up with the right conclusion. Haneef has been given back his visa, as was obviously going to happen from the beginning. Ex-minister Kevin...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:15 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
The previous Australian government, in its ongoing quest to out-mediocre the rest of the world, had instituted a "research Quality Framework", liberally taken from a failed exercise in Britain. Now, the new government has declared it dead. It will...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:31 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
Philosophy isn't one of those things that makes great breakthroughs that are recognised at the time. Generally something is thought of as a significant development much later, after it becomes obvious that people are engaging with it, like the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:28 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 20, 2007
Category: History
Janet and Shelley have opened up the question of whether students and others should use drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. Janet thinks one shouldn't, and Shelley thinks that, in the absence of bad side effects, one might as...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:17 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2007
Category: Evolution
A little while back I published an article on species concepts in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and I just discovered that it is available on the web. This is actually abetter format than the published...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:38 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 18, 2007
Category: Administrative
I received an email telling me I'm number 20 on the list of influential science blogs, according to Wikio, a European site that ranks according to links and readership, I gather. The irony of a philosopher being a high...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:57 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
PZ Murghl has challenged me to explain why there are theology departments in universities. Of course, most universities lack theology departments, and some, like the Princeton Theological Seminary, have been hived off their home institution. Back when I actually...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:34 PM • 52 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 17, 2007
Category: Evolution
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while. So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:40 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 14, 2007
Category: Creationism
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:34 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 11, 2007
Category: Humor
From Henry Gee's blog: I had thought that people who write marketing and advertising blurb for publishers occupied a rung on the scala naturae slightly above creationists. This may be true, but whatever the height of their perch, it...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:27 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 10, 2007
Category: Evolution
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:43 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Just to head off the obvious: Do people kill because their religion or ideology tells them that nonbelievers are subhuman? Yes. Do people go to war because their religion or ideology tells them it is their patriotic duty? Yes....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:51 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 9, 2007
Category: Creationism
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR. Many thanks to Noelie Alito for...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:25 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 8, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:37 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
The sole reason that I have any Microsoft products on my machine at all, is compatibility with Endnote. Once upon a time, Endnote was equally capable with a number of word and document processors, but now it only works...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:35 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
John, hear me. What? Who said that? It is I, God. Oh come on. PZ, is that you? I'm not buying it. It is I, God. Look, I'll prove it. [Clouds in the sky form the letters "Yep, It's...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:54 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 7, 2007
Category: Politics
I'm angry. The business with the CIA and the torture tape leaves me angry. Why oh why have the Democrats not immediately impeached Bush, Cheney, the Attorneys General involved, the Secretaries of State and Foreign Affairs, the heads of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:16 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
Anyone who has access to COSMOS magazine, published in Australia, will be able to find an article of mine on what good philosophers of science are for science. If you have a copy, scan it and send it to...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:03 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 5, 2007
Category: Evolution
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 4, 2007
Category: Evolution
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere. So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:50 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 3, 2007
Category: Evolution
Way back in the 1910s, when human evolution was poorly known, some trickster, probably Charles Dawson, its discoverer, set up a hoax: Piltdown man. This was enthusiastically accepted by many British experts because it made Britain, and in particular,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:06 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 2, 2007
Category: Creationism
The Institute for Intellectual Disco Dancing has spun its recent debacle at Minnesota thus: The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. Note that in passing it is not a fallacy...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:24 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 1, 2007
Category: Logic and philosophy
[Australian politics: look away] Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:20 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
This guy is a great drinker, ranconteur, and wit, all with an Irish accent. It turns out he's also a great teacher....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:27 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
