Sky pilot
Category: Humor
Anyone else read this and immediately think of Eric Burdon singing "sky pilot"?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:05 PM • 6 Comments •
Evolving Thoughts
One man's struggle against impermanence
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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...
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Blogroll
- Aetiology
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I also have an Australia-focussed blog: The Drought Resistant Philosopher
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Other Information
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
January 30, 2008
Vale Chesh
Category: Administrative
For a long time, I thought that animals were pretty much as Descartes thought - largely unreasoning organic machines. This morning, my teacher on animal communications died. Her name was Chesh, and she was 17 and a half. She...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:23 PM • 21 Comments •
January 27, 2008
Who should be president?
Category: Politics
And why would an Australian care? It's another country, so what business is it of mine? Well, apart from the fact that whoever is US president affects the rest of the world (and historically the best party for Australian...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:06 AM • 10 Comments •
If evolution were a religion...
Category: Humor
Given that the antievotees often declare evolution a religion (because after all, their view is purely based on wishful thinking and so they want to claim that everybody's views are), I got to thinking. What would the books of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:07 AM • 31 Comments •
January 26, 2008
Nature makes no leaps...
Category: History
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print: The only objections that have occurred...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:54 AM • 5 Comments •
January 25, 2008
Why wasn't I told?
Category: Administrative
A passing reference to Language Log has introduced me to an excellent blog. For instance, this well-balanced post on hate speech. Why didn't someone notify me of it before?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:08 AM • 9 Comments •
January 24, 2008
Del.icio.us Evolving Thoughts
Category: Administrative
We got delicioused, for the Basic Concepts Post, and wow, scores of links and (I hope) new readers. Some of the referrals [UPDATED]:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:55 PM • 4 Comments •
Measuring extinctions
Category: Biodiversity
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:37 AM • 20 Comments •
January 23, 2008
Research blogging goes live
Category: General Science
You'll recall that we had a new logo and link for Blogging Peer Reviewed Research. This is now rebadged and has become Research Blogging. It will aggregate and feed the posts on peer reviewed research....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:56 AM • •
January 21, 2008
Happenings
Category: Administrative
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:42 PM • 12 Comments •
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