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.
February 28, 2008
Category: Administrative
Janet asks what others have asked - what is science blogging all about, after a bully in the schoolyard taunted us Sciencebloggers. Her questions (and her answers) are very like mine, so I will steal them, below the fold....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:56 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Today marks the final day of the month in which, 150 years ago, a naturalist in what is now Indonesia wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in which he gave a theoretical account of how types can evolve by...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:44 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 27, 2008
Category: Creationism
Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:54 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
Well, actually the weather in Tempe, Arizona, seems to be very much like the weather here in Brisbane, but that's where I'm going. For a couple of weeks. Also in Salt Lake City. So blogging shall be sparse unless...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:40 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 25, 2008
Category: Humor
I suppose you all have heard of the recent trade agreement between South Africa, Tibet, and the Netherlands, swapping cattle for birds, and known as the Gnu yak stork exchange... [I'm not to blame. I saw it on the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:24 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History
... a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don't' get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:37 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 24, 2008
Category: Logic and philosophy
Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:34 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
Are you a sad nerd, spending more time with your computer than with actual people? Do you think a great night is when you get a debate going in the comments of a Pharyngula post? Would you like to...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:49 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2008
Category: History
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article discussing a study as to why there are so few conservative academics, in the light of the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to propose and "academic bill of rights". The...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:06 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks: However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ... This sad...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:59 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 20, 2008
Category: Evolution
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:19 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2008
Category: Evolution
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:02 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 18, 2008
Category: Creationism
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:30 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 17, 2008
Category: Creationism
In particular, see the final panel... Cf. also here on Private Languages in philosophy...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:49 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 16, 2008
Category: Design
A real journalist reviews a media conference held for the new pro-ID film Expelled: Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:20 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 14, 2008
Category: Humor
Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong, And I am Marie of Roumania. Courtesy of Mrs Dorothy Parker...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:50 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 13, 2008
Category: Administrative
Have you ever noticed that there are occasionally periods in which things just work, particularly with computers? I find that there is a confluence of coherence about every four years. I'm not sure if it's just because the vendors...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:53 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biodiversity
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:05 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 12, 2008
Category: Politics
Language Log recently took apart the speech and interview by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the media are, inaccurately, reporting as advocating the introduction of Sharia law into British and by implication other common law jurisdictions. Its conclusion was...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:46 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 11, 2008
Category: Evolution
Image by Colin Purrington...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:33 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 10, 2008
Category: Evolution
So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:33 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 9, 2008
Category: Sermon
Since I'm feeling low, I thought I'd wallow in it for a bit. A while back, Australian musicians were asked what they thought was the perfect song by an Australasian and they proposed "Into Temptation" by the adopted Australian...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:01 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
Some of you may recall I was immensely impressed by Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old who started Pro-Test, which defended the use of animal models against the vicious and largely unthinking nastiness of animal "rights" protesters. Now Nick...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:45 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
Hat tip: Chris Ho-Stuart. What I want to know is, who is keeping tabs on my social life?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:38 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
By Matt Ridley, in Time: ... by the end of this century, if not sooner, biotechnology may have reached the point where it can take just about any DNA recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:07 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 8, 2008
Category: Evolution
So, it seems that 44 is the median age of depression. Old news, or at least it is for me. Although for 44 to be the median age of depression for me, I'd have to live until my late...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:32 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 4, 2008
Category: Humor
I am quite sure that this is how undergraduates in philosophy see the whole thing: HT: Creative Synthesis...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:54 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2008
Category: Humor
NASA is broadcasting "Across the Universe" from Let It Be to the North Star, Polaris. All well and good until the aliens arrive and we find out they're Stones fans......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:38 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Martin Rundkvist, a Swede, has chastised the American body politick for being Right Wing and Even More Right Wing; that is, for lacking a Left in European terms. The American Body Politick, in the person of Chad Orzel, has...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:09 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 2, 2008
Here's a comment that represents a widely held misconception about the evolution of religion: Whenever there is an discussion about religions and changes in religions someone always pulls out the argument that religions evolve. I am very sorry but...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:42 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General Science
As well as the Basic Concepts list, I occasionally get sent some links that are in my mind too advanced to be basics, but too good not to mention. So I will do with them what I have done...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:54 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 1, 2008
Category: Evolution
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:22 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
A rather cute article at the Catholic News Service says this: In commentaries, papal speeches, scientific conferences and philosophical exchanges, the Vatican has been focusing more and more on the relationship between God and evolution. From the outside, this...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:08 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Readers will know that I got very angry about the Haneef Affair, in which a muslim Indian doctor was accused of being a terrorist and deported by the improper abuse of power by the minister for immigration of the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:35 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
