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Evolving Thoughts

One man's struggle against impermanence

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Grumpy 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...

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April 30, 2008

At last, a date for the K/T event

Category: Evolution

For years people have been telling us the dinosaurs were killed off in an extinction event 65 million years ago. That always seemed a little too even for me. Did they round off, or was there doubt, or what?...

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April 29, 2008

Almost, but not quite, right about gay marriage

Category: Politics

The Australian government, still in the period of meeting its election promises, has legitimised the relations between homosexual couples so that they now have the same rights as defacto couples, which is long overdue. But they didn't quite get...

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Basic Concepts in Science: A list

Category: Basic Concepts

This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published.

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April 28, 2008

A friend gets a trilobite named after him

Category: Administrative

... Wilkins turns green with envy. There's a special sort of immortality for those who work in paleontology which clearly outweighs the total lack of jobs and remuneration: having a species named after you. My friend and accredited geologist...

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April 27, 2008

The greatest threat: antimodernism

Category: Creationism

In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic...

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Resolved: religion is the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality that we face today

Category: General Science

The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here. One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are...

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April 26, 2008

Sociology and science

Category: General Science

I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and...

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106 books of pretension meme

Category: Administrative

Like Lynch, here is "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." So what I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:...

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April 25, 2008

Lehrer on sociology

Category: General Science

I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all. This one's for Eli Gerson......

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April 24, 2008

The leeches are out in force

Category: Administrative

Have a look at the title bar at the top of this page. If it doesn't say "Scienceblogs" or "Evolving Thoughts", then you are reading it via a leech site that does nothing but steal the words I and...

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April 23, 2008

The new Jews?

Category: Creationism

One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had...

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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

Category: History

Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott" The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:LevelScorePurgatory (Repenting Believers)Very LowLevel 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)ModerateLevel 2 (Lustful)Very...

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April 21, 2008

Some great actual biology posts

Category: Biodiversity

I just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs: Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs. It's...

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April 20, 2008

On ID and the public awareness of evolution

Category: Creationism

Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather...

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Sarkar slams Stein, while Kimbo kicks arse...

Category: Creationism

Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein... And knowing one of the principals...

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April 17, 2008

Good news, and bad news...

Category: Biodiversity

First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters. Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no...

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April 16, 2008

Oops, a slight error never killed anyone

Category: General Science

Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they'd miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3....

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April 15, 2008

Wilkins on Wilkins on The Galilean Library

Category: Creationism

In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel...

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April 14, 2008

Vale Wheeler, and Libet updated

Category: General Science

Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students. Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin...

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April 13, 2008

Darwinism now affects intelligent design film!

Category: Creationism

Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of...

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April 11, 2008

On the decline of the humanities

Category: History

I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit. Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school...

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April 7, 2008

The different epistemologies of science and religion

Category: Creationism

While it's always nice to see a scientists step up to argue that intelligent design or creationism ought not to be taught as science because they aren't science, this worries me somewhat: Scientists have failed to explain the limits...

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April 6, 2008

A slight diversion

Category: Sermon

Over the past few months I have increasingly become aware of the greatness of the last work of Johnny Cash. I don't much like country and western, and Cash was always regarded as a bit twee in my youth....

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Charlton Heston is dead

Category: Humor

Can I have his guns?...

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April 4, 2008

A good German site

Category: Creationism

Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which...

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Still crazy after all these years

Category: Politics

Oh honestly! The Australian Federal Police are still investigating Haneef for terrorism even after their own incompetence and prejudice has been laid bare, and a Royal Commission is in train to investigate them. Really, it's like J. Edgar Hoover...

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April 3, 2008

The F-word

Category: General Science

Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable...

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April 1, 2008

Le Guin on Rushdie and religion

Category: Evolution

David Williams sent me this snippet of Ursula Le Guins' review of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel: Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world...

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Stein is right: Darwinism causes antisemitism

Category: Creationism

I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of...

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