Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
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.
April 30, 2008
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?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:11 AM • 9 Comments •
April 29, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:21 PM • 24 Comments •
April 28, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:16 PM • 7 Comments •
April 27, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:45 PM • 31 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:10 AM • 33 Comments •
April 26, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:51 PM • 12 Comments •
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:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:52 AM • 23 Comments •
April 25, 2008
Category: General Science
I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all. This one's for Eli Gerson......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:26 PM • 2 Comments •
April 24, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:29 AM • 3 Comments •
April 23, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:50 AM • 24 Comments •
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