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.
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:23 AM • 97 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:20 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:59 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:16 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:50 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 17, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:22 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:23 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 14, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:06 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:06 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 11, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:47 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 7, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:27 AM • 90 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2008
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:21 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
Can I have his guns?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:53 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 4, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:37 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:25 AM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 1, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:49 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:00 AM • 60 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
