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.
May 31, 2008
Category: Logic and philosophy
I have for a long time now been very dissatisfied with the metaphysical categories bequeathed to us from Aristotle via a multitude of commentators and philosophers ranging from Boethius to Ockham to Locke to Hume to Kant. It seems...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:08 AM • 37 Comments •
May 30, 2008
Category: Humor
Clooney deals with the attention in a self-deprecating fashion, usually making jokes about himself. "That's the Australian way, it's the right way to do it," he says. From this article......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:33 PM • •
Category: Administrative
So we managed to attract 5 local PZombies (Craig, you are in trouble for not turning up!) on a wet Brisbane night. We had some interesting discussions (which I fear means that others listened to me nonstop) over beer....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:22 PM • 7 Comments •
May 29, 2008
Category: History
If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:58 AM • 82 Comments •
May 28, 2008
Category: Logic and philosophy
The Scientific Misconduct blog has identified a case of censorship based on fear: Briefly, a postgraduate student (Rizwaan Sabir) was conducting research (into terrorism). He was arrested after downloading material (related to terrorism) from a US government website. I...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:19 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Biodiversity
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here> Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:13 AM • 7 Comments •
May 27, 2008
Category: Evolution
Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:03 PM • 2 Comments •
May 26, 2008
Category: Administrative
One of the things about having one's own blog is that one gets to say what sorts of behaviours are acceptable by commenters. My commenters are generally a pretty nice bunch of people, often clever (hey, they read me)...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:21 AM • 20 Comments •
May 25, 2008
Category: Creationism
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:56 PM • 31 Comments •
May 24, 2008
Category: Administrative
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:09 PM • 15 Comments •
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
Orac 11.06.2009
Orac 11.05.2009
revere 11.07.2009
