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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.
June 27, 2008
Category: Evolution
Readers may know I have a passing interest in the works of Terry Pratchett. Oh, okay then, I'm a fanboy. Have been for well over fifteen years, since a coworker shoved Good Omens into my hands and mind. So...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:58 PM • 11 Comments •
June 26, 2008
Category: Biodiversity
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:54 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Politics
On the one hand we have James Dobson declaring that Barack Obama isn't really Christian, because he distorts the Bible. Funny, I thought the Bible had some things to say about that [Matt 5:22, 7:1, Luke 6:37, Rom 2:1,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:57 AM • 2 Comments •
June 25, 2008
Category: Evolution
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:32 PM • 10 Comments •
Category: Logic and philosophy
Well, no it isn't philosophically impossible... read on:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:38 AM • 33 Comments •
Category: Humor
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year: For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:31 AM • •
June 22, 2008
Category: General Science
Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:33 AM • 3 Comments •
June 21, 2008
Category: Evolution
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:03 PM • 31 Comments •
Category: General Science
Philosopher David Albert and physicist Sean Carroll* will be doing a Bloggingheads.tv spot like the one Paul Myeahs and I did recently. I'll add the direct URL when it comes online. Update: The spot is here. In particular note...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:32 PM • 1 Comments •
June 18, 2008
Category: Evolution
In an interesting post, Think Gene poses what they call "the inherent problem" of scientific theories: The inherent problem of scientific theories is that there exists an infinite equally valid explanations. Why? Because unlike in mathematics, we never have...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:05 PM • 30 Comments •
