Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
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.
July 30, 2008
Category: Evolution
For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer's own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:29 AM • 8 Comments •
July 29, 2008
Category: Biodiversity
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C. merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p = peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:46 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Logic and philosophy
From PhD Comics:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:10 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Politics
The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I've been using a filtered ISP at my university (they're running a trial) and what I can...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:53 AM • 6 Comments •
July 28, 2008
Category: Administrative
Those who are getting very agitated, missing out on their Usenet fix of the group talk.origins, which has been dormant for the past few days, should know that Steps Are Being Taken. Stop emailing me. I don't know any...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:28 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: General Science
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:59 AM • 30 Comments •
July 27, 2008
Category: Evolution
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa: Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:39 AM • 4 Comments •
July 26, 2008
Category: Basic Concepts
In the process of maintaining the Basic Concepts in Science list I often have to make a judgement call about whether or not something is a basic enough post. For example I have a slew of rather good but...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:02 PM • 8 Comments •
July 25, 2008
Category: Evolution
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea. A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:26 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Humor
Now it's against gravity... “Too many scientists have been afraid to speak out against the powerful gravity lobby,” said Crowther. “With Intelligent Motion, we are looking forward to imposing balance on yet another heavy-handed field of science.”...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:07 PM • 12 Comments •
