Official Comment Count: 1,033,864

Evolving Thoughts

One man's struggle against impermanence

Search this blog

Profile

Snowflake Grumpafudamus 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 a position as a Sessional Lecturer 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 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...

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Blogroll


Search old and new blogs



Other Information

My personal page is here:

John Wilkins' personal page

The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.

Add to Technorati Favorites: Technorati Profile Wikio - Top of the Blogs - Sciences Blog Directory - Blogged

August 31, 2008

Spin versus framing: the tragedy of PR

Category: General Science

For my sins, I was once a public relations guy, for an educational institution, and I held positions roughly in that domain (e.g., as public communications manager for a medical research institute, although I managed the means not the...

Read on »

August 30, 2008

Browsing through the Philosophical Transactions on species and generation

Category: Evolution

One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first...

Read on »

August 28, 2008

Cambrian fossils at Kangaroo Island

Category: Evolution

Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report...

Read on »

Font of humor

Category: Humor

I was a graphic artist cum typesetter for 25 years. So I know that Times New Roman and Arial are not proper fonts, but abominations foisted upon the unsuspecting world by the Evil Empire. Nevertheless, this is a funny video:...

Read on »

August 27, 2008

What gets logicians hot

Category: Humor

Read on »

August 26, 2008

Some interesting links

Category: Biodiversity

Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question. Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion. A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a...

Read on »

A biosphere for Brisbane

Category: Biodiversity

A few doors down from my office there's a guy with a ready laugh and a shared love of Macintoshes named Dom Hyde, a philosopher who works on the logic of vagueness among other things. He's also very active...

Read on »

August 25, 2008

Neither does "diairesis"

Category: Humor

Read on »

Books

Category: Book

In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I...

Read on »

August 24, 2008

The real Olympic performers

Category: Humor

Certain nations who shall remain nameless have been doing a fair bit of skiting about how well they've done. So I thought I'd do a bit of number crunching. Of course it isn't completed (or is it?) but using...

Read on »

August 23, 2008

Priest off!

Category: Humor

This is naughty, but very funny.......

Read on »

To be, and not to be - that is the quantifier

Category: Logic and philosophy

I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points...

Read on »

August 22, 2008

A casual disregard for facts

Category:

A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if...

Read on »

Is Christianity healthy?

Category: Logic and philosophy

In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment: Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to...

Read on »

August 21, 2008

Basic Concepts: Biology

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. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me...

Read on »

Basic Concepts: Historical and social sciences

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. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me...

Read on »

"Systematics is sick"

Category: Biodiversity

So says a committee of the UK House of Lords: Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must...

Read on »

August 20, 2008

Basic Concepts: Physics and Astronomy, Geology, and Chemistry

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. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me...

Read on »

Basic Concepts: Mathematics, Philosophy, Logic and Computer Science

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. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me...

Read on »

Fun with Christians and worldviews

Category: Logic and philosophy

The local evangelical students society had me along last night to talk about "Is belief in the Christian God rational?" I was on the negative, although I did ask them which side they wanted me to argue for. It...

Read on »

August 19, 2008

Agriculture and the rise of religion

Category: History

One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is...

Read on »

August 17, 2008

Heh...

Category: Humor

Want this, from Systematic Biology on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough... Hat tip Henry Simon...

Read on »

August 16, 2008

Is it true? I don't know

Category: Humor

Read on »

August 14, 2008

Wilkins back in Portuguese

Category: Administrative

Thanks to the editor of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the permissions department of Elsevier, my scientific blogging article is up again in Portuguese. At no cost! Thanks folks. João Carlos at Chi vó, non pó, translated it...

Read on »

The heat of religion

Category: Evolution

It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another...

Read on »

Genetic engineering and organic farming

Category: Biodiversity

The heir apparent to some minor European royal family has again demonstrated his lack of knowledge and trust in scientific matters. The Prince, who has previously said that he talks to plants and consults gurus, apparently failed to talk to...

Read on »

A blast from my past is reasonable - shock!

Category: Creationism

As I sit here, dying slowly and loudly from a dose of gastro and probably 'flu (Australian male: we don't do sick well), trying to distract myself from the efforts of my lower intestines to escape to Jamaica, I...

Read on »

August 13, 2008

Only government approved labs can do experiments, see?

Category: General Science

A retired chemist has had his home lab confiscated in Maryland because a government official was scared of it. Sayeth Robert Thompson: Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line...

Read on »

August 12, 2008

Win Apple stuff. Give it to me.

Category: Administrative

Our Seed Overlords have bling to give away. All you have to do is take a survey and they might give you an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air and a 40GB Apple TV. Keep the Air and give me the...

Read on »

August 11, 2008

Sarkar on Fuller

Category: Creationism

Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of...

Read on »

Blogging the history of science

Category: History

A chance link to my blog has led me through an ego search to find Will Thomas' most excellent Ether Wave Propaganda blog. Will is a historian of science post-doc, I think, and he has an engaging style. Coincidentally,...

Read on »

August 9, 2008

Bugs online

Category: Biodiversity

This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in...

Read on »

Kid's resource for species

Category: Evolution

Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and...

Read on »

August 8, 2008

Other adaptive landscape papers

Category: Evolution

Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First:...

Read on »

August 7, 2008

Colbert, spiders and cohesion species

Category: Biodiversity

I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I...

Read on »

August 6, 2008

New paper by Wilkins

Category: Evolution

Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and...

Read on »

August 5, 2008

Half of all primate species face extinction

Category: Biodiversity

sigh... More here....

Read on »

Developing dumbness

Category: Biodiversity

I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge...

Read on »

New work on speciation

Category: Evolution

Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side...

Read on »

August 4, 2008

The value of the history of science

Category: History

My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case...

Read on »

Congrats to Phil Plait

Category: General Science

Phil, of Bad Astronomy fame, has been offered and accepted the chairmanship of James Randi's Educational Foundation. I think that's a great choice by Randi and a great honour for Phil. Couldn't happen to a better guy....

Read on »

If your PhD was run by Windows

Category: Humor

Read on »

More of me in Spanish, and information again

Category: Administrative

A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks...

Read on »

August 3, 2008

A quote for the day

Category: Social evolution

Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from,...

Read on »

Wilkins in Spanish (or Portuguese)

Category: Administrative

It is an odd thing seeing one's words in another language. Joao Carlos at Chí Vó, Non Pó has translated my TREE article into Portuguese (I think). Without my permission, though, and probably not the editor's. Joao, you'd better...

Read on »

August 1, 2008

What is atheism?

Category: Logic and philosophy

Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog: I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist"...

Read on »

Blogs in the Network

Advertisement

Top Five: Most Active

  1. I am so proud of Philadelphia 10.12.2008 · PZ Myers
  2. Possummomma has gone silent 10.12.2008 · PZ Myers
  3. Burning Witches in Michigan 10.12.2008 · Ed Brayton
  4. Religulous! 10.12.2008 · ERV
  5. This photograph needs a caption 10.12.2008 · Greg Laden

Search All Blogs