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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 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...
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
August 31, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:41 AM • 23 Comments •
August 30, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:43 PM • 5 Comments •
August 28, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:04 PM • 5 Comments •
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:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:24 PM • 3 Comments •
August 27, 2008
August 26, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:37 AM • 1 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:37 AM • 1 Comments •
August 25, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:33 AM • 5 Comments •
August 24, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:10 AM • 39 Comments •
August 23, 2008
Category: Humor
This is naughty, but very funny.......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:39 PM • 4 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:45 AM • 16 Comments •
August 22, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:25 PM • 53 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:56 PM • 38 Comments •
August 21, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:53 AM • •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:50 AM • •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:15 AM • 0 Comments •
August 20, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:50 PM • •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:50 AM • •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:44 AM • 39 Comments •
August 19, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:25 AM • 13 Comments •
August 17, 2008
Category: Humor
Want this, from Systematic Biology on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough... Hat tip Henry Simon...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:02 AM • 1 Comments •
August 16, 2008
August 14, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:09 PM • 3 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:10 AM • 7 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:12 AM • 22 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:59 AM • 17 Comments •
August 13, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:04 AM • 34 Comments •
August 12, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:29 AM • 9 Comments •
August 11, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:13 PM • 8 Comments •
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,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:19 AM • 5 Comments •
August 9, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:48 PM • 1 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:14 AM • 2 Comments •
August 8, 2008
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:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:03 AM • 6 Comments •
August 7, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:45 PM • 6 Comments •
August 6, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:28 PM • 8 Comments •
August 5, 2008
Category: Biodiversity
sigh... More here....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:44 PM • 8 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 4:08 AM • 8 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:41 AM • 3 Comments •
August 4, 2008
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:35 PM • 10 Comments •
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....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:41 AM • 2 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:39 AM • 4 Comments •
August 3, 2008
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,...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:51 AM • 2 Comments •
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...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:43 AM • 10 Comments •
August 1, 2008
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"...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:18 AM • 107 Comments •
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