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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...

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Roundup - not just for weeds!

Category: Creationism • Design • Evolution • General Science • History • Logic and philosophy • Philosophy of Science • Politics
Posted on: September 13, 2008 3:09 AM, by John S. Wilkins

Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now.

A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent. Thony is not permitted to point out any further historical inaccuracies...

Leiter reports that a philosopher who blogs, from Yeshiva, James Otteson, may have been removed because he said things on the blog that are sexist, or at least interpreted to be, according to Inside Higher Education.

Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has the first of a series on the historian Simon Schaeffer, on the historiography of science.

David Brooks, the NYT columnist and PBS commentator from the right, has an interesting article on whether the Republicans have any intellectual foundation for many of their standard talking points. [Hat tip Larry Arnhart]

Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has a takedown of philosopher Thomas Nagel's claim we should, after all, teach about creationism in schools. He rightly points out that Nagel doesn't know these people, the political motives, and indeed much of the science, let alone the propaedeutic exigencies. I was going to do this, but jake did it better.

A couple of papers at the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology are interesting: Lisa Kondrick on the role Thomism played in permitting Catholic schools and universities to teach natural philosophy separately from theology (gotta love an article whose abstract begins "There is no debate over the Theory of Evolution"). And Kevin Padian on how to incorporate more evolution in education through the use of "evograms", diagrams that better represent the nature of multiple lines of evidence for common descent.

Have fun. Back to marking, still....

Find more posts in: Life Science Politics

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Comments

Thanks for the links!:)

Posted by: Vanessa Angles | September 13, 2008 3:48 AM

I'm surprised on that Nagel bit, especially after reading a little of his work on subjectivity and my pet why-am-i-me question. But then again, a quick skim of some of his other writings seemed hopelessly obscure to me, and I probably should have spent more time on him.

Posted by: jeff | September 13, 2008 4:21 AM

For some reason, reading Grayling's corrosive response to Fuller made me think of Dennett's "universal acid"...

Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | September 13, 2008 2:38 PM

...as an aside, I'm sure you didn't ask Thony not to comment because he can sing better than you can?

Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | September 13, 2008 2:55 PM

There's an update on the Yeshiva story on Leiter's blog:

UPDATE: Professor Otteson writes: "I saw your blog entry about the Inside Higher Ed article about me. I thought I should tell you that I'm not sure where they got their information, but it wasn't from me. We had policy differences about the honors program, yes, but I'm completely satisfied with what we decided to do. I think comparisons to Larry Summers are preposterous. I'm sure Yeshiva would say the same. I've told this to Inside Higher Ed, but I haven't received a response from them yet." The story did seem a bit thin on evidence, and now we know why!

So it was much ado about something else.

Posted by: RBH | September 13, 2008 4:43 PM

Ian: Rocks can sing better than that.

Thanks RBH. I was worried in case it meant the beginnings of an anti-blogging movement amongst philosophy departments.

Posted by: John S. Wilkins | September 13, 2008 8:47 PM

I'm sure you didn't ask Thony not to comment because he can sing better than you can?

But then again I wasn't born in 1614

Posted by: Thony C. | September 14, 2008 4:35 AM