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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.
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Category: Evolution • General Science • Humor
Posted on: November 10, 2008 10:23 PM, by John S. Wilkins
Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying:
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed.
Anyway, go read the bastard's excellent essay. I will just sit here in my pool of failure.
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Comments
It's a decent review of the past 50 years of genetics for the lay person. I think that's why Zimmer is so successful; he conveys mind numbing quantities of science into something readable for the average individual with little background in science. In any event, I know most of that, and I'm a bit upset that he didn't go more in depth with how untranslated regions within an a sequence function (like operators), but it was still a decent place to send people for a very general overview.
Posted by: Jared | November 10, 2008 11:00 PM
For a layman like me, it's a great piece of work.
One of the difficulties a non-specialist faces in keeping up with the field is that it changes so quickly, and new discoveries keep happening. That's why I started reading Scienceblogs.
Zimmer is indeed absurdly talented. But reading him was what led me to other fascinating blogs like this one. (Fishing for compliments, John?)
Posted by: John Monfries | November 11, 2008 6:38 PM