Truisms 2
Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't want to, on balance Corollary: Everything we want to do has a neurological foundation Discuss...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:46 AM • 19 Comments •
Evolving Thoughts
One man's struggle against impermanence
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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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I also have an Australia-focussed blog: The Drought Resistant Philosopher
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The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
December 31, 2008
December 29, 2008
The road to hell
In the final chapter of Terry Pratchett's Eric, the wizard Rincewind and the boy Eric are climbing out of hell on steep steps. He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:56 PM • 8 Comments •
Truisms 1
As an academic philosopher, one often finds it more interesting to discuss or debate the ideas of others than to assert what one believes to be true. This is because everybody has ideas they believe to be true, but few...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:01 PM • 39 Comments •
December 27, 2008
Basics: NOT
It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:42 AM • 6 Comments •
December 25, 2008
No Father Christmas? also no Jesus. Get used to it.
So what is it with Christians who are so able to debunk and demythologise the myths of everyone else, and fail to see that exactly the same logic applies to their own mythology? A priest in northern Italy told kids...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 3:18 AM • 20 Comments •
December 24, 2008
A nice discussion of the problems of Evolutionary Psychology
Here at monkey's uncle, the blog of James Holland Jones, a Stanford anthropologist. Well worth the read. Basically he attacks the presumption that there was some kind of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness needed to make the rest of the EP...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:56 AM • 6 Comments •
December 23, 2008
Miscellany
Damn it's hot. Around here, snow is at a premium, which means our solstitial celebrations are less active than those oop north. Anyway, I got interviewed last night on national radio, the ABC's National Evening show, talking about the early...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:22 PM • 5 Comments •
December 21, 2008
Interregnum
Because I have to hand back my laptop to my present employer, and my future employer won't have a Mac for me before mid-January or later, I may not be able to post much for a while. I do have...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:28 PM • 11 Comments •
December 19, 2008
The "Get a life" meme
Oh dear. I have a bad feeling about this. Via Greg Laden's blog comes a list of 219 movies and supposedly if you have seen more than 85 you have no life... Prepare yourself...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:32 AM • 16 Comments •
December 17, 2008
Basic Concepts: Biology
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:06 AM • •
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