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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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Posted on: December 24, 2008 8:56 AM, by John S. Wilkins
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 argument.
Merry Christmas. Or should I say Happy Holidays, being that there's a war on Christmas?
Humanities & Social Science
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respectful insolence 02.13.2012
evolutionblog 02.12.2012
starts with a bang! 02.11.2012
Comments
Happy Monkey.
Posted by: Andrew | December 24, 2008 9:53 AM
Thanks for pointing us in that direction. I thought Buller's arguments have some merit, and especially Buss's grand claims so far failed to convince me. (Best line in his interview with Richard Dawkins: Sooner or later all psychology/sociology departments will have to accept that they're just subsets of EP). But the first load of comments in the SciAm article's comment section was so hypervitriolic, including comparing EP critics to creationists, that I didn't know what to make of it.
^_^J.
Posted by: gyokusai | December 24, 2008 11:48 AM
Well, psychology in general has a tradition of the theory being way out in front of the empirical data, so why should EP be any different? I would expect that many or maybe even all of the conclusions of EP are wrong as far as the details are concerned, but I think that the overall program is unavoidable. What's that oft-repeated quote about the role of evolution in biology? "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." The problem is simply that psychology is currently still too far removed from the biology, but that is changing rapidly as neuroscientists map out the functioning of the brain. Eventually we will be able to map specific sets of genes to brain structures and behaviors, and to make some estimates as to when those genes became a part of the human genome. This will provide a firmer empirical basis for EP to work with.
Posted by: Kurt | December 25, 2008 12:23 AM
Yes, Virginia, there is a War on Christmas. It is being masterminded by the Department of Neverneverland Security, headed by Ebenezer "Heckuva job, Scroogie" Scrooge, BA Humbug, who is on the verge of declaring "Mistletoe accomplished!"
Merry Antipodean Christmas anyway!
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | December 25, 2008 6:26 AM
Posted by: llewelly | December 26, 2008 1:05 AM
In my opinion the largest threat for California are cataclysms and ecological catastrophes. Not important is how many money we have because one tragedy can us take all.
Posted by: alufelgi szczecin | January 2, 2009 7:00 PM