Evolving Thoughts

I have run across a useful little site by Yan Feng, me/diumwhich he calls a Linklog. He links to video material of some interest to those who are science-concerned. Some of the best are: Einstein and Eddington - A BBC dramatisation of Eddington and Einstein's correspondence leading to the famous solar eclipse observation that made Einstein a star, with David Tennant as Eddington and Andy Serkis as Einstein (and both are fantastic); Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics; and a plant that blogs: Blogging plant posts daily news on its mood.

Migrations has an essay in which they suppose that creationism is a form of folk biology. This seems true, indeed, truistic. But I must demur with this:

Naturally, this ties folkbiology closely to systematics and taxonomy, and the inductive approaches of Linnaeus and his contemporaries. Like Linnaeus, the categorization or classification of the organic world into ontological categories leads to a fundamental impression of the immutability of species, or Essentialism.

Three things are wrong with this:

1. Linnaeus was not folk biology - in fact he did a considerable amount of work differentiating classification from folk biologies and folk nomenclatures.

2. Classification doesn't necessarily lead to immutability of species, and indeed it set up the conditions for which mutabilism (evolution) was a solution. Darwin was led to the problem by dealing with the tree-like classification of Linnean classification.

3. Essentialism is not about immutability of species. It is the view that taxa have a set of necessary and sufficient properties, characters or traits. It doesn't mean that there cannot be intermediate forms that lack or superadd such properties. In fact, essentialists have always held that evolution involves vagueness of classification in speciation. And (which Wiki doesn't yet know) essentialism post-dates Darwin.

Moving on, even a child welfare group now opposes ISP filtering. Clive Hamilton, the idea's originator in Australia, tries to defend it as weighing the rights of children against the rights of adults (an argument that allows the removal of quite a lot of rights - call it the "Somebody think of the children" defence of witchhunts). Some Greens note that apparently the free market excludes ideas for neoliberals.