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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.
January 30, 2009
Category: Evolution
There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:02 PM • 19 Comments •
Category: Logic and philosophy
David Chalmers and his student David Bourget at the Australian National University have developed a new resource: PhilPapers. This is a hot list to online versions of (so far) over 188,000 items in current philosophy. I checked my own papers...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:27 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: General Science
Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai'i - Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:36 AM • 10 Comments •
January 27, 2009
H/T Clifford Dubery...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:48 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Evolution
If you happen to be near the University of Guelph, then not only is Massimo Pigliucci giving a talk there, but there's this event by my friend and former colleague, Stefan Linquist:...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:45 AM • 1 Comments •
January 26, 2009
Category: Evolution
An excellent fisking by Johnny at Ecographica is here - including the cover that New Scientist should have used... More from Larry at Sandwalk here, on the cover and the intent of the article. Marco F at Leucophaea has a...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:02 AM • 4 Comments •
January 24, 2009
Category: Evolution
It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this: In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:03 PM • 3 Comments •
January 23, 2009
Category: Evolution
this makes you laugh out loud: It's even relevant to this blog......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 5:29 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Biodiversity
There's been a slew of "Darwin was wrong" and "Evolution is more complicated" stories in the media lately. It's nearing Darwin day so simple minded media hacks can be explained as needing to find the requisite "drama" in their "stories"....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:05 PM • 33 Comments •
January 22, 2009
Category: History
What is nice about the humanity of science is that we do not need to have unattainable ideals for it to proceed. But we remain moral agents, and so we should not try to cover up the moral failings of scientific achievers.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:25 AM • 22 Comments •
Orac 02.13.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
