One man's struggle against impermanence
John Wilkins is an aged, 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 a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Queensland, in Australia. 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, which he is working into two books. One has been accepted for publication, and will come out in 2008; the other may be contracted soon. He is also interested in cultural evolution, philosophy of religion, Macintosh computers and his kids (they sort of make it a necessity, you know?).
If anyone knows of a tenurable, or even medium term, job in philosophy of biology, let me know. Have library, will travel. The contract runs out soon...
This blog is designed to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality
Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series)
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published.
Posted on April 29, 2008 12:23 AM • 97 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on January 24, 2008 1:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on September 13, 2007 1:41 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on September 8, 2007 4:32 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on September 6, 2007 12:03 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on August 11, 2007 2:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on June 6, 2007 7:42 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on June 5, 2007 9:27 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on June 4, 2007 6:24 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear.... But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution. ... The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram. ... That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
Posted on April 18, 2007 10:21 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Charles Darwin's classic definition of the ecological causes ("struggle for existence") and genetic consequences of selection ... can be restated in modern scientific language as follows: Natural/sexual selection is the ecological interactions an organism has with ((1) the physical conditions of the environment, (2) individuals of other species, and (3) individuals of the same species that affects the number of times the organism successfully reproduces the genes the organism is carrying.
Posted on April 9, 2007 9:56 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There are a cluster of terms used by biologists to describe where organisms live or grow, and they are: sympatric, allopatric, parapatric, peripatric, stasipatric, and dichopatric. This flock of technical terms is confusing to the newcomer (and to some biologists), but there is a kind of logic - as much as in the evolution of any technical jargon - that will make it clearer, and at the same time allow us to set up the alternative views on the fundamental evolutionary process of common descent: speciation.
Posted on March 11, 2007 5:57 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the more difficult conceptual problems the layperson has with biology lies in the simple word "primitive". It has many antonyms - "modern", "evolved" and "derived", and like many biological uses of ordinary words, everybody thinks they understand it, and doesn't.
Posted on February 28, 2007 9:32 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Last year and the year before I helped teach Philosophy of the Life Sciences here, and we used, respectively, one textbook and no textbook. Right now I'm reading a rather marvellous book, that would have set me up years in advance of where I am now, so this got me thinking (it's the job description, you know): what are the textbooks on Philosophy of Biology, and what are their respective merits?
Posted on February 23, 2007 6:35 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is a classic case of the sorts of strawman view of evolution that Edward Humes discusses when he notes that there is the real theory of evolution, as discussed by biologists, and the cartoon version that creationists discuss in order to inflame rejection against evolution itself....
Posted on February 19, 2007 7:30 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Theory: A word that gets used a lot in discussing science, or attacking it.
Posted on February 15, 2007 7:12 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Biohumanities Project of Paul Griffiths, of which I am a minor part, has a page up of talks and discussions at conferences and workshops, recorded for podcasting.... Some of the crispy goodness: A conference on mechanism and reduction, a conference on the philosophy of ecology, and a conference on evidence based medicine, plus talks on emotion, essentialism and biological hierarchies.
Posted on February 5, 2007 12:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
First of all I'd like to disagree with the entire way the debate has been framed over the past 150 years or so and state this: There is only one species concept. That is to say, there is only one concept that we are all trying to define in many ways, according to both our preferred theories of how species come into being and maintain themselves over evolutionary time, and what happens to be the general case for the group of organisms we have in our minds when we attempt our definitions.
Posted on January 23, 2007 9:58 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Fitness. Of the many concepts of evolution, this is perhaps one of the more widely misunderstood.
Posted on January 22, 2007 9:12 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on January 16, 2007 11:09 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on January 15, 2007 9:23 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on January 13, 2007 9:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Posted on January 12, 2007 10:38 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
