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 Sessional Lecturer 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 in 2004, which he has worked into two books. Species Definitions: A Sourcebook (Peter Lang) will come out in 2008; Species: A History of an Idea (University of California Press) will appear, it is hoped, in early 2009. He is also interested in cultural evolution, philosophy of religion, Macintosh computers and his kids.
If anyone knows of a tenurable, or even medium term, job in philosophy of biology, let me know. Have library, will travel. The contract ran out ...
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...
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)
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 3rd Edition (Bradford Books)
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
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A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Posted on May 30, 2007 4:45 AM • 15 Comments •
Posted on May 23, 2007 1:15 AM • 8 Comments •
It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.... Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Posted on May 16, 2007 7:31 AM • 9 Comments •
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter.... The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.
Posted on May 14, 2007 10:35 PM • 18 Comments •
Sure, nobody expects the president to select the next generation of successful breeders for any generation, but this is a good surrogate test of whether or not the candidate thinks science is to be trusted, or whether they think, as this administration odes, that they can choose the reality in which they operate with impunity.... So asking this question of the next shift of Republicans is in effect asking them whether they are prepared to lie, act on bad advice, and do whatever it takes either to appease a minority of the electorate (fundamentalists) or not.
Posted on May 12, 2007 2:53 PM • 11 Comments •
Posted on May 6, 2007 8:46 PM • 28 Comments •
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture.... Again with the repetitive quotes and little bells, and Daniel Dennett gets some airtime to yet again argue that Darwin made design implausible in biology (which it did, of course) but the rest of the show, which is mostly Miller with historians, narrating the rise of unbelief in the 19th and 20th centuries, and returning, this time more effectively, to McGinn, is more interesting.
Posted on May 1, 2007 9:32 PM • 20 Comments •
I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it.... Eugenie Scott and Ken Ham posed for a photo before resuming their club-fight, for the BBC, with a picture of the delightful Professor Steve Steve, who visited me and travelled with me through the US, particularly Hawai'i a while back, and more recently I met him in Vancouver.
Posted on April 15, 2007 6:13 AM • 6 Comments •
The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method publishes (in the same journal as my latest, preen, preen) a paper entitled - I kid you not - "Is the Pope a Catholic?"
Posted on April 12, 2007 9:11 AM • 18 Comments •
Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based on accounts of the events which form this evil history written by the best historians of the evil devices of DARWINISM and EVOLUTIONISM, and based on the best scientific principle of SUBJECTIVITY, and rejecting utterly the ATHEIST doctrine of OBJECTIVITY which clouds the mind of mankind and leads to the rejection of TRUE CHRISTIANITY ™.
Posted on April 12, 2007 8:34 AM • 5 Comments •
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones.... A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner.
Posted on April 12, 2007 12:48 AM • 0 Comments •
Coulter's book Godless isn't what it seems to be - an ill-informed rehash of tired old creationist bafflegab. Instead, it's a Sokalesque hoax designed to make conservatives reassess their own rationality and to expose the idiocy of intelligent design!
Posted on April 7, 2007 10:39 PM • 2 Comments •
None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.... The story is this: Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination inflicted on atheists by the constant celebrations afforded to Christians and Jews with all their holidays while the atheists had no holiday to celebrate.
Posted on March 31, 2007 12:46 AM • 9 Comments •
As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end].... A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the issues of what, if anything is to count as a microbial species, in the light of modern genomics.
Posted on March 27, 2007 3:08 AM • 2 Comments •
At Res Ipsa Loquitur comes a tale of a law professor trying to use Cicero to argue that all morality comes from intelligent design.... Read the smackdown by the student, who gives me much hope for the legal profession...
Posted on March 26, 2007 2:53 AM • 1 Comments •
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If certain right-wing and fundamentalist pressure-groups hadn't hit upon it as a way of opposing decades of uncomfortable scientific and social progress, it'd be pushing up daisies!... Customer: Pray, is it part of a theory that unifies the paleontological and biological sciences and leads to a powerful understanding of observed homologies and the nested hierarchy of life?
Posted on March 22, 2007 3:27 AM • 7 Comments •
Not what best puts the usual creationist canards forward, but which creationist (including ID) book tried to make an intellectually satisfying and honest case. So far I have Wendell Bird's Origin of Species Revisited published about 1983 or so, which was the defendant's brief in McLean v Arkansas.
Posted on March 12, 2007 7:47 AM • 3 Comments •
Thing is, in a charitable and updated form, Epicurus was right about the natures of living things - science shows us (not just evolutionary biology, but all of science) that the natures of living things really are composed of their parts and the combinations of those parts.... There's no general reason why a certain mutation had to happen, or a given population lost this or that gene, but this is because either we do not know the conditions or because there is a stochastic scatter in physical processes (which does not rely on evolutionary biology, but upon the nature of things - the world is largely scattered as a matter of fact, in physics and sociology as well as in biology).
Posted on March 10, 2007 10:35 AM • 22 Comments •
