Evolution:
I get so tired of comments like this: The Grim Reaper is taking a rest, and inherited differences in the ability to withstand cold, starvation or disease no longer power Darwin's machine. Those who die from such killers do...
Posted on October 6, 2008 10:26 PM • 17 Comments •
Readers know I think religion is post-agricultural, which raises some difficulties if we find evidence of organised religious behaviours before the onset of agriculture. The case in point here being Göbeli Tepe. Now a recent model of the process...
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Posted on September 28, 2008 8:57 PM • 12 Comments •
It all began with Larry Arnhart giving a "Darwinian" account of the case for financial bailouts. Then David Sloan Wilson rejected the argument from the Invisible Hand. Then Massimo Pigliucci entered the fray. What's at issue?...
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Posted on September 28, 2008 9:54 AM • 7 Comments •
If any of my readers are good knitters, check this out: The pattern, not the girl. Preverts! Hat tip: Colin Purrington...
Posted on September 27, 2008 8:22 PM • 14 Comments •
A paper I recently saw in EMBO Reports made the following assertion: Ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork for the scientific tradition of critical inquiry, but they nevertheless missed out on one aspect important to modern science. Many philosophers...
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Posted on September 16, 2008 9:35 AM • 18 Comments •
If I weren't such a reductionist mechanist, I'd probably find this very very funny. And what Cleese does to things deserves its own verb....
Posted on September 14, 2008 9:56 PM • 8 Comments •
The hyperborean John Pieret, notes that my love for the "social glue" theory of religion (I henceforth steal that name, John; sue me. Oh, wait, you're a lawyer aren't you? Never mind) has been backed up by two ASU...
Posted on September 14, 2008 12:16 PM • 17 Comments •
Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now. A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent....
Posted on September 13, 2008 3:09 AM • 7 Comments •
I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists....
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Posted on September 11, 2008 9:54 PM • 9 Comments •
I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote: The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours,...
Posted on September 9, 2008 1:25 AM • 10 Comments •
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something...
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Posted on September 5, 2008 8:47 AM • 38 Comments •
Once again I have manflu, the most despicable disease known to man (and to women, who also suffer indirectly from it). So blogging is patchy. Also, I have to do some teaching stuff, which involves thinking about what the...
Posted on September 4, 2008 10:27 PM • 6 Comments •
The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately....
Posted on September 1, 2008 1:46 AM • 2 Comments •
One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first...
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Posted on August 30, 2008 11:43 PM • 5 Comments •
Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report...
Posted on August 28, 2008 11:04 PM • 5 Comments •
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question. Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion. A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a...
Posted on August 26, 2008 2:37 AM • 1 Comments •
In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I...
Posted on August 25, 2008 1:33 AM • 5 Comments •
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if...
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Posted on August 22, 2008 11:25 PM • 53 Comments •
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords: Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must...
Posted on August 21, 2008 8:15 AM • 0 Comments •
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another...
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Posted on August 14, 2008 10:10 AM • 7 Comments •
As I sit here, dying slowly and loudly from a dose of gastro and probably 'flu (Australian male: we don't do sick well), trying to distract myself from the efforts of my lower intestines to escape to Jamaica, I...
Posted on August 14, 2008 3:59 AM • 17 Comments •
Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and...
Posted on August 9, 2008 2:14 AM • 2 Comments •
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First:...
Posted on August 8, 2008 12:03 AM • 6 Comments •
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I...
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Posted on August 7, 2008 9:45 PM • 6 Comments •
Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and...
Posted on August 6, 2008 9:28 PM • 8 Comments •
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side...
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Posted on August 5, 2008 1:41 AM • 3 Comments •
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case...
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Posted on August 4, 2008 10:35 PM • 10 Comments •
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks...
Posted on August 4, 2008 1:39 AM • 4 Comments •
For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer's own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer...
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Posted on July 30, 2008 9:29 AM • 7 Comments •
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C. merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p = peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae...
Posted on July 29, 2008 7:46 AM • 7 Comments •
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa: Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time...
Posted on July 27, 2008 5:39 AM • 4 Comments •
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea. A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly...
Posted on July 25, 2008 8:26 PM • 3 Comments •
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought...
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Posted on July 23, 2008 4:05 AM • 53 Comments •
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local...
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:39 PM • 6 Comments •
Good to see that Olivia Judson has finally caught up with me......
Posted on July 16, 2008 8:54 AM • 13 Comments •
Ryan Gregory at Genomicron has a couple of interesting posts; One on Natural Selection before Darwin, which discusses prior presentations back to Hutton. I think he's right that prior to Darwin selection was typically not thought of as a...
Posted on July 16, 2008 2:37 AM • 0 Comments •
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society? These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing...
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Posted on July 12, 2008 12:11 AM • 132 Comments •
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I...
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Posted on July 1, 2008 9:58 PM • 24 Comments •
Readers may know I have a passing interest in the works of Terry Pratchett. Oh, okay then, I'm a fanboy. Have been for well over fifteen years, since a coworker shoved Good Omens into my hands and mind. So...
Posted on June 27, 2008 8:58 PM • 11 Comments •
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full...
Posted on June 26, 2008 11:54 PM • 3 Comments •
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence....
Posted on June 25, 2008 9:32 PM • 10 Comments •
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it....
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Posted on June 21, 2008 10:03 PM • 31 Comments •
In an interesting post, Think Gene poses what they call "the inherent problem" of scientific theories: The inherent problem of scientific theories is that there exists an infinite equally valid explanations. Why? Because unlike in mathematics, we never have...
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Posted on June 18, 2008 9:05 PM • 30 Comments •
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code: Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S....
Posted on June 18, 2008 1:50 AM • 4 Comments •
Creationists and Darwinian skeptics often claim that natural selection could not produce the sort of improbability (often, for reasons that nobody is quite sure of, below 1 in 10 to the 500th power) that we see around us. So...
Posted on June 16, 2008 7:22 PM • 21 Comments •
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist....
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Posted on June 16, 2008 8:14 AM • 7 Comments •
I can't say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak's team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of...
Posted on June 11, 2008 12:32 PM • 0 Comments •
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist. Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him....
Posted on June 11, 2008 1:10 AM • 10 Comments •
Mystery Rays from Outer Space has a good essay on the evolution of spumaviruses ("foamy viruses") which are cytologically fatal in the lab, but which are latent in most body cell types in the nonhuman species they inhabit. It...
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Posted on June 9, 2008 5:05 AM • 11 Comments •
A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds' Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he...
Posted on June 9, 2008 12:10 AM • 1 Comments •
The final of my comments on this topic (see one and two here) addresses the question whether or not there is a rank of species....
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Posted on June 8, 2008 3:33 AM • 15 Comments •
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work. Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters,...
Posted on June 4, 2008 11:47 PM • 13 Comments •
Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican): Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths...
Posted on June 2, 2008 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
So we managed to attract 5 local PZombies (Craig, you are in trouble for not turning up!) on a wet Brisbane night. We had some interesting discussions (which I fear means that others listened to me nonstop) over beer....
Posted on May 30, 2008 9:22 PM • 7 Comments •
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here> Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much...
Posted on May 28, 2008 3:13 AM • 7 Comments •
Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what...
Posted on May 27, 2008 10:03 PM • 2 Comments •
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it....
Posted on May 25, 2008 10:56 PM • 31 Comments •
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell...
Posted on May 24, 2008 9:09 PM • 15 Comments •
One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a...
Posted on May 23, 2008 6:12 PM • 8 Comments •
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they...
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Posted on May 19, 2008 7:50 PM • 4 Comments •
Comparative limb growth of a bat (top) and a mouse, in utero development. From the paper below. One of my favourite statistics is this: one in every four mammal species you meet is a rat or rodent, and one...
Posted on May 18, 2008 10:01 PM • 4 Comments •
I have been called, for my denial of outright atheism, a Chamberlainist. Well I never felt so much like Neville Chamberlain today as I walked through the corridors of the Seat of Learning* with a contract from the publishers...
Posted on May 18, 2008 8:59 PM • 21 Comments •
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't! The third line gave Aldous Huxley the...
Posted on May 14, 2008 9:26 AM • 4 Comments •
So much has been happening in the world while I was giving a talk on the adaptiveness of religion in Sydney. The Platypus thing was one item I'd have blogged on if the rest of the blogosphere hadn't beaten...
Posted on May 9, 2008 8:33 PM • 8 Comments •
In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the "transcendental" relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents...
Posted on May 5, 2008 10:04 PM • 11 Comments •
John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it's most likely wrong....
Posted on May 3, 2008 9:43 PM • 0 Comments •
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from...
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Posted on May 3, 2008 1:04 AM • 6 Comments •
For years people have been telling us the dinosaurs were killed off in an extinction event 65 million years ago. That always seemed a little too even for me. Did they round off, or was there doubt, or what?...
Posted on April 30, 2008 1:11 AM • 9 Comments •
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic...
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Posted on April 27, 2008 8:45 PM • 31 Comments •
I just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs: Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs. It's...
Posted on April 21, 2008 8:59 AM • 0 Comments •
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 a position as a 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.
