General Science:
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 • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on Women and superstition (parts one and two) and Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four). Go check them and her...
Posted on May 8, 2008 9:33 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On a newsgroup that shall remain Nameless, one of the regulars, Bill Reich, just heard on the History Channel: Smilodon is the ancestor of all the modern big cats. Oy! So this thread is for egregiously* wrong statements made...
Posted on May 4, 2008 10:05 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
... Wilkins turns green with envy. There's a special sort of immortality for those who work in paleontology which clearly outweighs the total lack of jobs and remuneration: having a species named after you. My friend and accredited geologist...
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Posted on April 28, 2008 8:16 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here. One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are...
Posted on April 27, 2008 6:10 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and...
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Posted on April 26, 2008 9:51 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all. This one's for Eli Gerson......
Posted on April 25, 2008 7:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather...
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Posted on April 20, 2008 11:16 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein... And knowing one of the principals...
Posted on April 20, 2008 9:50 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they'd miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3....
Posted on April 16, 2008 3:23 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel...
Posted on April 15, 2008 7:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students. Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin...
Posted on April 14, 2008 1:06 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable...
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Posted on April 3, 2008 5:25 AM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
While we're on the topic of animals that act like humans, consider this very sad, very famous case: Nim Chimpsky. Raised to be a human boy, when the funds ran out and Nim got to the age equivalent of...
Posted on March 31, 2008 10:15 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So we're all such cosmopolitan nerds, blogging away... here's a guy (a friend of mine, actually) who has been doing a regular web column on Southern Hemisphere Astronomy for ten years. Give it up please for the well-bearded over-educated...
Posted on March 31, 2008 8:49 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Watch the video under the fold, from Chang Mai in Thailand. There's a moment where you realise what the elephant is representing, and a shock that comes when you see that it is representing something. I don't know if...
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Posted on March 30, 2008 8:42 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such...
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Posted on March 28, 2008 10:29 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Okay, so it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf, but it's even more important than news about me. The 6000 square mile (15,540 km2) ice shelf named for Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Australian Antarctic explorer (and very possibly some kind...
Posted on March 25, 2008 10:21 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On the one hand you have Jake Young discussing the role of expertise in public debates, concluding that maybe experts shouldn't expect that information from knowledgeable folk will automatically influence the uneducated. On the other hand, this......
Posted on March 21, 2008 10:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When I was about 8, I read in a newspaper that one of my favourite short stories, "The Sentinel", by Arthur C. Clarke, was to be made into a movie by some film maker I never heard of. I...
Posted on March 18, 2008 10:39 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment: Growth and division of these organisms was observed...
Posted on March 17, 2008 4:14 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The European Space Agency is doing lots of interesting work for biology, in particular ecology. This map allows you to zoom into any place on the planet to see the land cover. [From Eureka Science News]...
Posted on March 17, 2008 1:57 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of...
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Posted on February 19, 2008 12:02 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known,...
Posted on February 18, 2008 10:30 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A real journalist reviews a media conference held for the new pro-ID film Expelled: Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at...
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Posted on February 16, 2008 8:20 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers...
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Posted on February 13, 2008 8:05 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some of you may recall I was immensely impressed by Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old who started Pro-Test, which defended the use of animal models against the vicious and largely unthinking nastiness of animal "rights" protesters. Now Nick...
Posted on February 9, 2008 9:45 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As well as the Basic Concepts list, I occasionally get sent some links that are in my mind too advanced to be basics, but too good not to mention. So I will do with them what I have done...
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Posted on February 2, 2008 6:54 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You'll recall that we had a new logo and link for Blogging Peer Reviewed Research. This is now rebadged and has become Research Blogging. It will aggregate and feed the posts on peer reviewed research....
Posted on January 23, 2008 4:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out...
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Posted on January 21, 2008 3:42 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, so by now a number of you are either quite puzzled or are up in arms about this notion of mine that genes aren't information. First I'll recap and then make some general philosophical and historical points....
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Posted on January 17, 2008 9:48 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic......
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Posted on January 16, 2008 9:45 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Anyone who knows the film The Princess Bride knows what happens next. Westley gets hit hard by a rodent about the size of a pitbull. However, it seems that ROUS's (Rodents of Unusual Size) actually may have existed, in...
Posted on January 15, 2008 8:19 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
TR Gregory at Scientific Blogging asks why advisors would encourage their students to publish. One of the reasons is: Most of the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked directly have been quite excited by the possibility...
Posted on January 13, 2008 9:02 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of my colleagues just raised a point I hadn't thought of vis á vis Special Relativity. I had always thought that an observer on a photon would not experience time. My colleague suggests that each frame of reference...
Posted on January 10, 2008 10:24 PM • 36 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward,...
Posted on January 6, 2008 12:39 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” and Endnote are synthetic lethals. From The Futile Cycle. "A synthetic pair of genes are two gene variants that alone are fine, but when combined into the same organism, cause it to die." Why? When...
Posted on January 4, 2008 1:07 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Henry Gee reviews the Golden Compass, and comes up with largely the same conclusions I would have had I been as insightful as he. A quote: It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on...
Posted on December 29, 2007 11:05 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the things about being a Mac user, for 20-odd years now, is that you just like your corporate hero. Sure, they stuffed up on a number of hardware releases, and their delay in getting a multitasking OS...
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Posted on December 29, 2007 9:16 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, so today is Christmas day, December 25. On this day* a man was born who changed the world. He affected a growing tradition that has left no part of the world untouched, for good or ill. He revealed...
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Posted on December 24, 2007 6:14 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters....
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Posted on December 22, 2007 9:07 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is...
Posted on December 19, 2007 7:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is,...
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Posted on December 10, 2007 8:43 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human...
Posted on December 5, 2007 10:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
... a book was published that changed the way we thought of biology....
Posted on November 24, 2007 9:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[A guest post by palentologist and geologist Chris Nedin] It's taken the best part of 50 years but it's finally here! 50 years after the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that took a global geophysical view of the globe, one...
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Posted on November 4, 2007 10:45 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care. A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in...
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Posted on November 3, 2007 11:18 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here is an article in Harvard Magazine on bacteria and other wee beasties that make up the bulk of the living world, that is worth reading. It's called "The Undiscovered Planet". Hat tip to Jason Grossman....
Posted on October 31, 2007 12:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The above are icons to be used when blogging on actual peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular reports or kookery). I had a marginal involvement in this (I made some passing comments early on) so it is with great...
Posted on October 29, 2007 10:29 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather...
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Posted on October 5, 2007 9:46 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take...
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Posted on September 21, 2007 2:12 AM • 38 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
All the strangers look like family All the family looks so strange The only constant I am sure of Is this accelerating rate of change — Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up, from the Ovo Album Creek Running North has a delightful...
Posted on September 16, 2007 10:09 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When the Republicans began their deconstruction of American democracy, under Newt Gingrich, one of the immediate targets was the emasculation of the Office of Technology Assessment. Since that time, the Republicans have mangled, misused and rhetorically denied any science...
Posted on September 14, 2007 10:33 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get "the controversy" taught in the school district of his kids' school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was "discriminated against... for being Christian"....
Posted on September 13, 2007 10:55 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Now we turn to the modern accounts of life. In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler produced uric acid without using “kidney of man or dog”. Prior to that time, there was considered to be something different between organic chemistry and inorganic...
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Posted on September 8, 2007 4:32 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So, you thought that Colony Collapse Disorder, which is causing billions of dollars in losses in American agriculture, was an act of nature? You poor fools! It's a plot, I tell yez. We Australians have hardier bees than you...
Posted on September 7, 2007 3:14 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
COSMOS magazine has an interesting article sure to stir up trouble by suggesting that, among other things, global organic farming would necessitate clearing all remaining forests and even then a substantial portion of the earth's population would starve. I...
Posted on September 7, 2007 2:51 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Carl Zimmer has one of his usually clear and precise articles on recent work on the nature of life, focussing on the work of Carol Cleland, who is at the National Astrobiology Institute, despite reduced funding for actual science...
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Posted on September 6, 2007 12:03 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Continuing on from my last post, let's consider the modes of speciation that are called into account for the existence of species....
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Posted on September 1, 2007 7:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Dear readers, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has suggested that we have a universally available icon to indicate that the blogger is blogging about peer reviewed research, and he has created a discussion blog at BPR3. Please go make...
Posted on August 15, 2007 9:23 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of "species" in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It's designed as a reader for...
Posted on August 15, 2007 1:10 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Rob Wilson has a new entry up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled "The Biological notion of an individual". It discusses an interesting problem, one that goes back to discussions by Julian Huxley in 1911. What is an...
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Posted on August 11, 2007 2:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've been pretty quiet of late. In part this is because I've been travelling with little internet access, but also it's because I'm teaching a subject I haven't studied in years, and because I was asked to write a...
Posted on August 7, 2007 4:40 PM •
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?).
