History:
Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made...
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Posted on September 22, 2008 1:03 AM • 8 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 •
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 •
Another guest post by Thony ChristieJohn recently provided a link to a review of Steve Fuller’s newest book by Anthony Grayling. On the whole I find Professor Grayling’s comments excellent and applaud his put-down of Fuller but then in the...
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Posted on September 10, 2008 6:34 PM • 25 Comments •
Thony Christie, a regular commenter on this blog, is also a historian of science, and he sent the following guest post that I thought well worth publishing. Commentator “Adam” asked John’s opinion on a book he is reading, The...
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Posted on September 6, 2008 11:09 PM • 26 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 •
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 •
One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is...
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Posted on August 19, 2008 12:25 AM • 13 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 •
A retired chemist has had his home lab confiscated in Maryland because a government official was scared of it. Sayeth Robert Thompson: Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line...
Posted on August 13, 2008 5:04 AM • 34 Comments •
Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of...
Posted on August 11, 2008 9:13 PM • 8 Comments •
A chance link to my blog has led me through an ego search to find Will Thomas' most excellent Ether Wave Propaganda blog. Will is a historian of science post-doc, I think, and he has an engaging style. Coincidentally,...
Posted on August 11, 2008 2:19 AM • 5 Comments •
This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in...
Posted on August 9, 2008 10:48 PM • 1 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 •
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 •
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 •
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Posted on July 21, 2008 9:09 AM • 12 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 •
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 •
History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this: Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points...
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Posted on June 11, 2008 9:10 PM • 17 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 •
If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would...
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Posted on May 29, 2008 10:58 AM • 81 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 •
In a famous skit, Wayne and Schuster had Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, saying "Julie, don't go! It's the Ides of March!" Now we can see why Julie went. He was old, and worried... This is a bust of Julius Caesar...
Posted on May 14, 2008 11:12 PM • 24 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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had...
Posted on April 23, 2008 3:50 AM • 24 Comments •
Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott" The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:LevelScorePurgatory (Repenting Believers)Very LowLevel 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)ModerateLevel 2 (Lustful)Very...
Posted on April 23, 2008 1:20 AM • 17 Comments •
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 •
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 •
Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of...
Posted on April 13, 2008 3:06 AM • 12 Comments •
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit. Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school...
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Posted on April 11, 2008 9:47 PM • 29 Comments •
Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which...
Posted on April 4, 2008 8:37 PM • 19 Comments •
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of...
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Posted on April 1, 2008 12:00 AM • 60 Comments •
My friend and colleague Neil Levy has inaugurated the first edition of a journal devoted to a new field, Neuroethics, the first edition of which is available to all for free here. Neil has a convincing introductory editorial, arguing...
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Posted on March 27, 2008 10:09 PM • 8 Comments •
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 •
Yeah, yeah, OK, I know I've been absent except on the comments, but I'm traveling, all right? Everything I have worth saying gets said over beer or whiskey, tonight to Jim Lippard and John Lynch, the latter of whom...
Posted on March 9, 2008 3:21 AM • 3 Comments •
Today marks the final day of the month in which, 150 years ago, a naturalist in what is now Indonesia wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in which he gave a theoretical account of how types can evolve by...
Posted on February 28, 2008 9:44 AM • 7 Comments •
... a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don't' get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and...
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Posted on February 25, 2008 8:37 AM • 10 Comments •
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article discussing a study as to why there are so few conservative academics, in the light of the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to propose and "academic bill of rights". The...
Posted on February 21, 2008 11:06 PM • 5 Comments •
One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An...
Posted on February 21, 2008 7:51 PM • 4 Comments •
In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks: However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ... This sad...
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Posted on February 21, 2008 1:59 AM • 13 Comments •
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin......
Posted on February 20, 2008 7:19 PM • 6 Comments •
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models....
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Posted on February 19, 2008 1:29 AM • 1 Comments •
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 •
So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?...
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Posted on February 10, 2008 12:33 AM • 10 Comments •
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print: The only objections that have occurred...
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Posted on January 26, 2008 12:54 AM • 5 Comments •
This isn't something I would often write, but I think that the recent protest against the Pope speaking at the secular university La Sapienza in Rome is misplaced. Critics say that the Pope, when he was of more humble...
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Posted on January 17, 2008 2:47 AM • 59 Comments •
In an article on the Catholic or otherwise virtues of Harry Potter (didn't we do all this a while back), L'Osservatore Romano has an article claiming that Harry Potter is the wrong kind of hero. Why is that? Not,...
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Posted on January 15, 2008 4:53 AM • 17 Comments •
Some things I spotted today.....
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Posted on January 8, 2008 6:50 PM • 4 Comments •
Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own:...
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Posted on January 3, 2008 11:12 PM • 1 Comments •
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links......
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Posted on January 1, 2008 12:28 AM • 0 Comments •
The New York Times has a long overdue article on the stupidity of airport security measures for those flying to, within or in markets affected by the United States post-9/11. Pointing out that the security screening at airports in...
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Posted on December 30, 2007 4:13 AM • 9 Comments •
Found in an old manuscript in the ruins of an old university: Well this year has been pretty much the same as those that went before. We planted crops, most of which failed because we only had the poverty...
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Posted on December 28, 2007 9:26 PM • 9 Comments •
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not...
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Posted on December 25, 2007 10:39 PM • 10 Comments •
Janet and Shelley have opened up the question of whether students and others should use drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. Janet thinks one shouldn't, and Shelley thinks that, in the absence of bad side effects, one might as...
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Posted on December 20, 2007 5:17 AM • 12 Comments •
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR. Many thanks to Noelie Alito for...
Posted on December 9, 2007 9:25 AM • 3 Comments •
Anyone who has access to COSMOS magazine, published in Australia, will be able to find an article of mine on what good philosophers of science are for science. If you have a copy, scan it and send it to...
Posted on December 7, 2007 8:03 AM • 6 Comments •
Way back in the 1910s, when human evolution was poorly known, some trickster, probably Charles Dawson, its discoverer, set up a hoax: Piltdown man. This was enthusiastically accepted by many British experts because it made Britain, and in particular,...
Posted on December 3, 2007 7:06 AM • 1 Comments •
This paragraph: This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal,...
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Posted on November 26, 2007 2:40 AM • 17 Comments •
[This started as a discussion of the debate mentioned below. It got lost somewhere, and became me riffing on my favourite topics. Sorry.] I love it when people I know have a barny* in public, but it presents some...
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Posted on November 3, 2007 7:49 AM • 14 Comments •
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the...
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Posted on October 6, 2007 11:08 AM • 7 Comments •
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his...
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Posted on September 28, 2007 12:43 AM • 21 Comments •
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 •
Now we turn to the modern accounts of life. In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler
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.
