Logic and philosophy:
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 • 1 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
Damn The Onion! They're watching me!...
Posted on May 5, 2008 10:31 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Duck and cover, folks. I'm about to upset somebody. I have previously been fairly critical of DNA barcoding, the proposal to use a small fragment of the COI gene - a mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase, subunit I -...
Read on »
Posted on May 3, 2008 11:29 PM • 9 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...
Read on »
Posted on April 27, 2008 8:45 PM • 31 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
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
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...
Read on »
Posted on April 11, 2008 9:47 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
While it's always nice to see a scientists step up to argue that intelligent design or creationism ought not to be taught as science because they aren't science, this worries me somewhat: Scientists have failed to explain the limits...
Read on »
Posted on April 7, 2008 2:27 AM • 90 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...
Read on »
Posted on April 3, 2008 5:25 AM • 31 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...
Read on »
Posted on March 28, 2008 10:29 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Read on »
Posted on March 27, 2008 10:09 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I once sat across the table from Alex Rosenberg, a well known philosopher, who argued persuasively that one cannot be both a Christian and accept natural selection. I think Alex intended this as a reductio for Christianity, as natural...
Read on »
Posted on March 24, 2008 7:03 PM • 77 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought)...
Read on »
Posted on March 17, 2008 2:48 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sorry that I didn't liveblog today. The room was too far to carry my Mac, and I was tired damn it. Blame Lynch, Todd Grantham, Michael Ghiselin and Roberta Millstein among others, who all made me drink beer. No,...
Read on »
Posted on March 15, 2008 6:04 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is a session on paleontology that I missed the start of because I had to go get my power supply....
Read on »
Posted on March 14, 2008 5:04 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I (and apparently Jim Lippard) went to see Dawkins' talk based on his The God Delusion, which I have critiqued before. I was impressed at the technique. It was definitely the very best Revivalist Sermon I have seen. I...
Posted on March 7, 2008 1:12 AM • 211 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example...
Posted on February 27, 2008 8:54 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that...
Read on »
Posted on February 24, 2008 11:34 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
Read on »
Posted on February 19, 2008 1:29 AM • 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...
Read on »
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
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
I am quite sure that this is how undergraduates in philosophy see the whole thing: HT: Creative Synthesis...
Posted on February 4, 2008 11:54 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A rather cute article at the Catholic News Service says this: In commentaries, papal speeches, scientific conferences and philosophical exchanges, the Vatican has been focusing more and more on the relationship between God and evolution. From the outside, this...
Read on »
Posted on February 1, 2008 11:08 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It is widely understood that philosophers aren't as a rule, intentionally funny. Partly this is because we are often old fogies whose sense of humour was formed in the early Jurassic. Mostly it's because when you deal with the...
Read on »
Posted on January 18, 2008 10:02 PM • 3 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....
Read on »
Posted on January 17, 2008 9:48 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Shelley at Restrospectacle gives a poem she learned in school, an excellent piece by A. E. Housman, So I got to thinking - what poem sticks with me? Is it the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by Eliot,...
Read on »
Posted on January 17, 2008 9:13 AM • 41 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......
Read on »
Posted on January 16, 2008 9:45 PM • 25 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
Some things I spotted today.....
Read on »
Posted on January 8, 2008 6:50 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true?...
Read on »
Posted on January 7, 2008 10:23 PM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a...
Read on »
Posted on January 6, 2008 2:25 AM • 36 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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......
Read on »
Posted on January 1, 2008 12:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The online journal Episteme has a special issue out on conspiracy theories. Examples include God as a conspiracy theory, the 9/11 WTC "controlled demolition" theory and questions of rationality of those who engage in them. Late note: This is...
Posted on December 27, 2007 9:53 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Murghl has challenged me to explain why there are theology departments in universities. Of course, most universities lack theology departments, and some, like the Princeton Theological Seminary, have been hived off their home institution. Back when I actually...
Read on »
Posted on December 18, 2007 9:34 PM • 52 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I...
Read on »
Posted on December 14, 2007 5:34 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to...
Read on »
Posted on December 8, 2007 10:37 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[Australian politics: look away] Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the...
Read on »
Posted on December 1, 2007 9:20 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The term "radical" is a very loose term. It basically means "something that differs wildly from the consensus" in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won't take offense if I say that they have a...
Read on »
Posted on November 29, 2007 6:29 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren't clever enough at thinking up counterexamples......
Read on »
Posted on November 27, 2007 2:51 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have a rule (Wilkins' Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times. Davies...
Read on »
Posted on November 25, 2007 5:00 AM • 76 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf...
Read on »
Posted on November 6, 2007 10:04 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I can't believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he's just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young...
Read on »
Posted on November 6, 2007 8:28 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it. In the philosophy...
Read on »
Posted on November 5, 2007 8:48 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question: And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans"...
Read on »
Posted on November 5, 2007 7:20 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sorry about that pun - it's been around for a while since Antony Flew, quandam philosopher and "Darwinian", announced he was converting to a kind of deism. Jon Pieret, who often comments on this blog when he should be...
Posted on November 3, 2007 10:02 PM • 0 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
Michael Ruse has a new article up on creationism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There's not much new to those who know his work, but the following comment resonates - dare I say thunders - in the Science...
Posted on October 28, 2007 10:36 AM • 39 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?...
Read on »
Posted on October 25, 2007 9:51 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind:...
Read on »
Posted on October 25, 2007 11:13 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
According to a book mentioned by Greg Dahlman at blog.bioethics.net. He notes that this makes Stephen Colbert Plato. I think it makes Hilary Clinton Aristotle, and Richard Dawkins Epicurus, although the sequence is a bit messed up....
Posted on October 23, 2007 11:53 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop...
Read on »
Posted on October 23, 2007 10:24 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does anyone who reads this blog have access to JFP from the American Philosophical Association? None of the locals or my usual contacts do, and by the time I can get a subscription going, I'm likely to have missed...
Posted on October 7, 2007 3:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The estimable and overproductive Neil Levy* at CAPPE at my alma mater, has sent me Terry Pratchett's and Stephen Brigg's book/diary Lu-Tse's Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008, with a note "To help you chart your course into unemployment". For which...
Read on »
Posted on October 3, 2007 10:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As a silverback, I am always intrigued when you humans start to debate our nature, or put us in silly films (not that the one with Sigourney was silly - any film she's in is fine by me. We...
Posted on September 13, 2007 11:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention:...
Read on »
Posted on September 10, 2007 5:42 PM • 7 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....
Read on »
Posted on September 1, 2007 7:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such...
Posted on August 28, 2007 2:41 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them. 1. There is an...
Posted on August 23, 2007 10:06 PM • 203 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
... I'm teaching. First years. Cognitive science. It turns out that a lot of what I thought was common knowledge isn't common at all. And what I count as a simple introduction leaves a lot of folk behind. Now...
Posted on August 21, 2007 11:00 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm home sick, so I'm shirking duties and came across one of my favourite film scenes of all time:...
Posted on August 8, 2007 12:38 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Kate Devitt, a PhD student at Rutgers, as a rather wonderful blog, Mnemosynosis, on matters relating to memory. She's got at present a very interesting post on bacterial cognition worth reading....
Posted on August 8, 2007 12:22 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy...
Read on »
Posted on August 7, 2007 7:33 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut
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?).
