Philosophy of Science:
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
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
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 • 9 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 -...
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Posted on May 3, 2008 11:29 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 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
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters. Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no...
Posted on April 17, 2008 5:22 AM • 3 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...
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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...
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Posted on April 7, 2008 2:27 AM • 90 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 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
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
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 • 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...
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Posted on March 24, 2008 7:03 PM • 77 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were...
Posted on March 24, 2008 4:26 AM • 35 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
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)...
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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,...
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Posted on March 15, 2008 6:04 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Roberta is a great philosopher from UC Davis and she's talking about the notion of populations....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 6:43 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....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 5:04 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jay is an ecological philosopher. He wants to sketch how ecologists have used boundaries, and outline both a skepticism and an interactive approach....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 3:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lunch being had we crowd into a new room to hear Stephen Peck, a biologist from Brigham Young University down the road a ways in Provo. Stephen is talking about ecological boundaries....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 3:28 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bill Wimsatt is somewhat of a hero around here and for good reason. He is perhaps one of the most influential under-published philosophers of biology. Today he's talking about modularity in biological and cultural evolution....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 1:35 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jim Griesemer is one of my favourite philosophers. Here he's discussing the work of Herbert Simon on dynamical boundaries....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 1:07 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Monica Piotrowski (Utah) also is talking about DNA Barcoding. She starts with a child's coin sorter. Imagine that it's a bug-sorter, sorting by DNA samples. What does the child now have? She claims Barcoders must have a species concept...
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Posted on March 14, 2008 11:45 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Brent Mishler is a very nice guy who is wrong on a few things - Phylocode, species, and so on - but he's absolutely right about barcoding. He's talking today about so-called DNA barcoding and species concepts....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 11:22 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have just sat through one of the most teeth clenchingly bad philosophy talks, given on phylogenetics by a philosopher who has never read anything sensible on phylogenetics to phylogenetic systematists. One of the last mentioned leant over to...
Posted on March 13, 2008 11:18 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Below the fold is a humorous and possibly true account of reality TV trying to include geologists. With appropriate substitutions, the same thing could be said of any academic......
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Posted on March 7, 2008 3:30 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
After a three day workshop on the future and nature of taxonomy (or systematics; I'm still unconvinced there's a difference) I am exhausted and enthused. The former because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the latter,...
Posted on March 6, 2008 12:13 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Well, actually the weather in Tempe, Arizona, seems to be very much like the weather here in Brisbane, but that's where I'm going. For a couple of weeks. Also in Salt Lake City. So blogging shall be sparse unless...
Posted on February 27, 2008 8:40 AM • 1 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...
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Posted on February 24, 2008 11:34 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 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....
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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...
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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
In particular, see the final panel... Cf. also here on Private Languages in philosophy...
Posted on February 17, 2008 11:49 PM • 6 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
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 • 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
By Matt Ridley, in Time: ... by the end of this century, if not sooner, biotechnology may have reached the point where it can take just about any DNA recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the...
Posted on February 9, 2008 1:07 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So, it seems that 44 is the median age of depression. Old news, or at least it is for me. Although for 44 to be the median age of depression for me, I'd have to live until my late...
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Posted on February 8, 2008 9:32 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's a comment that represents a widely held misconception about the evolution of religion: Whenever there is an discussion about religions and changes in religions someone always pulls out the argument that religions evolve. I am very sorry but...
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Posted on February 2, 2008 8:42 PM • 20 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...
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Posted on February 1, 2008 11:08 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea...
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Posted on January 24, 2008 9:37 AM • 20 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
... sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler – Robert Frost It was a typical hot and humid summer's day, so I entered a nice dark bluestone pub, hoping the dark would offer some cool and...
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Posted on January 19, 2008 2:29 AM • 8 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
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 • 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
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
Some things I spotted today.....
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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?...
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Posted on January 7, 2008 10:23 PM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own:...
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Posted on January 3, 2008 11:12 PM • 1 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......
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Posted on January 1, 2008 12:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is a field in which I am largely ignorant, so I will just report it and leave the commenters to interpret. Collider blog has a discussion of an idea reported by Charm &c. in a paper at arXiv...
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?).
