Sermon:
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 •
This is me commenting on American politics again. Sorry. I am somewhat amazed at the furore over Wesley Clark's comment that being a prisoner of war doesn't automatically make one qualified as Commander in Chief of the armed services,...
Posted on July 1, 2008 8:58 PM • 16 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 •
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year: For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma....
Posted on June 25, 2008 3:31 AM • 0 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 • 29 Comments •
Few things make me very angry: injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak, good science fiction series being canned by network executives, and people who think they can say whatever they like without regard for their audience. I...
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Posted on June 9, 2008 11:27 AM • 69 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 • 12 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 •
The Australian government, still in the period of meeting its election promises, has legitimised the relations between homosexual couples so that they now have the same rights as defacto couples, which is long overdue. But they didn't quite get...
Posted on April 29, 2008 10:21 PM • 24 Comments •
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 •
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 •
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 •
Over the past few months I have increasingly become aware of the greatness of the last work of Johnny Cash. I don't much like country and western, and Cash was always regarded as a bit twee in my youth....
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Posted on April 6, 2008 11:21 PM • 23 Comments •
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 •
David Williams sent me this snippet of Ursula Le Guins' review of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel: Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world...
Posted on April 1, 2008 1:49 AM • 6 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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
Language Log recently took apart the speech and interview by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the media are, inaccurately, reporting as advocating the introduction of Sharia law into British and by implication other common law jurisdictions. Its conclusion was...
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Posted on February 12, 2008 10:46 PM • 23 Comments •
Since I'm feeling low, I thought I'd wallow in it for a bit. A while back, Australian musicians were asked what they thought was the perfect song by an Australasian and they proposed "Into Temptation" by the adopted Australian...
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Posted on February 9, 2008 11:01 PM • 16 Comments •
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 •
For a long time, I thought that animals were pretty much as Descartes thought - largely unreasoning organic machines. This morning, my teacher on animal communications died. Her name was Chesh, and she was 17 and a half. She...
Posted on January 30, 2008 6:23 PM • 21 Comments •
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...
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Posted on January 6, 2008 2:25 AM • 36 Comments •
The previous Australian junta introduced a "citizenship test" for those wanting to become naturalised Aussies. It includes such gems as who Don Bradman was, who wrote a song that isn't even officially our anthem (Waltzing Matilda - Tom Wait's...
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Posted on January 3, 2008 10:38 PM • 12 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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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...
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Posted on December 18, 2007 9:34 PM • 52 Comments •
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...
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Posted on November 25, 2007 5:00 AM • 76 Comments •
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 •
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 
