Pastorale
From Wiley: And while we're on the topic......Posted on May 12, 2008 2:50 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Evolving Thoughts
One man's struggle against impermanence
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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?).
If anyone knows of a tenurable, or even medium term, job in philosophy of biology, let me know. Have library, will travel. The contract runs out soon...
This blog is designed to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
Recent Posts
- Render Caesar
- What sorts of people
- Speaking of spiders...
- Neil Young gets his own web presence
- Russell's teapot
- Pastorale
- Short takes
- A meaningless numerical coincidence, w00t!
- Podblack Cat
- The name has been changed...
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Blogroll
- Aetiology
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Books I'm reading
Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality
Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series)
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Other Information
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
Social evolution:
Podblack Cat
... 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
Religion and imagination
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
Definitely not right about gay marriage
The federal Australian government of Kevin Rudd has done its first act of pure bastardry. As I noted before, the PM thinks that marriage is reserved for heterosexuals only. He can think that. He can think that marriage ought...Posted on May 5, 2008 2:20 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Almost, but not quite, right about gay marriage
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 • 0 TrackBacks
The greatest threat: antimodernism
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...Posted on April 27, 2008 8:45 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Resolved: religion is the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality that we face today
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
Sociology and science
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...Posted on April 26, 2008 9:51 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The new Jews?
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 • 0 TrackBacks
On the decline of the humanities
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...Posted on April 11, 2008 9:47 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Stein is right: Darwinism causes antisemitism
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...Posted on April 1, 2008 12:00 AM • 60 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The boy chimp
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
Can an elephant paint?
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...Posted on March 30, 2008 8:42 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Barcoding redux
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)...Posted on March 17, 2008 2:48 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Postblogging the conference
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,...Posted on March 15, 2008 6:04 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Liveblogging the conference: Bill Wimsatt
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....Posted on March 14, 2008 1:35 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Dawkins' lecture in Phoenix
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
The cultural canoe
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....Posted on February 19, 2008 1:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Valentine's Day Poem
Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong, And I am Marie of Roumania. Courtesy of Mrs Dorothy Parker...Posted on February 14, 2008 9:50 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The law, Sharia, and religious control
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...Posted on February 12, 2008 10:46 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does religion evolve?
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...Posted on February 2, 2008 8:42 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Happenings
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...Posted on January 21, 2008 3:42 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is postmodernism retreating?
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?...Posted on January 7, 2008 10:23 PM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the news
Let's see... what's happening in the world today? Kenya is in turmoil and thousands are displaced and in danger of death by disease, starvation or tribal feuds. Religious moneymaking scam Scientology is accused of threatening those who leave it...Posted on January 7, 2008 2:54 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What must a citizen know?
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...Posted on January 3, 2008 10:38 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sunday sermon: on cultural isolation
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....Posted on December 22, 2007 9:07 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sociobiology 5: What is at issue
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts....Posted on November 22, 2007 5:34 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sociobiology 3: Kin selection and pluralist explanations
[The third in a series on a recent paper by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. Post 1; Post 2] In presenting a group selectionist account of sociobiology, Wilson and Wilson argue that alternatives such as kin selection...Posted on November 19, 2007 7:07 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sociobiology 2: Theoretical foundations
Wilson and Wilson begin by reviewing the reasons why sociobiology of the 1970s was rejected. They focus on the arguments against group selection....Posted on November 18, 2007 11:56 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The two Wilsons on sociobiology
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining...Posted on November 18, 2007 4:23 AM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Explaining religion 4 - Wolves and gods
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...Posted on November 6, 2007 10:04 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Words and taxa
[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...Posted on November 3, 2007 7:49 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Explaining religion 3 - Is it adaptive?
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential...Posted on October 31, 2007 9:28 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A quote
From J. B. S. Haldane's 1932 The Causes of Evolution: ... I must ... discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which...Posted on October 31, 2007 2:16 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Explaining religion 2 - what is religion?
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?...Posted on October 25, 2007 9:51 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Explaining religion
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments. They are:...Posted on October 22, 2007 12:22 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On extremes
Thinking some more about PZ's latest comedic act, I think I see what the problem is....Posted on October 1, 2007 2:26 AM • 108 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
How to fix Iraq, and not invade Iran
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...Posted on September 28, 2007 12:43 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Strong reciprocity
On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism. Then today...Posted on September 22, 2007 10:07 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The more things change..
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is,...Posted on September 2, 2007 12:18 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In defence of Keanu, and the 5th best scientist
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
An essay on the evolution of human evolution
Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It's...Posted on August 12, 2007 1:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The inimitable Mr Spencer
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...Posted on August 7, 2007 7:33 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[Philosophy of] science blogging
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 • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Home again
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid. One thing that I came back fired up over are...Posted on August 3, 2007 10:19 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Haneef again
Sorry to bother you all with internal Australian politics, but this has to be discussed. Now the minister for immigration is saying that the Australian Federal Police intercepted a chat room conversation in which Haneef was told to leave...Posted on July 31, 2007 5:28 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Religion and science
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of...Posted on July 15, 2007 1:12 AM • 61 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Explanation
But state space models in physical sciences tend to provide not a single coordinate, but a surface over which the system or phenomenon under explanations can range - so long as the observed trajectory of the system is on or near the surface described by the model, there is so far an explanation of the facts. A full explanation would, I think, involve showing in a suitably rich state space that only the actual states are possible, in the order they are observed (which turns out to be a single coordinate in a state space of the dynamical model after all).
Posted on July 13, 2007 2:49 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Random things
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts. One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had...Posted on July 4, 2007 8:38 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
ID not OK in UK
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]...Posted on June 26, 2007 1:11 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lewes on Heredity, in 1856
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes...Posted on June 22, 2007 1:43 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Greewald on Bush on Evil
A very thoughtful and interesting, dare I say almost philosophical, discussion of the Manichaean nature of the Bush Administration is in the present Salon here. A quote: The power to order people detained and imprisoned based solely on accusation...Posted on June 20, 2007 8:46 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Etruscans
In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was "neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing". He had no idea of the results made possible...Posted on June 20, 2007 1:36 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Journalists and scientists - an antimatter explosion?
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density...Posted on June 20, 2007 1:29 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The World According to Genesis: Language and Society
After the Flood, the earth is repopulated, and so R and P give us a list of notable ancestors. In 10:4-5 they say "And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles...Posted on June 15, 2007 11:25 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Perspective
A 26 year old woman is convicted of twice driving while on probation for having done so drunk earlier. She is an adult who knew very well what the consequences of her actions would be, for her. Fortunately, she...Posted on June 8, 2007 10:08 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The World According to Genesis: Other peoples
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural...Posted on June 8, 2007 6:52 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Philosophy is to science, as ornithologists are to birds: 3. Science is a Dynamic Process
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science. [Part 1; Part 2]...Posted on June 6, 2007 7:42 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The World According to Genesis: Moral Knowledge
Like any middle eastern deity, YHWHW Elohim is a fairly petty individual. He doesn't want competition from his creations, so he blocks access to the "Tree of Life", which is a magical tree whose fruit can make you live forever. We have two magical trees, a corporeal deity of limited knowledge and good will, a snake that talks and has intentions like any trickster god to thwart the designs of the deity, and a justification for wearing clothes, which is not a matter just of shame, but of intended purpose.Posted on June 6, 2007 2:06 AM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Philosophy is to science, as ornithologists are to birds: 2. Two topics of philosophy of science
Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching...Posted on June 5, 2007 9:27 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Philosophy is to science, as ornithologists are to birds: 1. Introduction
This three-part series is a talk I gave a while back to some ecologists and molecular biologists. It is a brief overview of the aims and relationship between science and philosophy of science, with a special reference to the...Posted on June 4, 2007 6:24 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Moral cognition survey
Then stop reading and go think about something [else]. Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Posted on May 29, 2007 8:35 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Random thoughts, evolving...
This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing, wondering whether people were properly self-reporting their reasons for believing X, and I suggested that, in matters of justifying behaviours, they took the behaviours for one reason, and then applied the standard tmeplates for justifying such actions afterwards, and that if we did experimental philosophy to poll the "folk" (a sort of philosophical hoi polloi), they would not be able to give you the real reasons why they acted due to false consciousness.
Posted on May 27, 2007 1:14 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks