Species and systematics:
Once again I have manflu, the most despicable disease known to man (and to women, who also suffer indirectly from it). So blogging is patchy. Also, I have to do some teaching stuff, which involves thinking about what the...
Posted on September 4, 2008 10:27 PM • 6 Comments •
The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately....
Posted on September 1, 2008 1:46 AM • 2 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 •
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question. Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion. A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a...
Posted on August 26, 2008 2:37 AM • 1 Comments •
I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points...
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Posted on August 23, 2008 12:45 AM • 16 Comments •
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords: Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must...
Posted on August 21, 2008 8:15 AM • 0 Comments •
Want this, from Systematic Biology on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough... Hat tip Henry Simon...
Posted on August 17, 2008 1:02 AM • 1 Comments •
The heir apparent to some minor European royal family has again demonstrated his lack of knowledge and trust in scientific matters. The Prince, who has previously said that he talks to plants and consults gurus, apparently failed to talk to...
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Posted on August 14, 2008 7:12 AM • 22 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 I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free.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 •
Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and...
Posted on August 9, 2008 2:14 AM • 2 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 •
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I...
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Posted on August 7, 2008 9:45 PM • 6 Comments •
sigh... More here....
Posted on August 5, 2008 11:44 PM • 8 Comments •
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side...
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Posted on August 5, 2008 1:41 AM • 2 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 • 9 Comments •
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C. merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p = peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae...
Posted on July 29, 2008 7:46 AM • 7 Comments •
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa: Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time...
Posted on July 27, 2008 5:39 AM • 4 Comments •
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea. A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly...
Posted on July 25, 2008 8:26 PM • 3 Comments •
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought...
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Posted on July 23, 2008 4:05 AM • 52 Comments •
Today I got my manuscript off to the publisher. Heaven knows what the editors will do with it; I expect a sympathetic treatment as the publisher's editorial board are quite keen. But it's like having a ten year boil...
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Posted on July 21, 2008 9:27 AM • 10 Comments •
Stealing this one from Moselio Schachter: A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the...
Posted on July 17, 2008 8:29 PM • 11 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 •
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code: Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S....
Posted on June 18, 2008 1:50 AM • 4 Comments •
A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds' Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he...
Posted on June 9, 2008 12:10 AM • 1 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 •
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 • 13 Comments •
So, in the last episode, you'll recall that the dastardly villain "theory" has relinquished its grip on species in a cliffhanger. But that raises a few questions. What, for instance, is it to be a theoretical object?...
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Posted on June 2, 2008 9:11 PM • 5 Comments •
MOUSEBENDER: Good Morning. WENSLEYDALE: Good morning, sir. Welcome to the National Cheese Emporium. MOUSEBENDER: Ah, thank you my good man. WENSLEYDALE: What can I do for you, sir? MOUSEBENDER: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on...
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Posted on June 1, 2008 12:32 AM • 6 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 •
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here> Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much...
Posted on May 28, 2008 3:13 AM • 7 Comments •
One of the things about having one's own blog is that one gets to say what sorts of behaviours are acceptable by commenters. My commenters are generally a pretty nice bunch of people, often clever (hey, they read me)...
Posted on May 26, 2008 6:21 AM • 20 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 •
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they...
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Posted on May 19, 2008 7:50 PM • 4 Comments •
Comparative limb growth of a bat (top) and a mouse, in utero development. From the paper below. One of my favourite statistics is this: one in every four mammal species you meet is a rat or rodent, and one...
Posted on May 18, 2008 10:01 PM • 4 Comments •
I have been called, for my denial of outright atheism, a Chamberlainist. Well I never felt so much like Neville Chamberlain today as I walked through the corridors of the Seat of Learning* with a contract from the publishers...
Posted on May 18, 2008 8:59 PM • 21 Comments •
No, not the use of Java to archive his music. This presence: A trapdoor spider named after him. This cute fellow: Hat tip: David Williams...
Posted on May 13, 2008 6:17 AM • 1 Comments •
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 • 8 Comments •
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 •
John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it's most likely wrong....
Posted on May 3, 2008 9:43 PM • 0 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 just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs: Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs. It's...
Posted on April 21, 2008 8:59 AM • 0 Comments •
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 •
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...
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Posted on March 30, 2008 8:42 PM • 30 Comments •
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 •
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 •
The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment: Growth and division of these organisms was observed...
Posted on March 17, 2008 4:14 PM • 1 Comments •
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 •
Ever since Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an "explosion" of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted...
Posted on March 17, 2008 2:13 PM • 2 Comments •
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 •
Jon is a Utah biologist. His talk is on population genetics....
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Posted on March 14, 2008 6:09 PM • 0 Comments •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
... 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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward,...
Posted on January 6, 2008 12:39 AM • 2 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 •
A little while back I published an article on species concepts in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and I just discovered that it is available on the web. This is actually abetter format than the published...
Posted on December 19, 2007 9:38 PM • 1 Comments •
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while. So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another...
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Posted on December 17, 2007 1:40 PM • 9 Comments •
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere. So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it...
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Posted on December 4, 2007 10:50 PM • 13 Comments •
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...
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Posted on November 29, 2007 6:29 AM • 8 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 
