Philosophy isn't one of those things that makes great breakthroughs that are recognised at the time. Generally something is thought of as a significant development much later, after it becomes obvious that people are engaging with it, like the Chinese Room of John Searle. So instead I will simply list my better posts of this year in a fit of self-aggrandisement.
January
Bioturbation and Darwin's worms
The man who invented evolution
Species
February
Dads
Darwin on species: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Science and nonscience
Theory
The many faces of "evolution"
Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology
The Procrastination Principle [More on procrastination]
In praise of scientific ignorance - Claude Bernard
Progress, Primitive and Advanced
March
Water and reduction
The Myers Biological Song
The topic of the evolution of religion
Evolution and accident
Allopatry and sympatry
Linnaeus on species
On myths about Darwin
Darwin on the Irish
Scientific realism and inference to the best explanation
Instruction and information
The mystery of mysteries - early naturalistic views of species origins
[Whew - I must have been trying to evade some work that month]
April
On the incoherence of "Darwinism"
A Very Bad Idea: Commenting on the VT tragedy
Ancestors [Counting ancestors]
Literary Darwinism
On communication
On secularism
May
Thoughts on history and science
In praise of religious tolerance, even for atheists
The Secret? Sympathetic magic
Types, tokens, genera and species
Happy Birthday Linnaeus
Linnaeus on species
The world according to Genesis: The cosmos
June
The world according to Genesis: Stuff that grows
The world according to Genesis: Humanity
Philosophy is to science, as ornithologists are to birds, Part 1, part 2, part 3
The world according to Genesis: Moral knowledge
The world according to Genesis: Other peoples
The world according to Genesis: The Flood
The kangaroo is the first organism, but the fungus is not the biggest
"Species" in the Stanford Encyclopedia updated
The world according to Genesis: Language and society
Lewes on heredity in 1856
July
Explanation
August
What is an individual?
Popper peeps papally at UD
Tolerance and reason
Are species theoretical objects?
September
Theories of speciation
The meaning of "life"
What is "life", again?
What is "life", at last
The constancy of change and the lack of balance
October
How not to Feyerabend
What evolution is and what it is not (1897)
Explaining religion
Law, theory, or something else?
Explaining religion 2: What is religion?
Explaining religion 3: Is it adaptive?
November
Words and taxa
Upstream issues
Magnetic anomaly map finished (by guest blogger Chris Nedin)
Animals and rights
The library of the mind
Birds up
Explaining religion 4: Wolves and gods
Species as objects of explanation
Our inner ape
The two Wilsons on sociobiology: Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5
Physicists on science
One more thing about Davies
The philosophy of classification
December
Nationalism and evolution
Virgin births
A personal revelation
Do bacteria think?
A letter to a high school student
Traditions in academe (theology departments)
Taking drugs to enhance cognitive performance
There you go. Some holiday reading, or rereading if you are one of the six who read this blog regularly. It's not as sciencey as Catalogue of Organisms, or John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, or the wonderful Tetrapod Zoology, but it's me. The real me. Confused and scattered...
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Thanks John, it's good to have all this in one spot.
Easier to clean up.
Just kidding.
Have a Merry Christmas. I hope you get to spend time with your kids.
I personally think that your explication of Genesis from June is one of the finest workings of the topic I've ever seen, and some of the best writing of yours I know of. I'd love to see a "Wilkins interprets the Bible" sometime... I'd buy it, at least!