evolvingthoughts

In response to the unwarranted flap over the education director of the Royal Society making comments that of course the media and the creationists spun to suit themselves, Richard Dawkins had this to say: Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is…

A paper I recently saw in EMBO Reports made the following assertion: Ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork for the scientific tradition of critical inquiry, but they nevertheless missed out on one aspect important to modern science. Many philosophers obtained their results through a…

Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology, has a very nice takedown of Thomas Nagel's qualified support for teaching creationism on his blog. Hat tip Leiter. Richard Losick has an excellent piece on the problems of using cultured lab strains when studying microbes, at Small Things Considered. A…

If I weren't such a reductionist mechanist, I'd probably find this very very funny. And what Cleese does to things deserves its own verb.

The hyperborean John Pieret, notes that my love for the "social glue" theory of religion (I henceforth steal that name, John; sue me. Oh, wait, you're a lawyer aren't you? Never mind) has been backed up by two ASU anthropologists in a new book. I'd feel a lot happier if my views weren't being…

It occurs to me that I don't have a good list of these, so I invite you all to list and name your favourite science journalism narratives. You know, the sorts of things that journalists must squeeze every science story into, no matter what the actual content. Journalists in general have at best a…

Here is a roundup of links and stuff that I don't have time to blog on right now. A. C. Grayling replies in a piece of beautiful snark to Steve Fuller's response to his review of Dissent over Descent. Thony is not permitted to point out any further historical inaccuracies... Leiter reports…

I think they are: they give credence to verbal slips, egregious misinterpretations of ordinary phrases, take words out of context, and ignore what really matters in the most important political competition in the world. How can a nation be clinically insane? By listening to what the media tell…

I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists. Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to…

Another guest post by Thony Christie John recently provided a link to a review of Steve Fuller’s newest book by Anthony Grayling. On the whole I find Professor Grayling’s comments excellent and applaud his put-down of Fuller but then in the last section of his review he goes and spoils it all, at…

I just checked the spam comments folder, and there, amidst the sea of Envall crap, were some legitimate comments. So I have revived them, and this may explain some discontinuities and duplications in various threads. My apologies to the victims.

I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote: The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours, with so much failed experiment of life, so much repetition and haphazard variety of…

At Kevin Zelnio's The Other 95%. Much crunchy goodness about taxonomy.

Ten things you don’t know about the Earth - Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy considers the following propositions: 1) The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball. 2) The Earth is an oblate spheroid 3) The Earth isn’t an oblate spheroid 4) The Earth is not exactly aligned with its geoid 5) Jumping into…

No, the large Hadron Collider won't destroy the earth. Go on, bet me everything you own against everything I own that there's be no strangelets or black holes as a result. You'd get four or five years enjoying my wealth. Meanwhile morons have threatened to kill physicists who are trying to…

Thony Christie, a regular commenter on this blog, is also a historian of science, and he sent the following guest post that I thought well worth publishing. Commentator “Adam” asked John’s opinion on a book he is reading, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and…

One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated…

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 essays say. I am writing, slowly, a piece about the recent paper on…

Sometimes it's so cool to know smart people, so you can congratulate them when they win awards. Go Kimbo! Hat tip Leiter.

The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately.

For my sins, I was once a public relations guy, for an educational institution, and I held positions roughly in that domain (e.g., as public communications manager for a medical research institute, although I managed the means not the message) for the bulk of my professional life until I finally…

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 of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society…

Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's TV show Catalyst recently…

I was a graphic artist cum typesetter for 25 years. So I know that Times New Roman and Arial are not proper fonts, but abominations foisted upon the unsuspecting world by the Evil Empire. Nevertheless, this is a funny video: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Hat tip:…

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 technical problem with DNA…

A few doors down from my office there's a guy with a ready laugh and a shared love of Macintoshes named Dom Hyde, a philosopher who works on the logic of vagueness among other things. He's also very active in environmental matters, particularly those associated with the D'Aguilar Range, which is a…

In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I can be), and Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God. So I am going to be busy over…

Certain nations who shall remain nameless have been doing a fair bit of skiting about how well they've done. So I thought I'd do a bit of number crunching. Of course it isn't completed (or is it?) but using the Wikipedia population figures and the official medal tally, I plotted gold medals per…