evolvingthoughts

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 find it disgusting that some people think it's okay to…

Mystery Rays from Outer Space has a good essay on the evolution of spumaviruses ("foamy viruses") which are cytologically fatal in the lab, but which are latent in most body cell types in the nonhuman species they inhabit. It turns out that they have evolved over a long time to be nonvirulent by…

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 presents recent evidence that stressed primates (in this case humans) eat…

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. Once I had a paper knocked back by a reviewer in which I argued that there was nothing unique to being species. This became my 2003 paper. The reviewer said that the…

In a move that will come as no surprise to pinnipedalists (those who pedal seals and sea lions), the Caribbean monk seal Monachus tropicalis has been declared officially extinct. It hasn't been seen in the wild for over 50 years, and the US National Marine Fisheries Service declared them extinct…

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, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first…

As an Australo-African ape, Snowflake is happy that one command from him was enough to ensure Obama won the Democrat selection. Now he wants you to ensure that John Edwards is the VP. Edwards will bring many votes and some level headedness to the campaign, without the nasty taste in the mouth that…

Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican): Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths and weaknesses” requirement from the…

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? Traditionally, something was a theoretical object, that is, an object that was…

The idea of philosophers having a carnival, literally a celebration of the flesh, is somehow fitting and faintly disturbing, but this time they had the good taste to refer to a post of mine. But thats not [entirely] why I mention it. The Uncredible Halq has an Introduction to Philosophy, which is…

The snivelling little boy, Mats Envall, who thinks that walking into someone's living room and pissing on the floor is acceptable behaviour, has forced me to make comments require my manual authentication. I am sorry for the rest of you, but we are up to 122 spams from the idiot. Those who…

John Pieret's blog Thoughts in a Haystack has an essay on this that is well worth reading, although I'd rather be called an elite snob than an elite bastard because all Australians are bastards. It's part of the Carnival of the Elite Bastards #1 at En Tequila es Verdad.

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 Thurmond Street just now, skimming through History of…

I have for a long time now been very dissatisfied with the metaphysical categories bequeathed to us from Aristotle via a multitude of commentators and philosophers ranging from Boethius to Ockham to Locke to Hume to Kant. It seems to me that they are based on a prescientific notion of what sorts…

Clooney deals with the attention in a self-deprecating fashion, usually making jokes about himself. "That's the Australian way, it's the right way to do it," he says. From this article...

So we managed to attract 5 local PZombies (Craig, you are in trouble for not turning up!) on a wet Brisbane night. We had some interesting discussions (which I fear means that others listened to me nonstop) over beer. It's nice to know that those of us who are in thrall to our cephalod overlords…

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 be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we need a real writer. Carl Zimmer is the guy. He…

The Scientific Misconduct blog has identified a case of censorship based on fear: Briefly, a postgraduate student (Rizwaan Sabir) was conducting research (into terrorism). He was arrested after downloading material (related to terrorism) from a US government website. I believe that the material…

<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 other than an interest in new species underpinning it…

Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what an encyclopedia article ought to do…

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) and polite even as the issues get hot. Occasionally, one is not. When this…

Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it.

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 his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault…

One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.] Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I…

Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a…

OK, so it seems there are several readers of PZ Maggle who live in or around Brisbane. Some are even on or near the UQ St Lucia campus. So we should meet and pay homage to the Great Tentacled One. Leave suggested times and places in the comments. So far the best suggestion is Genie's Cafe in the…

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 are researching. It makes them seem to be proposing something important,…

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 in every five is a bat. That's right, nine in every 20 mammal species is covered by one…

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 for my book Species: A history of an Idea. I felt like shouting as I…