evolvingthoughts

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 at 90°;C…

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) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent…

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 as contrary to "Darwinism" (whateverthehell that is) or even…

The European Space Agency is doing lots of interesting work for biology, in particular ecology. This map allows you to zoom into any place on the planet to see the land cover. [From Eureka Science News]

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, I swear, they really did. Anyway the final session (below the fold) was very…

Roberta is a great philosopher from UC Davis and she's talking about the notion of populations. Known she needed a definition of population for a long time - this is a first stab. "Population" has many definitions by biologists. Most try to limit it by space or time or interbreeding. But very…

Jon is a Utah biologist. His talk is on population genetics. He is talking about an unusually clean evolutionary experiment that leaves natural populations just as messy as they were before. Real populations are so complicated they frustrate basic models and general principles of population…

This is a session on paleontology that I missed the start of because I had to go get my power supply. Julia, a paleontologist, is discussing the evolution of birds, and how paleontology was misled by hypotheses that used the wrong taxa and characters. I'd love to blog it more extensively, but I…

Jay is an ecological philosopher. He wants to sketch how ecologists have used boundaries, and outline both a skepticism and an interactive approach. He's not talking about types of ecosystems but tokens; not biomes, for example. Second, some ecosystems are sociopolitical objects (Greater…

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. A group of ecologists set up seven different ecosystem groups for agroecosystem studies. They debated how to…

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. Modularity is a recurrent theme in biology and culture. Evolved systems…

Jim Griesemer is one of my favourite philosophers. Here he's discussing the work of Herbert Simon on dynamical boundaries. What Simon said was that subsystems are nearly decomposable - systems are hierarchical and their internal relations are stronger than their cross level relations - and that…

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 to measure the success of their practice. They have none, and…

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. He says that species are just the least inclusive taxa for whatever view of taxa one…

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 me and asked "Does this guy know anything?" I had to…

John Lynch took me to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum yesterday, and made me walk. Naturally I forgot my camera, so I can't show you the really cool hummingbirds, or the cougar/puma (it has a split personality) or the bighorn sheep, let alone the amazing diversity of plant life (until I came here…

Yesterday John Lynch (he of the Stranger Fruit) took me to see the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, which had some truly excellent displays of the feathered dinosaurs from China (they wouldn't let me photograph them, though, and none of the souvenir postcards had them either, but see…

Yeah, yeah, OK, I know I've been absent except on the comments, but I'm traveling, all right? Everything I have worth saying gets said over beer or whiskey, tonight to Jim Lippard and John Lynch, the latter of whom is my present host. I must thank Malte Ebach for his hospitality over the past week…

Below the fold is a humorous and possibly true account of reality TV trying to include geologists. With appropriate substitutions, the same thing could be said of any academic... While the media rarely represents geologists to the general population, (excluding sound bytes on Discovery Channel…

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 was not impressed by the content, nor by the fact that Dawkins was playing for…

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, well, because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the…

So I'm here, and after a long sleep I got to see some marvellous AZ scenery before the camera died. I'm staying with my mate Malte, who was a costudent of Gareth Nelson with me some years back, Tomorrow the Workshop begins. I must get around to writing my talk... In my absence, please go read…

Janet asks what others have asked - what is science blogging all about, after a bully in the schoolyard taunted us Sciencebloggers. Her questions (and her answers) are very like mine, so I will steal them, below the fold. 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? Like Janet, I don't. I…

Today marks the final day of the month in which, 150 years ago, a naturalist in what is now Indonesia wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in which he gave a theoretical account of how types can evolve by natural selection so that new species will arise. Give it up, folks, for Alfred Russel Wallace…

Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example of why I don't want to demonise those who are religious but accept evolution and the rest…

Well, actually the weather in Tempe, Arizona, seems to be very much like the weather here in Brisbane, but that's where I'm going. For a couple of weeks. Also in Salt Lake City. So blogging shall be sparse unless I get inspired at the Systematics and Biodiversity workshop, as I surely shall. And…

I suppose you all have heard of the recent trade agreement between South Africa, Tibet, and the Netherlands, swapping cattle for birds, and known as the Gnu yak stork exchange... [I'm not to blame. I saw it on the Dino-L list.]

... 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 more recently against, but you can't deny the buggers on the Interwubs. Here…

Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in the second that…

Are you a sad nerd, spending more time with your computer than with actual people? Do you think a great night is when you get a debate going in the comments of a Pharyngula post? Would you like to meet other sad people and mingle? Well, apart from the scary coincidence that there are so many…