evolvingthoughts

The new challenge is this: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically? Answer, as anyone who knows me, is that I do my work on the blog, and then tidy it up and publish…

This, to a Mac OS X user, seems strangely apposite. It appeared in The Monthly, June 2006. Windows is Shutting Down Windows is shutting down, and grammar are On their last leg. So what am we to do? A letter of complaint go just so far, Proving the only one in step are you. Better, perhaps, to…

It seems the Republican party in the US is continuing its war on science they don't like. The Sex Drugs and DNA Blog reports that House Republicans vote AGAINST science integrity amendment. The amendment would have protected scientists from censorship by governments and their officials, from…

Reed, who was a doctoral student at the genetics department of the University of Georgia, is no longer. Now he's Dr Cartwright to you. The author of De Rerum Natura, one of my favourite blogs (understandably a bit sparse lately), Reed is also a contributor to The Panda's Thumb, and found the time…

[This is another repost from my old blog. I am sitting at home suffering with a hole in my jaw where a tooth, or its remnants was extracted with extreme prejudice, so I don't feel much like blogging.] The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be…

Another living fossil has been discovered, described and now videoed by a retired professor of biology. Can it be long now until creationists start to claim this falsifies evolution? "Living fossils" are an artifact of the way we classify species and higher taxonomic groups. Typically it means they…

No comment needed: Gitmo Suicides Comment Condemned, U.S. Official's 'Publicity Stunt' Remark Draws International Backlash - CBS News

The Public Library of Science, which as I noted recently has started a project of Open Access review of articles with its PLOSOne, has also begun a blog on it, divided into technical and publishing streams. There's not much there yet, and the technical will probably be more useful than the other…

An archival post from a year and a half ago. I recently attended my last Systematics Forum at the Melbourne Museum. This lovely little series covers issues at a technical and theoretical level to do with classification in biology, which is my obsession du jour. The forum was a special one, a talk…

PvM, in The Panda's Thumb: Laudan, demarcation and the vacuity of Intelligent design, has done a masterful job of pointing out that a favourite quotemine source of the Intelligent Design crowd, Larry Laudan, doesn't say what they say he says, quelle surprise. The issue is epistemological naturalism…

So, Janet posed the meme (or something with the same name) to enable us newbies to introduce ourselves. And because I'm a follower, not a leader, I have to offer up my predilections to you all. 3 reasons you blog about science: 1. Because it's interesting, dammit! 2. Because science is the…

When I was sixteen, I was rebelling against whatever society had got by getting stoned, generally screwing up, and eventually getting thrown out of high school six months before I graduated. Laurie Pycroft on the other hand, decided enough was enough with the Animal Liberation Front's terrorism…

Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has an excellent roundup of recent work on the group of monkeys named in the title, following the discovery of a new mangabey monkey called a kipunji. He notes that molecular data suggest a diphyletic (two separate evolutionary branches) origin of mangabeys, some…

Here is a nice site showing dinosaur skeletal fragments and the reconstructions. Go check it out.

The Ask a Seedblogger question this week is Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? That's an easy one: the one area I most miss having done well is: mathematics. Statistics, calculus,…

Originally, science began when people started to give their papers and results publicly, for discussion and correction. Back in the days of the Royal Society and other subsequent bodies, a talk would be read to the society and then published in their proceedings, and there was an immediate live…

Suppose you come from Mars, freshly minted with your PhD degree in the ethology of terrestrial mammals, and you decide to study this ape species that uses language and technology. Suppose further it's about 10,000 years before now. What would you describe? That is the topic of this post. It's…

Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way. First, there is the "state of nature" issue. A longstanding tradition in political philosophy is that humans existed at some stage in a state of nature, that is to say, a condition of living without the constraints of…

Darwin, evolution, and Popper Creationists often appeal to authority in the person of the well-known philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, who said, they say, that evolution is not scientific. Mark Isaak's marvellous Index to Creationist Claims is in the process of adding a section on this. I responded,…

I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the extreme laisse faire capitalist conservatism. For it appears to me that these systems would work…

I was bemoaning to Paul Griffiths and Sahotra Sarkar, admittedly over a beer, that unlike them (they are both birdwatchers), I lacked a special organism I could be expert about. This is a grievous fault in a philosopher of biology, so we wondered what I could choose as my "target organisms".…

Diseases are threatening the production of chocolate. What will I do to stave off Nietzschean despair? There's always beer, I guess...