John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
August 22, 2008
I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points us at a paper in a new journal,…
August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like…
August 22, 2008
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment:
Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can…
August 21, 2008
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the…
August 21, 2008
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords:
Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late.
Of course, this is not the…
August 20, 2008
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the…
August 20, 2008
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the…
August 19, 2008
The local evangelical students society had me along last night to talk about "Is belief in the Christian God rational?" I was on the negative, although I did ask them which side they wanted me to argue for. It was done in traditional debating format, and I found it incredibly restrictive -…
August 18, 2008
One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is that in the latter, people are all related closely enough to be…
August 16, 2008
Want this, from Systematic Biology
on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough...
Hat tip Henry Simon
August 14, 2008
Thanks to the editor of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the permissions department of Elsevier, my scientific blogging article is up again in Portuguese. At no cost! Thanks folks. João Carlos at Chi vó, non pó, translated it and hosts it. And it's all legal and above board.
August 14, 2008
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another explanation for religion, based on the correlation between tropics and…
August 14, 2008
The heir apparent to some minor European royal family has again demonstrated his lack of knowledge and trust in scientific matters. The Prince, who has previously said that he talks to plants and consults gurus, apparently failed to talk to any actual, you know, scientists who might clear up a few…
August 13, 2008
As I sit here, dying slowly and loudly from a dose of gastro and probably 'flu (Australian male: we don't do sick well), trying to distract myself from the efforts of my lower intestines to escape to Jamaica, I came across a name I recall all too well from my 1970s: Francis Schaeffer. Well,…
August 12, 2008
A retired chemist has had his home lab confiscated in Maryland because a government official was scared of it. Sayeth Robert Thompson:
Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a…
August 12, 2008
Our Seed Overlords have bling to give away. All you have to do is take a survey and they might give you an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air and a 40GB Apple TV. Keep the Air and give me the rest if you win. Don't tell the Overlords though. They might make me give it back.
C'mon. The odds are much better…
August 11, 2008
Steven ("Steve") Fuller is a well known sociologist of science (he began as a philosopher of science but is presently employed by the University of Warwick as a sociologist). He is widely credited for the subject and journal of Social Epistemology. He is also the guy who wrote several hundred…
August 10, 2008
A chance link to my blog has led me through an ego search to find Will Thomas' most excellent Ether Wave Propaganda blog. Will is a historian of science post-doc, I think, and he has an engaging style.
Coincidentally, John Lynch lists various links to history of science, including a number of…
August 9, 2008
This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in 1951 and made the archival articles…
August 8, 2008
Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and nonspecialists. We can fix up their errors later when they get the basics.
August 7, 2008
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright's…
August 7, 2008
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to…
August 6, 2008
Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David…
August 4, 2008
I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the…
August 4, 2008
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below…
August 4, 2008
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of…
August 4, 2008
Phil, of Bad Astronomy fame, has been offered and accepted the chairmanship of James Randi's Educational Foundation. I think that's a great choice by Randi and a great honour for Phil. Couldn't happen to a better guy.