John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
April 20, 2008
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein...
And knowing one of the principals in this comment, I had to laugh. When Kimbo says he thinks you are full of…
April 16, 2008
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.
Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of…
April 15, 2008
Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they'd miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3.
April 15, 2008
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel like a fraud, but hey, you all know I love the "sound" of my…
April 13, 2008
Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students.
Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin Libet on the fact that conscious choices occur after the brain has…
April 12, 2008
Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of the pro-ID "scientists" interviewed by the…
April 11, 2008
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit.
Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with…
April 6, 2008
While it's always nice to see a scientists step up to argue that intelligent design or creationism ought not to be taught as science because they aren't science, this worries me somewhat:
Scientists have failed to explain the limits of science, Peshkin said. Science deals in what can be observed…
April 6, 2008
Over the past few months I have increasingly become aware of the greatness of the last work of Johnny Cash. I don't much like country and western, and Cash was always regarded as a bit twee in my youth. But recently I came across what is surely one of the greatest of all music videos - "Hurt" (…
April 4, 2008
Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which I really like.
Tometheus (Prometheus' and Epimetheus'…
April 3, 2008
Oh honestly! The Australian Federal Police are still investigating Haneef for terrorism even after their own incompetence and prejudice has been laid bare, and a Royal Commission is in train to investigate them. Really, it's like J. Edgar Hoover only without the smarts and the dress.
Anyone…
April 2, 2008
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here.
In a…
March 31, 2008
David Williams sent me this snippet of Ursula Le Guins' review of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel:
Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for "re-enchantment". But it's clear that Charles…
March 31, 2008
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of this below the fold. I'll stick with those in which Jews were…
March 31, 2008
While we're on the topic of animals that act like humans, consider this very sad, very famous case: Nim Chimpsky. Raised to be a human boy, when the funds ran out and Nim got to the age equivalent of a five year old boy, he was sent off to live with other chimps. Imagine that you are a five year…
March 31, 2008
So we're all such cosmopolitan nerds, blogging away... here's a guy (a friend of mine, actually) who has been doing a regular web column on Southern Hemisphere Astronomy for ten years. Give it up please for the well-bearded over-educated and definitely an over-achiever: Ian Musgrave. Go visit his…
March 30, 2008
Watch the video under the fold, from Chang Mai in Thailand. There's a moment where you realise what the elephant is representing, and a shock that comes when you see that it is representing something. I don't know if it's been trained to do this but it looks real to me.
March 28, 2008
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling…
March 27, 2008
My friend and colleague Neil Levy has inaugurated the first edition of a journal devoted to a new field, Neuroethics, the first edition of which is available to all for free here.
Neil has a convincing introductory editorial, arguing that advances in neurobiology call into question and in other…
March 25, 2008
Okay, so it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf, but it's even more important than news about me. The 6000 square mile (15,540 km2) ice shelf named for Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Australian Antarctic explorer (and very possibly some kind of relation), is breaking off due to global warming. This is the…
March 24, 2008
I once sat across the table from Alex Rosenberg, a well known philosopher, who argued persuasively that one cannot be both a Christian and accept natural selection. I think Alex intended this as a reductio for Christianity, as natural selection is both true by definition and also observed in the…
March 24, 2008
This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously "framed" more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with
Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn't help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was a sort of microcosm of America, and let me tell you - it's a…
March 23, 2008
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were just ordinary words he coopted for the Metaphysics and…
March 21, 2008
On the one hand you have Jake Young discussing the role of expertise in public debates, concluding that maybe experts shouldn't expect that information from knowledgeable folk will automatically influence the uneducated. On the other hand, this...
March 21, 2008
They see in 12 colours and using polarised light, they move at the speed of a bullet. Go read about them at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yes, they are the coolest inverts...
March 20, 2008
PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein's silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and guest in, though. The guest was Richard Dawkins...
March 19, 2008
So one of the most inspiring and intelligent political speeches of my time, comparable with Kennedy's, has been delivered while I was either in transit or sleeping (I can't work out which). I have read it, and I have this to say.
Obama treats his hearers as intelligent adults, not to be swayed…
March 18, 2008
When I was about 8, I read in a newspaper that one of my favourite short stories, "The Sentinel", by Arthur C. Clarke, was to be made into a movie by some film maker I never heard of. I had to wait 5 years to see 2001, A Space Odyssey. The last of the golden age science fiction writers, who…