John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
April 5, 2009
I'm very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida's works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think…
April 3, 2009
Oklahoma lawmakers are singling out the visit by Richard Dawkins to talk about evolution on campus at OU, but they're not censoring it, right? Just making academics fear for their funding, and perhaps jobs, but seeking all documentation about the visit. Just this visit, mind. Piers Hale, a…
April 3, 2009
There's a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and his friend Piero Sraffa by Norman Malcolm (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir):
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar…
April 3, 2009
This was doing the rounds. I have to say there is absolutely no need for such techniques at my present employer institution, no sir.
Just in case you are having a rough day, here is a stress management technique recommended in all the latest psychological journals. The funny thing is that it…
April 2, 2009
Well yes it was a joke. But it was based on the inappropriate manner in which the well-known work on lateral transfer was reported by New Scientist as showing that Darwin was wrong. That genes occasionally cross over taxonomic borders among single celled organisms by transduction (viral exchange),…
March 31, 2009
A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much…
March 29, 2009
Whenever you see this:
Remember this:
From AppleInsider - who also note that Linux is cheaper than both, and runs on old hardware (but you need to find your Inner Geek, which costs in time spent).
March 28, 2009
A dozen or so years ago, or maybe more, I was heading up the communications section of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, when I employed a young biology graduate as a graphics guy to do medical graphics. This he did for a while, until he started playing with…
March 27, 2009
Pope rewrites medical science to suit Catholic dogma. Film at 11.
Australian government censorship website hacked. I'm not laughing, really.
March 26, 2009
It's true! Dinosaurs still exist. John Conway dissected a Rhamphorhyncus, and drew what he saw, here.
I had "dinosaur" in the title but as Chris points out, that's a bad error, like calling a mammal a turtle.
Damn, I'm not having much luck. Not a pteranodon then...
March 25, 2009
Some links and issues I have come across lately.
Those who read this and my other blog know that I am deeply opposed to internet censorship. Recently, Wikileaks put up a leaked list supposed to be the list being used in Australian trials of what will be a mandatory blacklist of URLs. First the…
March 25, 2009
I need about a page of Latin translated. It's late - 18th century, so no classicisms. I will be Very Grateful (and that's about all I'll do, I'm sorry. They don't pay much on a postdoc's salary).
March 25, 2009
At Laurie's blog, The Critical Thinker's Speakeasy. 'Course, I don't think this actually happened. My own Mormon stories are much more restrained. After 20 minutes of arguing, in which I quoted the Bible at some Mormon missionaries, one said "But the Bible is not accurate. You need the Book of…
March 24, 2009
One of my favourite 70s songs, below the fold: "Life's a Long Song", by Jethro Tull, from the 1971 EP of the same name. For some reason the final episode of Battlestar Galacticaput this in my head.
When you're falling awake and you take stock of the new day,
And you hear your voice croak as…
March 24, 2009
Anthony Grayling, who does a really interesting review column in the Barnes and Noble Review, entitled "A Thinking Read", has a piece on Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. This saves me having to read it and review it for you myself.
The column title is a pun on Blaise Pascal's statement…
March 23, 2009
Kate Devitt is so much better a teacher than I am (and she's smarter, better educated and more attractive a person, but let's deal with just one of my insecurities at a time, hey?). I wish I had thought to teach students about Turing Machines like this.
March 21, 2009
There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues…
March 20, 2009
I am rather old fashioned, which is unsurprising since most of what I read dates from before the invention of the transistor. But I think that one can disagree with someone else without needing to call him an idiot:
This is exactly why idiots like Matthew Nisbet, who continually call for reining in…
March 19, 2009
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is often criticised for his racial classification and supposed racism, but in this work, published in 1775, he not only argues for the unity of the human species, but in other passages for their general equality of intelligence, contrary to the use his ideas were later…
March 19, 2009
But this one's going to be huge. The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science has a new group blog. [How do I know? I set it up.] It will act as a clearing house for events and ideas at what has become a very large concentration of HPS types in one city (even as HPS declines elsewhere in…
March 19, 2009
If I may interrupt the politics for a bit with a sciencey note, I strongly recommend reading this blog post at Small Things Considered (the go-to site for all things microbial and smaller): parasitoid wasps insert viral-like particles, or VLPs, into the host caterpillars in which they lay their…
March 19, 2009
Ian Musgrave has a brilliant post showing that Dembski's revisiting of the old creationist canard that Dawkins' 1984 Weasel program, designed to show that random variation and selective retention can "evolve" a target phrase, in this case Shakespeare's "Methinks it is a weasel" (oops; I nearly had…
March 18, 2009
I'm posting this on my American blog because the Australian government, through the Australian Communications and Media Authority is fining people on Australian sites who give the links below the fold $11,000/day. Pretty well everything I feared about censorship by the internet filter and heavy…
March 18, 2009
I have a six hour layover at the airport in the morning of 20 April... or I can just work on my talk.
March 18, 2009
Most bloggers know that it is hard to write interesting entries (curse PZ Mnhyrs!), but just occasionally, one writes itself.
In one day we get three items about taxonomy: one about real taxonomic disagreement, over whether whales are more closely related to hippos (the whippo hypothesis) than…
March 17, 2009
Homer: "Oh, I just love it here! So many things, and so many things of each thing!"
From here (go look!) via here.
March 17, 2009
I urge people to go read Russell Blackford's submission to the Human Rights consultative committee in Australia. It deals with the changes and challenges to civil liberties in the modern era and although Australia-focussed, it generalises well once you get past our odd spelling conventions and…
March 17, 2009
Marjorie Grene was a doyen of philosophy and history of biology, and I reviewed one of her last texts a while back and linked to an interview. She died yesterday, according to Leiter, aged 99.