John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
As you may have noticed, I am something of a Victorian - as well as being from that wonderful state, I also write as if I were a nineteenth century writer. It comes of reading too many of them over too long a period. I have little trouble when the parentheses separate the beginnings from the ends…
A while back I excerpted some Whewell on classification by types. Here is John Stuart Mill disagreeing with him, and, I think, starting off the modern literature on natural kinds.
Kinds are Classes between which there is an impassable barrier; and what we have to seek is, marks whereby we may…
In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.…
Taxonomy - the science of classifying organisms into putatively natural groups - is often treated as a kind of necessary bit of paperwork without much theoretical import by some biologists. Others think it is the single most important thing to do, usually justifying it in terms of conservation…
Leiter's poll has Wittgenstein beating Frege. I'm disappointed that Peirce didn't get a higher ranking, and astonished the Nietzsche did.
A talk Michael Ruse gave recently in Sydney for the celebrations of Darwin's 200th birthday is now available as a podcast from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) here. Or here:
Apparently it's Pi day on March 14*, which means you get to eat a pie. But Americans do not understand what a pie is. That's not a pie... this is a pie:
Real pies have meat, preferably with well-known common names like "beef", in them. And you eat them with tomato sauce, thusly:
I once retraced…
Archetype is a blog on stuff I like, including taxonomy and entomology. It's by Roberto Keller, a graduate of AMNH and Cornell. Go check it out. Some nice stuff on homologies in insects.
There's been a highly publicised conference at the Vatican about evolution. There are good and sensible things being said there, and silly ones.
The good and sensible things are that nobody questions that evolution occurs, and it is asserted that faith and science cannot conflict (which means,…
An interesting article is up at the New Atlantis by Ari Schulman, arguing that we will never be able to replicate the mind on a digital computer. Here I want briefly to argue there are other reasons for this.
Transhumanists are fond of claiming that one day we will be able to download a state…
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as "Darwin's theory". But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection.
First off, let's say this again: Darwin did not think…
You all probably already knew about this comic series, but I needed Phil Plait to mention it.
This is me.
And...
This is us collectively...
William Smellie wrote The Philosophy of Natural History in 1791, and it remained in print for over a century. It's a lovely and explicit expression of the Great Chain of Being view that all things grade insensibly from simple to perfect, and all classifications are arbitrary. This was effectively…
Actually, this one is better called "Darwin was a racist", but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that.
Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871.
If you…
Brian Leiter has asked who that was in the train of the New York Times declaring that it was Wittgenstein.So far, Russell is leading. Russell? My goodness, he was important but hardly the best - most read more than best, I suspect. Moore was better than Russell. As to the other leading contenders,…
PD Magnus on the history of the philosophy of science in the last 50 years, in around 1400 words.
A short primer on the Greenhouse Effect
Mendeley, a bibliographic cloud project, has raised funding from Last.fm, Warner and Skype execs. Looks like next gen after Endnote...
Folks, I haven't forgotten you or the promised myth posts, but I've had to do some book stuff, along with Real Life stuff. So hang tight - I'm away this weekend (and - shock! - I'm not taking the laptop with me) but I promise something meaty on Sunday evening or so, OK?
In the meantime: some X-Phi…
This is a kind of note to myself, an aide memoire to remind me of the fact that much of the modern narrative about classification in biology before Darwin is not correct. It's also interesting that Whewell defines systematics, but most interesting is the reinforcement of the prior note that Whewell…
I can't not do this, because I want to display to the world how nerdish and little of a life I have...
Later note: The link above is crap. Instead I'm replacing it with the actual BBC Book list.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones…
A 6th grade maths and science teacher emailed me about whether theories could become laws. Below the fold is his request and my reply. The short answer is that when laws grow up, they become theories, not the other way around.
Cameron Peters wrote:
Dr. Wilkins,
I was hoping you might be able to…
A new blog that looks promising is here. In one of their first pieces they note that Cameroon is following the Congo's example and setting up preserves for gorillas (and other things).
This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology.
One of the constant and incessant complaints made against Darwin by theists in particular, is that he introduced chance and purposelessness into our worldview. I don't believe in such entities as…
This myth has more to do with what people thought their own views contrasted to, than anything Darwin said, but like all myths, there's a hint of truth underlying it.
The problem with this myth is the ambiguity of the term "gradual". It is a weasel word, which can mean one thing at one point and…
Once upon a time, I made mention, simply a mention, of a paper by one Matts Envall, which I said I would later comment on. I did so because a friend of mine, Malte Ebach, told me about him and the paper. I have yet to appropriately thank Malte. My gratitude involves a water balloon, I think.
This…
I finally have internet - only took Primus three weeks to install and get working my internet and phone - and that was with an existing account and line!
Tonight I went to the opening of a Thomas Henry Huxley exhibit at the Macleay Museum, and Michael Ruse gave an excellent talk on Tom and his…
I have always had a sneaking admiration for neo-Thomistic accounts of creation and evolution, because they tend to think of creation as the actualisation of the real world with no limitations on natural law within the created universe. Now read this nice piece by Michael Tkacz. You need not agree…