John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
June 15, 2006
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…
June 14, 2006
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…
June 14, 2006
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…
June 14, 2006
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…
June 13, 2006
[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…
June 13, 2006
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…
June 12, 2006
No comment needed:
Gitmo Suicides Comment Condemned, U.S. Official's 'Publicity Stunt' Remark Draws International Backlash - CBS News
June 12, 2006
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…
June 12, 2006
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…
June 11, 2006
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…
June 10, 2006
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…
June 10, 2006
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…
June 10, 2006
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…
June 10, 2006
Here is a nice site showing dinosaur skeletal fragments and the reconstructions. Go check it out.
June 10, 2006
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,…
June 10, 2006
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…
June 9, 2006
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…
June 8, 2006
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…
June 8, 2006
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,…
June 6, 2006
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…
June 5, 2006
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".…
June 5, 2006
Diseases are threatening the production of chocolate. What will I do to stave off Nietzschean despair? There's always beer, I guess...