John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
November 5, 2008
I am keen to jot down whatever I can about the ontologies of biology - not just evolution, but also molecular, developmental, taxonomic, ecological and other domains of biology. I want to do this in a relatively systematic manner, so I would appreciate readers noting in the comments the sorts of…
November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious…
November 5, 2008
Or rather, Jimmy Smits' character, Matt Santos? I am rather taken by how much like the presidential race involving Smits and Alda the recent election was. Obama is an intelligent Santos. I wonder how much credit for the sea change in American politics must go to Sorkin's portrayal of a decent…
November 4, 2008
The antigay marriage measures in Arizona and Florida passed, and it looks like the Californian one will also pass. I cannot see how anyone can justify refusing a large minority the rights afforded the majority. There's a name for that.
I reiterate my modest proposal.
November 4, 2008
At the time of writing the vote was evenly split four ways between A Moose, Immanuel Kant, Saul Kripke, and any Four Dimensionalist. Beat the tie now by voting.
[Hat tip to Leiter]
November 2, 2008
I haven't seen a lot of commentary about what it will mean if the Republicans go down or if they win the White House and Congress. From half a world away, some reflections beneath the fold.
Republicans win the White House but lose the Senate
This will reinforce the politics of smear and…
November 2, 2008
Well, you crash your server with requests for free software, don't you? Hopefully I'm not adding to the problem, but Codeweavers offered a free copy of their *nix and Mac OS X WINE-based Windows emulator CrossOver, which needs no copy of Windows unlike the other virtualisers I have (Parallels and…
November 1, 2008
I used to think that Jews in general were able to avoid the confusion of biblical literalism with their rich tradition of allegorical and other forms of interpretation and commentary, but it seems that there are some - haredim - who follow the example of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and dismiss evolution…
October 31, 2008
An essay in Nature recently, titled "A question of class" (by Jeffrey Parsons and Yair Wand) puts the case that classification is crucial to science and needs to be understood. They hold, as I do, that a poor understanding of classification - particularly of the concepts/words "class" and "…
October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is…
October 28, 2008
As I feared, the internet filtering issue has now been taken up by special interests. The conservative Christian political party Family First, run largely by the Hillsong evangelical denomination, has one senator, but the balance of power is so tight they wield disproportionate power, and as PM…
October 27, 2008
The Grauniad has a front page item pinpointing the real cause of the economic crises of the part 30 years: the Australian/British group, AC/DC, or Acker-dacker as we call them here. Because when pants hems move up, the FTSE moves down, you know...
I always knew Australia was the root cause of…
October 27, 2008
The NCSE has put up more of its content from it's excellent, if badly laid out, magazine Reports of the NCSE. As a result, one of my better pieces, on species concepts, is now up, with a list of what I at the time thought were the concepts in the modern literature, derived from Mayden's 1997 piece…
October 27, 2008
Well, anyone, really, not just Americans. My question arises from the somewhat breathless attitude taken towards Obama. While I think he is an admirable guy, and I have done so for a time now, I wonder what people expect him to be able to achieve? What is the minimum a good leader ought to be able…
October 26, 2008
Readers: if you haven't eaten lately, hover your mouse over the Snowflake avatar to the left. Give it a bit of time and you will see what I look like when I shave.
Clicking on it merely takes you to Barcelona Zoo's page on my avatar.
October 26, 2008
Users, or Lusers as they are known, learn early not to piss off the sysadmin, who is God. Federal minister Stephen Conroy's ham-fisted attempt to gag critics of his stupid paternalistic and ultimately failure-ridden net filter scheme has managed to piss off the whole lot of them. This could be fun…
October 26, 2008
The Ediacaran period is the era between around 635Mybp and 540Mybp, just before the Cambrian. You pronounce it "ed-ee-ack-a-ran". It is also the name of a new blog by the inimitable Chris Nedin, erstwhile paleontologist who specialised in the Ediacaran fauna before joining the Dark Side (federal…
October 26, 2008
I love golden orb spiders - they are among the prettiest spiders you will find in Queensland, and the largest [click on the pic for information]. You'll come across them in the oddest places, too. I once nearly stepped on one on a footpath (sidewalk to non-English speakers) in the business center…
October 24, 2008
Waits is one of the few people I admire almost without reservation, even including the industrial blues. A comment quoted on a passing web site was "We are monkeys with money and guns", leading me via Google to this wonderful interview at NPR a few months back. Read it.
I have cited his version…
October 24, 2008
I told you so 1: High cost of internet filtering and controls stricter than Iran's, oh and critics bullied.I told you so 2: Terrorism laws unsafe, court rejects charge of breaking laws that did not exist when the "crime" was done
October 23, 2008
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had…
October 23, 2008
My favourite subject as an undergraduate was Historiography, which covered historical method and the nature of history. I was fortunate to be invited to contribute to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography by the editor, Aviezer Tucker, which is being launched in…
October 22, 2008
That is not a riddle, or rather it's not meant to be, but it's a question worth asking about the barcoding project.
Wired has a nicely written piece about the rationale and program of giving species DNA barcodes and using the gene chosen as the barcode to identify the number of species out…
October 20, 2008
Not that I can be all that superior: we have similar problems in Australia (like the outrageous funding of the Australian Institute of Sport).
October 20, 2008
So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to…
October 17, 2008
The Labor plan to interrupt Australian internet access, which I have previously excoriated, has been, as I feared, extended. Electronic Frontiers Australia reports that the government has a second, secret, list that even opting out doesn't free you of. So the technical overhead is still there and…