John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
August 3, 2008
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice…
August 3, 2008
Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike instructive. [T . H. Huxley,…
August 3, 2008
It is an odd thing seeing one's words in another language. Joao Carlos at Chí Vó, Non Pó has translated my TREE article into Portuguese (I think). Without my permission, though, and probably not the editor's. Joao, you'd better contact the journal and get permission. Springer can be brutal about…
August 1, 2008
Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog:
I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist" and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are…
July 30, 2008
For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer's own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer himself. Supposedly the founder of the justification for…
July 29, 2008
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C.
merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p =
peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source
Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae called picoeukaryotes. These guys make up half…
July 29, 2008
The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I've been using a filtered ISP at my university (they're running a trial) and what I can do online at home in one minutes takes the better part of fifteen at work. I am…
July 28, 2008
Those who are getting very agitated, missing out on their Usenet fix of the group talk.origins, which has been dormant for the past few days, should know that Steps Are Being Taken. Stop emailing me. I don't know any more than this... go take some other stimulant. Alcohol, chocolate, anything!…
July 27, 2008
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes.…
July 26, 2008
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa:
Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science…
July 26, 2008
In the process of maintaining the Basic Concepts in Science list I often have to make a judgement call about whether or not something is a basic enough post. For example I have a slew of rather good but to my mind very technical posts by Carl Brannen at Mass which are labelled "Elementary Science…
July 25, 2008
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea.
A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly divergent partial phylogenies (evolutionary histories with a root)…
July 25, 2008
Now it's against gravity...
“Too many scientists have been afraid to speak out against the powerful gravity lobby,” said Crowther. “With Intelligent Motion, we are looking forward to imposing balance on yet another heavy-handed field of science.”
July 24, 2008
I spent three days trying to reinstall Vista on my son's Dell Inspiron laptop; three solid days. Using Dell's supplied disks and instructions, no less. Each time it would fail for some unknown reason. We lost everything on the hard drive because it seems you can't boot from the rescue disk and…
July 23, 2008
I've been uncommonly productive in the last few days - first the book went off (and then I find that one chapter needs a complete rewrite, but hey), then I sent off a paper based on the talk I gave a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne, then today I find that my and Gary Nelson's article on Pierre…
July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and…
July 22, 2008
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local Baptist church...
July 21, 2008
Today I got my manuscript off to the publisher. Heaven knows what the editors will do with it; I expect a sympathetic treatment as the publisher's editorial board are quite keen. But it's like having a ten year boil lanced. And seeing a favourite child graduate. All at once.
So it remains for me…
July 21, 2008
I was breathless, sitting in the loungeroom of my religious studies teacher in Year 7. Unlike nearly everyone else in my year, I was a space nerd. I kept card files of each astronaut and cosmonaut. I knew how many thousands of pounds each F1 engine on the Saturn V used per minute. I was waiting…
July 20, 2008
John Hawks has an excellent essay up (I don't know how correct it is, never having been on a tenure track) on the merits and problems of being an academic blogger. Do read it.
July 19, 2008
Wow. Just... wow.
This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development, and it moves from being a crime film to a war film at some unspecified…
July 17, 2008
I miss Buffy. I miss Mal Reynolds. I really miss Kaylee. Most of all I miss Joss Whedon's sparkling entertainment. So go watch Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog, now!
July 17, 2008
Stealing this one from Moselio Schachter:
A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the genie.
The man replies, “Well, I'd dearly love to go to Hawaii but I hate both…
July 16, 2008
Good to see that Olivia Judson has finally caught up with me...
July 15, 2008
Ryan Gregory at Genomicron has a couple of interesting posts; One on Natural Selection before Darwin, which discusses prior presentations back to Hutton. I think he's right that prior to Darwin selection was typically not thought of as a way to form new species. It's generally not after Darwin…
July 14, 2008
Not the Simon and Garfunkel song, this:
title="Wordle: Evolving Thoughts">
src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/69128/Evolving_Thoughts"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"
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Just seeing if it works.
July 14, 2008
Language Log has a very nice summary of the reasons why some holes are black, and some are white.