John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
January 20, 2009
From Evolution: Education and Outreach comes a nice introduction to the concept of homology.
Late note: OK, not so good. I saw only the cute pix, and presumed the author understood paraphyly. But as I didn't have an entirely functional computer at the time I leapt in too soon. See Malte Ebach's and…
January 18, 2009
Truism 5: One is only required (by our language games) to justify moral claims one or two levels
Scholium*: Justifying moral claims is a language game in Wittgenstein's sense, but only in a philosophical language game do we justify the justifications. That is why many people prefer to make God the…
January 18, 2009
People get readyThere's a bus a'comin'
Don't need no deity
Just get on board
Won't hurt believers
If you can't hear God's mummery
You'll still need a ticket
From the Transport Board
People get ready
For the bus to show you
All people are passengers
From coast to coast
Citizenship's the key
For the…
January 16, 2009
One of the enduring mistakes made in science and philosophy is to confuse how things seem with how they are. In biology, the conjunction "pattern and process" has been around for decades, at least since 1947 in ecology, when Alex Watt used it as a title for an essay on plant communities. In 1967,…
January 16, 2009
Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the…
January 14, 2009
Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris…
January 12, 2009
The website www.talkorigins.org is now back up, although links to the temporary archive www.toarchive.org/ still work for now. The story is roughly this - the company (joker.com) we bought the domain name from reassigned the IP number for the site as part of changing their data centre. They…
January 12, 2009
Truism 4: There is most likely no God - if all gods but one are rejected with good reason, then by induction so should the final god.
Corollary: There are no independent reasons to think there is a god
Corollary: If there is a god, no-one can know that for a fact
Discuss
January 7, 2009
I'm away from what serves as my computer these days for a while - off to Sydney to find a place to live. Also, the Seed Masters (whom I for one welcome) are upgrading Moveable Type from 3 to 4, so we can't blog for a few days anyway. But I would like to announce that my paper with Gareth J. Nelson…
January 6, 2009
I make no secret that I admire Darwin as a historical figure very much, but I recently submitted a paper for an open access journal for science teachers at secondary level named Resonance, entitled "Not Saint Darwin". I was motivated by some of the rather uncritical, unhistorical and unnecessary…
January 4, 2009
Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do
Corollary: Morality is not based on commands from on high
Subcorollary: If God is dead, how could everything be permitted? We are still social apes.
Corollary: The 95:95 Rule - 95% of people are decent 95…
January 4, 2009
This was brought to my attention by a reader on the alt.fan.pratchett group in response to an evangeliser there. Below the fold, it really asserts how I think of death (and identifies me thus as an Epicurean).
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I…
January 4, 2009
Well, he admits that it was a theist diatribe from the beginning, and not the even handed interaction between science and faith doco he told Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers among others. Always nice to find out that those who assert that only with faith in God can we have morals behave as if morals…
January 3, 2009
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the…
January 2, 2009
I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism…
December 31, 2008
Congratulations to Sir Terence Pratchett, or SurPterry as we shall undoubtedly come to call him (although I'm tempted to doubt it as he is the last bloke I think would ever be lost for words). But overlooked in the reports is this guy, who gets an OBE:
He's John Martyn, BTW.
December 30, 2008
Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't want to, on balance
Corollary: Everything we want to do has a neurological foundation
Discuss
December 29, 2008
In the final chapter of Terry Pratchett's Eric, the wizard Rincewind and the boy Eric are climbing out of hell on steep steps.
He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping onto,…
December 29, 2008
As an academic philosopher, one often finds it more interesting to discuss or debate the ideas of others than to assert what one believes to be true. This is because everybody has ideas they believe to be true, but few have managed to argue for them in any way, and philosophy is all about the…
December 26, 2008
It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the founder of western logic, had discussed groupings of things in…
December 24, 2008
So what is it with Christians who are so able to debunk and demythologise the myths of everyone else, and fail to see that exactly the same logic applies to their own mythology?
A priest in northern Italy told kids there was no Father Christmas at a children's mass. Great. We shouldn't believe in…
December 24, 2008
Here at monkey's uncle, the blog of James Holland Jones, a Stanford anthropologist. Well worth the read. Basically he attacks the presumption that there was some kind of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness needed to make the rest of the EP argument.
Merry Christmas. Or should I say Happy…
December 23, 2008
Damn it's hot. Around here, snow is at a premium, which means our solstitial celebrations are less active than those oop north. Anyway, I got interviewed last night on national radio, the ABC's National Evening show, talking about the early ideas of philosophy to presenter Rhys Muldoon. Nice fellow…
December 21, 2008
Because I have to hand back my laptop to my present employer, and my future employer won't have a Mac for me before mid-January or later, I may not be able to post much for a while. I do have access to a desktop PC, but what can one really do with that sort of SNAFU technology anyway? I may get a…
December 19, 2008
Oh dear. I have a bad feeling about this. Via Greg Laden's blog comes a list of 219 movies and supposedly if you have seen more than 85 you have no life... Prepare yourself
(x) Rocky Horror Picture Show
(x) Grease
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
( )…
December 16, 2008
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the…
December 16, 2008
SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
Because Moveable Type is gagging on the number of links, I have had to break this into several different posts, as shown…
December 16, 2008
The title is the title of a nice essay at Crikey. I especially like this:
Bernadette McMenamin of ChildWise, you've crossed the line, defaming everyone who’s protested the government’s plans. "Most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect,…