John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
March 12, 2007
I am idly wondering what the best creationist book ever was. Not what best puts the usual creationist canards forward, but which creationist (including ID) book tried to make an intellectually satisfying and honest case.
So far I have Wendell Bird's Origin of Species Revisited published about…
March 11, 2007
I have put a file on my home site that lists as many species definitions, from Aristotle to today, as I can find. It's a work in progress, so if you find any that are significant in the history of biology or the present debate that I have missed, please let me know. In time, this may become a…
March 10, 2007
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in March 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series.
It is, wrote the Roman poet Horace, fit and proper to die for one's homeland. The word he used for homeland was "patria" (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori), and the word has…
March 10, 2007
Migrations has this wonderful image of the structure of a yeast cell done by EMBL through electron tomography. You can even see the cytoskeleton.
Below the fold:
March 10, 2007
A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No…
March 10, 2007
As I have mentioned before, I started reading dystopias at eight. This naturally led to my reading science fiction or SF (never scifi) and the third book was, as I have said, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, in the Wellsian tradition.
But it wasn't all literary. Dreck. I craved dreck! As…
March 9, 2007
David Hicks, the Australian held without trial or charge for five years and tortured in Guantanamo by the American military at the behest of the clearly criminal administration in the United States (there! I feel much better now) is being charged and tried for "providing material support for…
March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically…
March 8, 2007
PZ Mghserx hits the big 50, the youngster. And there's a poetry fest going on at his blog (for values of "poetry" that includes all Vogonesque contributions). I wrote this, but I thought I'd add it here, with typos corrected.
The Myers Biological Song:
You are the very model of a modern…
March 7, 2007
Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
The villagers did not know where they came from…
March 6, 2007
New research indicates that "crabs", or pubic lice, began to evolutionarily diverge after human-leading lineages and gorilla-leading lineages split. As there are very few ways to spread public lice, it suggests that there was some hominid-on-gorilloid action after speciation.
Eww, you might…
March 6, 2007
You, dear readers, are all smart people. So I'm asking for your suggestions - how to analyse networks of links between blogs? Tools, sites with analytic tools, visualisation apps, the whole shebang. Please let me know...
March 6, 2007
Janet started a meme, which started the whole world meming...
Ten weird things about me? Hell everything about me is weird.
1. My first full novel read was Brave New World. I was eight.
2. As a kid I wrote to all the Soviet as well as the American space centres looking for information. I'm sure…
March 5, 2007
You know that "Wow" ad for Vista, where you see them watch Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 launch on B&W TV and go "wow"? NASA Watch points out that Shepard launched on the Navy's Redstone, not the Air Force's Atlas. Wow. They are that careless. Well I know it's the advertising agency, and by…
March 5, 2007
I received the following from someone who refers to herself only as Fran K, which, given my recent experiences with university adminstration, has the right Kafakesque overtones. I publish it in the hope that others may learn from our joint experiences... someday.
Dear John Wilkins,
I quite…
March 5, 2007
Taxonomy is a science, but its application to classification involves a great deal of human contrivance and ingenuity, in short, of art. In this art there is a leeway for personal taste, even foibles, but there are also canons that help to make some classifications better, more meaningful, more…
March 4, 2007
The following is a series of reasons why in a democracy, one should not elect Christians as leaders or representatives.
1. They are exclusive, and will favour their own over the welfare of all. Minorities like Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other religions, as well as those who lack any religion,…
March 4, 2007
What do you do with a lawyer who attacks detention without charge, who defends habeus corpus, denies that retrospective legislation should apply, and criticises the thinness of evidence against his client?
You'd give him a legal award, wouldn't you? After all, he is defending not only his client…
March 3, 2007
You Got 79% Right!
Very very nice. You've got the basic classics down cold, and a few of the less mainstream ones as well. You get a gold star for brightness!Famous First Lines QuizQuiz Created on GoToQuiz
So it's a while since I read any fiction (Pratchett and Neal Stephenson don't count)...
March 2, 2007
Way back in 1843, John Stuart Mill wrote this:
When the laws of the original agent cease entirely, and a phenomenon makes its appearance, which, with reference to those laws, is quite heterogeneous; when, for example, two gaseous substances, hydrogen and oxygen, on being brought together, throw…
February 28, 2007
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in April 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series.
One of the more difficult conceptual problems the layperson has with biology lies in the simple word "primitive". It has many antonyms - "modern", "evolved" and "derived", and…
February 28, 2007
Ignore the incredibly lame credits song. This is a cool video, filmed in Panama by actual ecology students, foot fungus and all...
Click To Play
Biodiversity is all around us! In this video we introduce you to the concept of biodiversity. It is more than just the total number of species, however…
February 27, 2007
So what if the remains found really are those of Jesus of Nazareth? This joke indicates that for some it might not matter:
One day the Pope received a phone call from an archaeologist in Palestine. "Holy Father," the voice said, "I don't quite know how to tell you this, but we have discovered…
February 25, 2007
"I support ignorance. There is my philosophy. I have the tranquility of ignorance and faith in science. Others cannot live without faith, without belief, without theology [or theory - the original is smudged. JSW]; I do without all of these. I do not know, and I shall never know; I accept this…
February 25, 2007
Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have once been asked by a journalist what he thought about western civilisation. "I think it would be a very good idea", Gandhiji is supposed to have replied. True or not, the anecdote came to mind when I read William Rees-Mogg's piece in the Times Online: "Religion…
February 25, 2007
The Australian is Rupert Murdoch's treasure. He began it to show that the established state-based papers weren't doing trheir job properly, and it took over 15 years to become profitable. So one might think that its editorials are somewhat representative of Rupert's own views.
Ian Musgrave has a…
February 25, 2007
If you saw this:
what would you think it meant? I think it means exhaust fans are pleasant to pirates and not to everybody else, who run to find aircon. NASA Watch thinks it means "that big ceiling fans can send flaming arrows down to kill pirates and people crossing the street". It might even…
February 25, 2007
Your Dominant Intelligence is Intrapersonal Intelligence
Reflective and thoughtful, you enjoy spending time alone.
You are good at analyzing yourself - and knowing your true feelings.
Totally self aware, you are in tune with your dreams and desires.
A spiritual and philopsophical person, your…
February 24, 2007
Wiley resolves the age-old controversy...