John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
December 16, 2006
at the front, there'd be this suspiciously familiar primate...
My son reckons that a photo of me wouldn't look all that different. My son is about to lose some teeth, I reckon.
December 13, 2006
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
C'mon. You knew I'd fall prey to temptation, didn't you?
December 13, 2006
9 Chickweed Lane has been making a few pointed comments about academe and teaching that I just have to share.
First, a summary of how things are going for me right now:
Second, the joys of teaching and marking...
December 13, 2006
Chris at Mixing Memory has a couple of interesting posts on religious cognition. They inspired me to present my own hypothesis about the origins of religion, and in particular individual gods...
My own view, which is mine (*ahem*), is pretty simple. While there are benefits to religion in terms of…
December 13, 2006
A paper gets retracted in Cell because of image manipulation.
Someone needs to tell scientists how not to use PhotoShop when preparing their images. I used to do precisely that to new researchers at the institute I worked at. Here are Wilkins' Rules of Scientific Image Manipulation:
1. If you have…
December 13, 2006
If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the sky; cattle and other farm animals, and every kind of wild beast, would bear young…
December 12, 2006
It's nice to see a review of some science that neither dumbs it down nor over technifies it. Ars Technica reviews the lactose tolerance gene evolution in African populations.
December 11, 2006
This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not educated in the field
Basically, Dr David Roemer…
December 9, 2006
A new war on Christmas is being waged... by a pastor. Forget those secular humanists; the real danger to traditional Christmas is the religious. Santa is "a blasphemous stand-in for God who makes liars of parents and causes confusion among children."
Why do they hate Christmas? And, presumably,…
December 8, 2006
The below-the-fold note was seen on WIRED. It's a plea to prevent political interference from continuing to demolish the scientifically worthwhile aspects of the NASA program, in favour of the bread and circuses smell to the lunar base. A friend worked in the Astrobiology Program NASA funded, which…
December 8, 2006
Those who know me, or try to proselytise me with petitions or for political party support, know that I am a moral vacuum. At least, that's what I say when they try ("Sorry, I'm a moral vacuum". It gets great reactions). I like to talk about facts and practices, but not to prescribe or proscribe. I…
December 5, 2006
This is one of the few tests that gives me a ranking I agree with. Even if the questions are too simplistic and the alternatives not exclusive.
Your Political Profile:
Overall: 15% Conservative, 85% Liberal
Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 0% Conservative,…
December 5, 2006
A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in urban environments than when in forest environments. As the writer at ScienceNOW tells…
December 3, 2006
Janet has raised the undead argument from its grave again! I... must... respond...
The issue is (raised, as always, by the existence of woo science, antiscience, and pseudoscience) how do we know when something is, or isn't, science? This is often called the "demarcation problem" (DP hereafter). I'…
December 3, 2006
I'm a follower, not a leader. And when John Lynch and Mike the Mad Biologist do something, I must too. I am their terrorism-loving lapdog, I am...
Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 98%
You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league…
December 2, 2006
Google prides itself for being an ethical company. "Do no harm" is their motto, I believe (although some Chinese dissidents may dispute this). But what happens when an honest site is hacked and porn links are included on their index page?
Google delists and deindexes that site immediately, with…
November 30, 2006
Last night, the Australian media held their annual awards ceremony, the Walkley Awards. A somewhat funny event occurred when an iconoclastic blogger, founder of Crikey.Com, was presenting an award, and was physically attacked by an obviously drunk political editor from one of Murdoch's papers. He…
November 30, 2006
In case anyone thought that I had given into existential despair or had a major infarct or something, the answer is yes, I did, on both counts. Or, in other words, I moved house. It took five days, and I still don't have broadband back. And now I have something like a month's backlog, after the…
November 25, 2006
Ignore what's below the fold, unless you are one of those who just can't not look...
I'll check back in a few days to see how this looks...
November 23, 2006
Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does.
Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that human reason was limited, and could not reach knowledge of things…
November 23, 2006
This is such a cool site: the Biology and Palaeontology Qs and As site is for UK school students to ask questions of experts. And some of those questions are way sophisticated. Kids are always dinosaur nuts (or at least more of them are than adults) but these kids are asking interesting questions…
November 22, 2006
Our Lords and Masters ask
Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?
According to the dictionary, a "laureate" is "someone honored for great achievements; figuratively someone crowned with a laurel wreath". We can read this more than one way - you might read it as "…
November 19, 2006
Just because a bunch of German, French and British people invented geology some 200 or more years ago, all the "type locations" for the geological column have been defined in terms of Northern Hemisphere locations. Finally, though, we Australians have our own period, and it's a doozy - the earliest…
November 19, 2006
Some time back, I was doing driving duty for a conference of philosophers (that's the collective noun; another is a dispute of philosophers) on a skin diving trip, and one of my passengers was Jonathon Kaplan (actually, if I'd crashed and killed us all, a large swathe would have been cut through…
November 19, 2006
One of the points made by Rabbi Slifkin in the article I cited recently is that if you insist on using God as an explanans in the aspects of the world we do not yet understand, that is going to mean a decreasing role for God as we learn more. This is an old point. Wesley Elsberry and I made this…
November 16, 2006
My favourite rabbi, Natan Slifkin, has a piece in the Jerusalem Post entitled "The problem with intelligent design". In it he distinguishes between thinking that evolutionary processes involve randomness and thinking that a universe that can evolve living things is random, the latter of which he…
November 15, 2006
The Knoxville Metro Pulse Online has a nice guest opinion piece by Rikki Hall that uses Zeno's paradox as an analogy for creationists and evidence.
November 14, 2006
This week's question is
What are the best pickup lines for scientists and science-savvy folk?
Asking a geek this question is like asking a McDonald's chef for the recipe. Geeks don't pull. Or maybe, that's just me. Besides, I was married for nearly 20 years and I'm well out of practice. But for my…
November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some…
November 12, 2006
Well by now you are all no doubt dying to see my holiday snaps. Fifty years ago I'd be that annoying relative who insisted on holding slide nights after a vacation (I had a vacation once. I remember it well). So here is the visual diary of my (working) trip to Vancouver for the PSA/HSS conference,…