John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
November 12, 2006
In a stress test of such quizzes, I took the test and found out I'm actually from the Great Lakes region...
What American accent do you have?Your Result: The Inland North
You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you…
November 11, 2006
Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology.
1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on…
November 8, 2006
It has been a fascinating experience being in the US during an election. Josh Hayes, mine host in Seattle (I slept fine, thanks) took me to a polling booth, and we watched the count come in on CNN. A few observations, if I may, from a bewildered tourist.
One thing that struck me is that it is…
November 5, 2006
Here I am in Vancouver, which is a lovely place despite the rain, and while I'm overloading my cortex with philosophy of biology, we hit a landmark here. 100,000 unique visitors! And nobody to share the champagne with, if I had any champagne...
Tomorrow I go to Seattle for three days of…
November 1, 2006
The living world, it seems to me, causes no end of trouble for those who would classify it. Its levels, ranks, hierarchies and units all seem to be clear enough, until we encounter troublesome cases. Then they get very troublesome indeed. So I want to say, there are no ranks or set units in…
October 30, 2006
So, I'm packing for the PSA/HSS conference in Vancouver, where I will be drinkingworking with other philosophers and historians, and meeting the Sciblings. Then to Seattle, where I will be shown the sights by Josh Hayes and others. Thence to San Francisco where I get to give a talk and be…
October 29, 2006
The conservative government of John Howard is proposing to offer $20,000 to any school to employ a "religious person" as a chaplain for students. This isn't blurring the line of separation between church and state, he says. It's just "common sense". Right.
[Updated, so moved up to the top]
I wonder…
October 28, 2006
Courtesy of Mixing Memory comes the announcement of a conference at AlphaPsy on methodology and the social sciences, which raises an interesting thought. Is the use of scientific methodology and the naturalising of the social sciences a threat to those disciplines?
This is an old debate, though. It…
October 27, 2006
This week's Ask a Science Blogger is
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?
In my view, it is taxonomy. We classify species and higher groups for a number of reasons, but the pressing reason right now is that taxonomy is the basis of nearly all measures of…
October 26, 2006
Karen Neander, an Australian philosopher of mind and biology, has moved to Duke. There's a nice press release about it here.
October 26, 2006
OK, so someone sent me a copy of The God Delusion and I have to say, I'm not impressed. Let's get this straight, it's not a work of science, but of philosophy. Dawkins is making a rhetorical case, not a logical or scientific one, that God is a hypothesis that can be tested and found wanting. I'll…
October 25, 2006
I have often felt disgusted by the fact that homosexual partners can be excluded from sharing their SO's last minutes because they "aren't" family, and are unable to inherit, and all the other legal benefits that come along with marriage (here in Australia, but also elsewhere). And I thought, for a…
October 25, 2006
Every so often, whether by design or random chance*, a number of research items get released on or about the same topic. Today's topic is bees.
First off, an amberised fossil bee that shows similarities with wasps (thereby confirming a prediction made by phylogenetic classifications) has been…
October 25, 2006
There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign…
October 23, 2006
I'm fairly busy right now what with job applications, selling a house and attempting murder on my teenage son, but while all that's going on here at The Laboratory of Doom behind the scenes, here's a poem below the fold, by Philip Larkin:
Philip Larkin - Church Going
Once I am sure there's nothing…
October 21, 2006
The Museum of Natural History in Paris (where I drank cognac at 2am when I visited) is coordinating an extensive indexing of the species biodiversity of the island of Santo in Vanuatu, with 170 researchers attempting since September to identify and describe all the species in its rainforest and…
October 21, 2006
King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs is running a series of lectures on trust in science that looks very interesting. Bit far for me to drop in, but if you're in the neighbourhood...
The ChronicleHerald article is below the fold.
King's, ethics…
October 20, 2006
Others have their own view, but the best science show on TV ever was done in Australia. In fact, it wasn't a show, it was a man - Professor Julius Sumner Miller. Miller was a student of Einstein's, and he got his start in the US and Canada before taking up a position in the Physics department at…
October 19, 2006
The Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology has just started up at the Australian National University. It's an interdisciplinary centre comprising biologists, palaeontologists, philosophers, archaeologists and geologists, researching issues in Geochemistry, Palaeontology, Archaeology, Genomes,…
October 18, 2006
National Geographic are reporting on a new fossil fish found in West Australia, which has some tantalising intermediate forms between ordinary fish and air breathers. It seems that Gogonasus (the Inspector Gadget of evolution?) had precursors to the Eustachian tube and the inner ear, and also had…
October 18, 2006
Well, Stranger Fruit beat me to it (after I told him about it!) but there's a new version of Darwin's works online that has many juicy goodnesses, such as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin. Now we can check if these creationists are quoting properly. It has images as well as OCR'd…
October 18, 2006
A nice interview with Dawkins at BeliefNet, in which he says what we have always known but which antievolutionists like to gloss over:
Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?
They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution…
October 18, 2006
It seems that we do see colours the same, despite cultural differences. [The spelling of "colour" is not a universal, though, as Americans don't know how to spell it properly.]
From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the world's languages.…
October 17, 2006
There's a really really dumb article getting a lot of attention in the media about the future of human evolution. Razib has a deprecating post about it, but I thought I'd add my two Australian cents (=0.006 US cents) worth.
Let's look at the major claim: that humans will subspeciate. I can't think…
October 16, 2006
An interview with Iranian physicist Reza Mansouri indicates that a major reason for the nuclear program in Iran is not militarism as such, but a desire to become scientifically competent, and nuclear science is seen as the peak of science.
Not an idiotic thing to say - as recently as four decades…
October 16, 2006
In a nice bit of irony, the attention paid to the Dover, PA school board attempt to get Intelligent Design into schools gave a major boost to the success of the American Museum of Natural History exhibit on Darwin.
Niles Eldredge says the goal was merely to continue a series of New York exhibits on…
October 16, 2006
There's a new book on junk science out. The following is from an announcement on the History and Philosophy of Science list. I haven't read the book myself.
Although the term "junk science" has often been used by rightists in
the U.S. to describe science that contradicts their interests, they
have…
October 14, 2006
I don't usually get poetry, being aesthetically colourblind and all. But this one got to me.