John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
September 15, 2006
I'm reading Robert Carneiro's Evolution in Cultural Anthropology (Westview Press, 2003) right now, and it's a good introduction to the debate over cultural evolution in the social sciences from Spencer to the present day. But I have some criticisms.
Carneiro's view of cultural evolution is…
September 13, 2006
So's you know, I will be finishing the Darwin and the Holocaust series, but the reference I need seems to have evaporated in my desk mess. Have I mentioned that I hold to the Bomb Crater Theory of paperwork? The idea is that you treat paperwork as a flow of information and materielle, and when it…
September 13, 2006
Repost from the old blog: This week I am an Eighth Day Agnostic, as recent reformers in my irreligion have decided that we also don't know what a week is. My sermon for today begins with a question: When did it become possible to be an atheist?
On Friday I attended an interesting PhD…
September 13, 2006
Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3
With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education?
Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-…
September 12, 2006
LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this…
September 12, 2006
From the old blog: Tom Wolfe, whose works often show a considerable pretentiousness in my opinion, has a piece in the New York Sun entitled "Darwin meets his match" [old link dead, so this will have to do]. In this he adduces Zola and Weber, and most of all the 1950s American sociologists whose…
September 12, 2006
What happens when rational coherence is not assumed, in the development of creationist views?
No child is able to make their epistemic set maximally coherent, and so it is likely that they will acquire a number of mutually inconsistent epistemic values and principles. If your parent tells you to…
September 11, 2006
Five years ago now, I was watching an episode of The West WIng, and channel surfing in the ads, as is my wont and my family's despair, when I happened on a news flash that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. I had visited New York six weeks earlier and stood at the base of those enormous…
September 10, 2006
The development of one's conceptual world is not done in a vacuum. As Gilbert and Sullivan noted
...every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
but of course that isn't true. Liberals, conservatives, Christians and atheists,…
September 9, 2006
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a…
September 9, 2006
In the last half hour, we reached 70k hits. I came to Scienceblogs with around 32k hits, after a year and a half of blogging, so my read rate has tripled. Thanks guys. I'll be sure to post something meaty in the next week for your ruminating pleasure...
September 9, 2006
Early on when I was publishing for the first time, I published in an online open access journal entitled The Journal of Memetics. Being naif, I didn't think it mattered. I had an idea I wanted to get out, and that was the place where the discussion was going on. What I didn't realise was that this…
September 7, 2006
There are those who contribute to the world in a positive way. No matter what you think of Steve Irwin's antics on camera, the man did a lot of good for conservation consciousness raising and teaching zoology to young and old alike.
Then there are those who do little but attack the former class, to…
September 7, 2006
Every taxonomist has to check before they name a genus that the name hasn't been used before, or that their own taxon isn't a synonym of some previously named group. Eliminating synonyms is a complex task, involving a slew of literature from the 1758 edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae to the…
September 6, 2006
Well everyone else is doing it and it appears I qualify for an MIT position (anyone listening?), but I have to justify my nerdiness to skeptics.
1. I read all of Arthur C. Clarke's novels when I was a kid.
2. I read all of Robert Heinlein's novels when I was a teenager.
3. I read all of Neal…
September 6, 2006
And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and…
September 5, 2006
John Allen, at National Catholic Review, has an interesting analysis of the motives behind the recent Evolution Study Day the pope held. Unsurprisingly, the issue is not whether life changed over time, or even whether natural selection works - although he indicates that as Cardinal Ratzinger,…
September 3, 2006
The "Crocodile Hunter" guy has been reported killed in a freak skindiving accident off the coast of Queensland north of Cairns. Apparently he was pierced through the heart by a stingray.
I visited his Australia Zoo a few years back and was pleasantly surprised how well it presented the animals. I…
September 3, 2006
I only just saw this today - here's a nice (and more informed) discussion of my use of Aquinas on design. It seems I relied on the term "designedly" a bit too much, when it should be about why the cause of something causes that outcome and not another. I misread by reading Aristotle himself into…
September 3, 2006
The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin entitled "3 Questions for America". The three questions are:
1. Should alternatives to evolution be taught in schools? Dworkin says yes, but only if they are actually scientific. Alternatives derived from and dictated by…
September 3, 2006
Reuters are reporting that neither creationism, which we didn't expect, nor ID, which we did, was the topic of the recent papal study group. Instead, it was the (legitimate, in my opinion) theological implications of evolution. In other words, since evolution is a fact, what does that mean for…
September 2, 2006
The claim often made is that Darwin is the sine qua non of the eugenics that the Nazis used to justify their genocide.What I aim to do today is show that while it is true (and widely accepted) that Darwinism was used by eugenicists to justify the "scientific" nature of their project, particularly…
September 1, 2006
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an amazingly prolific and influential philosopher in America, and founded what has come to be known as "pragmatism", which is the idea that the meaning of terms depends on how they "cash out" in practice. He contributed to the development of modern logic,…
September 1, 2006
Because I don't like to follow the herd all the way...
Next you'll ask where I got a stamp that does four colour...
August 31, 2006
Go check out Darren Naish's excellent series on the south east Asian wild pig, the babirusas, at Tetrapod Zoology, to see an excellent example of scientific blogging.
August 31, 2006
One of the problems of living at the edges of empire as I do, is that often you want to have access to older books that are hard to come by. Anything from about 1870 is pretty easy to get, but if you want to access older material, it gets troublesome. Some of it is only available on microfilm or…
August 29, 2006
Well, we have established that the subhuman thesis is not of Darwinian origins, and made a start on showing that the eugenics thesis isn't either (more to come later), but while we're all waiting, Daily Kos has an interesting article by a former history teacher on the Christian attitude to Jews,…
August 29, 2006
A recurring theme in the blogosphere is that our reaction to the terrorist threats is disproportionate and fundamentally subversive of our social structure and freedoms. This is usually cast in terms of the rollback of civil liberties, the denial of natural justice and the overweening ambitions of…
August 28, 2006
In line with condemning past science for present day ills, the Daily Kos correctly identifies the reason why all coherence is gone, as Donne put it, and blames the slave trade on Copernicus.