John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
August 28, 2006
I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is…
August 24, 2006
Another group (in this case, pair) of scientists have come up with a species concept. In this case, it's published in the Journal of Mammalogy [304kb PDF], and it turns on species being protected gene pools.
It's not new. It's not even a repeat of prior concepts. It's a collation of several species…
August 24, 2006
evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear membrane surrounding the genetic material). Now Bill Martin and…
August 23, 2006
Shelley of Retrospectacle has asked us:
Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?
I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty. No government has, in…
August 23, 2006
Well, first there's flowers and chocolates, and then a nice restaurant...
Or, if you want the cheaper option, go to EARTHTIME and download the files that describe both the best modern results and the techniques used.
August 23, 2006
There's been some debate over whether or not Pluto is a planet. But it turns out that the problem will soon resolve itself. A paper written by the father of Andrew Dessler, back in 1980, shows (using the same logic that creationists use to prove that the speed of light is decreasing) that Pluto is…
August 22, 2006
Paramount studios, that bastion of sensible and intelligent divertisements, has cut ties with Scientologist moron Tom Cruise, taking its lead from Nicole Kidman. Now, ordinarily what an idiot member of a stupid religion does or has done to him would be of no interest to this blog, but this is the…
August 22, 2006
For some reason, Alfred Nobel didn't endow a mathematics prize, but John Fields, secretary of the International Mathematical Union in 1931, did, and the Fields Medal is the math equivalent of the Nobel in that discipline. Four winners every four years get the medal, all under 40 years of age.
This…
August 21, 2006
Mike Taylor on the Dinosaur list has this in his signature:
"Conclusion: is left to the reader (see Table 2).Acknowledgements: I wrote this paper for money" -- A. A. Chastel,A critical analysis of the explanation of red-shifts by a new field, A&A 53, 67 (1976)
While it was the 70s, this was in…
August 21, 2006
In yet another demonstration that celebrity is no reliable guide to intelligence, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, her husband, have tried to lobby British government officials to use a magic Kabbalistic water to clean up radioactive waste. It was amusingly stymied by the British Civil Service playing "…
August 21, 2006
The organisation that brought us BioMed Central has aggregated its open access journals. So far, BioMed Central (150+ journals), Chemistry Central (5 journals) and PhysMath Central (none yet) are linked here.
BMC has a host of nice addons, some of which require a paid subscription (they have to…
August 21, 2006
This, from LifeSite:
The Jesuit priest-astronomer who vocally opposed the Catholic understanding of God-directed creation, has been removed from his post as head of the Vatican observatory.
Fr. George Coyne has been head of the Vatican observatory for 25 years is an expert in astrophysics with an…
August 20, 2006
Acute readers may have noticed that I greatly resemble an albino gorilla (and that is only by those who have met me). But truth to tell, my picture at left is an avatar. I'm actually much grumpier.
Anyway, below the fold are some pictures I just found on Flickr of my much prettier doppelgänger…
August 20, 2006
A friend of mine just attempted suicide. When I was in my teens, I attempted suicide several times. It wasn't a cry for help, because nobody ever knew I tried. It was a reaction to the bad situation I found myself in, at a time when my hormones were raging, and when I was mostly alone. The reason I…
August 18, 2006
Lawmakers ponder the meaning of fish ...
Here is a case in which taxonomic categories are defined by political and legal considerations. In order to regulate the use of marine species for commercial reasons, to enforce export controls over crocodile (archosaurian) products, shellfish (molluscs),…
August 18, 2006
Hell, everybody's doing it, so why not me.
The rules: "Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe."
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.…
August 16, 2006
Razib at Gene Expression has called for a followup to the "evolution in ten words or less" post he previously had and which I responded to (linked in his post above) with a call for "ten assertions about evolution". So I just saw this, and of course I rise to the challenge...
1. All progress in…
August 15, 2006
The Christian Science Monitor has a reasonable review of David Quammen's latest book, The Reluctant Mr Darwin, but there are a couple of interesting tells.
One of my pet hates is this sort of journalistic boilerplate:
Centuries before, Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the universe;…
August 15, 2006
Occasionally one comes across odd stories in the late medieval literature on natural history, and one is inclined to dismiss them as fablous stories born of credulous superstition. But they illustrate a much more important phenomenon - the shift from seeing nature as a source of moral lessons to…
August 14, 2006
Here's a nasty case of a child custody case that has been fought over whether or not the mother's involvement in the Church of the Subgenius makes her an unfit mother. The Church is of course a parody on organised evangelical religion (save yourself for eternal slackness! Justify your sins!). It…
August 13, 2006
Just saw this link at The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould archive. Eldredge was Gould's collaborator on punctuated equilibrium theory, and is a deep thinker about matters evolutionary. It contains discussions of many topics - go check it out.
August 13, 2006
Burning silo is holding the next Festival of the Trees and coturnix suggested a poem. So I wrote one:
I think that I shall never see
A definition of a tree
For trees evolved in many ways
With diff'rent forms, in diff'rent days
So resolution of the term
Requires phylogeny, not form
So Aristotle was…
August 12, 2006
The Greek English language newspaper Kathimerimi is reporting that there is a problem in Greece teaching evolution to secondary students. Not because of religious opposition, according to the way the article is phrased, but because of disorganisation in the curriculum. 250 university academics have…
August 12, 2006
PZ Placeholder at Pharyngula is reporting that evangelical churches in Kenya want to shut down the rich human fossil exhibit at the Kenya national museum. He's concerned that a rich heritage of all humanity will be Talibanised (remember the Buddha statues in Afghanistan?). From what I know of…
August 11, 2006
This week's question is
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
I was in my sexually active 20s when AIDS hit, but it was a distant thing, something that affected gays and IV drug users, and I was not in the vulnerable…
August 11, 2006
New Light Microscope Images Cellular Proteins with Near-Molecular Resolution.
Advances in microscopy have fuelled biology. Here is a new approach that allows the visualisation of individual proteins, using fluorescent in situ hybridisation techniques. What's even more interesting is that the two…
August 9, 2006
One of the pitfalls of blogging is that you can go for days without finding anything worth saying, and then get a bunch of things worth noting all at once. Today is such a day. So here is a heterogeneous collection of links and topics for your delectation (I love that word, and "heterogeneous"):
1…
August 7, 2006
Here is a very nice cosmological and geological evolutionary timelien in Flash format. It has sliders that allow you to move from one era to the next. Be aware that nothing much happens until the Archaean, so it's not broken if nothing happens when you lide to that period.
Hat tip to Jura on the…
August 6, 2006
One of my favourite bands of the 80s was Split Enz, out of which Crowded House evolved. And one of their best songs was titled "History never repeats", a sentiment that seems to be fairly widespread. Recently, I started Dawkins' latest book (what is it with established writers on evolution? Gould's…
August 3, 2006
Science & Theology News has an article on "evolutionism" that is replete with historical errors and other misdemeanors. But it indicates some nuances of the evolutionary biological debates are starting to have some impact.
The author, Gennaro Auletta, is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical…