Book
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
Bill Wimsatt is one of the philosophy of biology's underappreciated performers. Many of his takes on biology have influenced a great many people, including me. Here is an interview with him on his latest book Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Harvard Press, 2007). According to the interview, he takes our cognitive limitations as a virtue. I hope to get a copy sometime, after which I'll review it. He says
“Complex systems are messy,” said Wimsatt, gesturing to the 400-page synthesis of his work. “And human beings make errors trying to…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
Even though I didn't get to go to SVP this year, my friends Julia and Neil were in attendance and were kind enough to send me a *signed* copy of Don Prothero's newest book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Although I was already in the middle of a book when Prothero's book arrived at my door, I dropped what I was reading and started tearing through the glossy pages, and I have to say that I was impressed. Aside from the excellent illustrations by the talented Carl Buell (plus tons of photographs and other diagrams), Prothero's book doesn't hold back when it comes to…
laelaps | November 3, 2007After many false starts I've actually started to write my "treatise" on evolution, some of the pages I've been turning out being in note form (I want to get the ideas down and then fill in the exact details later when I can pick up the proper reference books from the shelf) while others resemble actual passages and are in a near-finished form. My work isn't going to be a chronological overview of the history of life like many other books, but will instead take a more personal approach reflecting how I've come to understand evolution and how it proceeds. Differing rates of change, convergence…
laelaps | October 29, 2007
It was bound to happen sooner or later; books were starting to overflow onto the floor and living room table, so a great bookcase reorganization needed to be undertaken. This is a snapshot during the carnage, my little cat Charlotte coming to help ("help" meaning crawl all over the books and push them out of the bookcase). I've still got a little bit of space at the top and most of another bookcase for 2008's accumulations, so if nothing else this serves as something of a visual progress report for my personal library (since you can't see half the books on the bed I'll have to take a picture…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven't sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies.
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2007
I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of "species" in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It's designed as a reader for scholars to see how the notion[s] have evolved separately in the logical definitional sense - for Aristotle, eidos, which we translate as "form", "species", and "kind", was a logical term, not a biological one, which had to wait until the 16th century, and even then they were distinct notions.
I argue in the commentaries that there was nothing…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
evolvingthoughts | April 24, 2007
Chris Mooney, who is too damned young and handsome, was in Sydney yesterday (well for a few days before that) so I decided the decent thing was to fly down from Brisbane to meet him, given that he travelled across some small bit of water to get here. The astonishing thing was how much he found out about the best drinking spots in Sydney after only three days on his own! He probably knows the night spots of Melbourne better than I do, even though I grew up there. Anyway, Tim Lambert also dropped by, as did a friend of mine, Chris Ho-Stuart, who only had to come 2.5 hours by train from…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
I cannot believe I didn't pick this up myself. Coulter's book Godless isn't what it seems to be - an ill-informed rehash of tired old creationist bafflegab. Instead, it's a Sokalesque hoax designed to make conservatives reassess their own rationality and to expose the idiocy of intelligent design! Read about it at Livescience.com in a piece of clever analysis by Peter Olofsson.
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
As I recently mentioned Grene's book with Depew, it's worth noting an interview with her by The Believer (Benjamin Cohen) here. It explains some of the themes in the book. Thanks to Benjamin for the heads up.
evolvingthoughts | February 23, 2007
When one is starting in a field for the first time, the choice of textbook is crucial, as it will often set the tone for the rest of one's study. Last year and the year before I helped teach Philosophy of the Life Sciences here, and we used, respectively, one textbook and no textbook. Right now I'm reading a rather marvellous book, that would have set me up years in advance of where I am now, so this got me thinking (it's the job description, you know): what are the textbooks on Philosophy of Biology, and what are their respective merits?
I'm going to ignore the various present and…
evolvingthoughts | February 14, 2007
Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years?
"The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth" (Patrick Wyse Jackson), gives a nice and comprehensive account of the project to date the earth, and the means used to do it, from early modern theological approaches like the famous Ussher's (and Jackson has some corrections to make to Gould's essay on the topic), through to the…