trashcan categorial
evolvingthoughts | May 6, 2009My union is calling a strike next Tuesday. I'm not sure what to do. I don't teach, and have no administrative duties, so should I stop thinking from for 8 hours? I'm not sure the administration would notice...
Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has a series of podcasts from the series of lectures on Darwiniana that were held there recently. They include John Beatty, Roberta Millstein and Ken Waters, all serious folk in philosophy of biology (although Roberta, at least, is not serious all the time). From the sublime to the faintly absurd, you can also see my talk in Lisbon, one of them, anyway, at…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2009Wilkins is fragile and destablised
Intellectual tourist attacks local inhabitants
All happy bacteria are alike (or is that like each other?)
Australian current affairs gets vaccination right! [That's not a pun, it's an act of God] The original video is here.
Evolution does spreadsheets in origin of genetic code
Siris and Sandwalk go head to head on the Courtier's Reply. Neither of them are dressed.
Creationists misunderstand Deep Time. I'm shocked. I mean, it's only ten years since they were taken to task for it. Perhaps if they had millions of years to think it over...
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2009Pope rewrites medical science to suit Catholic dogma. Film at 11.
Australian government censorship website hacked. I'm not laughing, really.
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2009Some links and issues I have come across lately.
Those who read this and my other blog know that I am deeply opposed to internet censorship. Recently, Wikileaks put up a leaked list supposed to be the list being used in Australian trials of what will be a mandatory blacklist of URLs. First the minister said it wasn't the list, then he said it had some similarities, and now he says it's substantially the right list but there have been edits, but that's not my point. Now, in Germany, a Wikileaks host has been raided at the behest of a German minister. It's even possible that the Australian…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
evolvingthoughts | January 7, 2009I'm away from what serves as my computer these days for a while - off to Sydney to find a place to live. Also, the Seed Masters (whom I for one welcome) are upgrading Moveable Type from 3 to 4, so we can't blog for a few days anyway. But I would like to announce that my paper with Gareth J. Nelson on a possible precursor to punctuated equilibrium and the biological species concept, Pierre Trémaux, has been published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. The full details are:
Wilkins, John S., and Gareth J. Nelson. 2008. Trémaux on species: A theory of allopatric…
evolvingthoughts | January 4, 2009This was brought to my attention by a reader on the alt.fan.pratchett group in response to an evangeliser there. Below the fold, it really asserts how I think of death (and identifies me thus as an Epicurean).
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and…
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2008Congratulations to Sir Terence Pratchett, or SurPterry as we shall undoubtedly come to call him (although I'm tempted to doubt it as he is the last bloke I think would ever be lost for words). But overlooked in the reports is this guy, who gets an OBE:
He's John Martyn, BTW.
evolvingthoughts | December 23, 2008Damn it's hot. Around here, snow is at a premium, which means our solstitial celebrations are less active than those oop north. Anyway, I got interviewed last night on national radio, the ABC's National Evening show, talking about the early ideas of philosophy to presenter Rhys Muldoon. Nice fellow. It was more like a chat than an interview (which means I did most of the talking, as my chats tend to). It seems I am the sole contactable philosopher in Australia.
So anyway, to entertain you there are some pre-solstitial items just announced. First off, I'm going to put all the internet…
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2008I've been travelling a little to organise my move to Sydney. Love the building, the department, the people and the project. Not sure about Sydney... so anyway, nothing of substance from me for a while.
Here's a lovely little essay about Newton pissing off most of the European intellectual giants of his time, by one of our commentators, Thony Christie, at Etherwave Propaganda. He truly was the most egotistical and curmudgeonly bastard of his time, matched only by his actual achievements.
The latest Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Agricultural Biodiversity. They had the good taste to use one of mine…
evolvingthoughts | December 7, 2008Siris has an interesting piece on the nature of the liberal arts. I loves me some 13th century, I does.
Bora objects to Obama's choices being characterised as "elites" and therefore bad. On the other hand, the term "groupthink" was coined to characterise the elite advisors of the first American Camelot. And an open letter to Obama here on the failures of the Healthcare Information Technology proposals in the US. IT won't solve problems that aren't informational in nature.
PM of Notes from the Floating World discusses the constitutionality and sense of the proroguing of the Canadian Parliament…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
I'm introducing a new category - the Trashcan. This is a term used in systematics to identify a group that comprises "everything else" once you have done the identification of the real groups of some taxonomic grouping.
I will be using the Trashcan to group together all and only those links that have one common property - that they caught my eye. No other property is necessary or sufficient for inclusion. It has no rank, either.*
Under the fold is the Inaugural Trashcan.
Some work on the simplest vision system, of a marine worm, suggests how complex vision got started. Just two cells…