John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
July 11, 2008
My paper in TREE is now available as an in-press corrected proof. It is titled "The roles, reasons and restrictions of science blogs", so thanks to you guys (and Bob O'Hara in particular) for the raw material and opportunities.
July 11, 2008
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he…
July 10, 2008
If a black hole is where common sense is lost, is a white hole where we spew out absurdities? To say so seems like blackmail, which only yellow dogs employ, with a niggardly vocabulary. It's a red flag, I tell you! I'm completely browned off. Don't let the MSM whitewash this.
July 10, 2008
Well I have done my talk at the AAP conference, and survived with ego intact (as if there was any doubt). All I need to do now is sleep for eight straight days.
Sorry but I don't have the time free to do a meet up in Melbourne, so back to Mornington Crescent.
July 2, 2008
Hi folks. It's conference time again, and of course we have organised to have the Australasian Association of Philosophy/Australasian Association for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAP/AAHPSSS) conferences in the coldest place on the mainland - my home town Melbourne, at the…
July 1, 2008
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with…
July 1, 2008
This is me commenting on American politics again. Sorry.
I am somewhat amazed at the furore over Wesley Clark's comment that being a prisoner of war doesn't automatically make one qualified as Commander in Chief of the armed services, a position that the President fulfills. Not only is that true…
June 27, 2008
Readers may know I have a passing interest in the works of Terry Pratchett. Oh, okay then, I'm a fanboy. Have been for well over fifteen years, since a coworker shoved Good Omens into my hands and mind. So it was with some trepidation that I read that he had found God.
Actually, though, he hasn'…
June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird…
June 25, 2008
On the one hand we have James Dobson declaring that Barack Obama isn't really Christian, because he distorts the Bible. Funny, I thought the Bible had some things to say about that [Matt 5:22, 7:1, Luke 6:37, Rom 2:1, 14:4, James 4:11, but then I'm not a Christian so I am probably misreading it by…
June 25, 2008
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence. And more recently Teilhard held that…
June 24, 2008
Well, no it isn't philosophically impossible... read on:
It is commonly thought that one cannot prove a negative, but of course I can. If I say "there are no weasels in my right pocket", all I need to do is enumerate the objects in my right pocket and find a dearth of weasels among them to…
June 24, 2008
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year:
For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma.
June 22, 2008
Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine's birth.
"The…
June 21, 2008
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes…
June 21, 2008
Philosopher David Albert and physicist Sean Carroll* will be doing a Bloggingheads.tv spot like the one Paul Myeahs and I did recently. I'll add the direct URL when it comes online.
Update: The spot is here. In particular note the segment on how Albert got suckered by the What the Bleep Do We…
June 18, 2008
In an interesting post, Think Gene poses what they call "the inherent problem" of scientific theories:
The inherent problem of scientific theories is that there exists an infinite equally valid explanations. Why? Because unlike in mathematics, we never have perfect information in science. ...
OK…
June 18, 2008
The Darwinian Gardener is interviewed in the newsjournalonline. He explains how Darwinian gardening also applies to buried sprinkler systems, which is something that never occurred to me, I must admit. But I think he's running perilously close to self-contradiction even having sprinklers.
June 17, 2008
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code:
Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse,…
June 17, 2008
Okay, so while we're bagging on Queensland, here's a couple of articles (Ars Technica, ZDNet) on a proposed and apparently non-negotiable database of Queensland students, including their
things like photos, career aspirations, off-campus activities, contact information, behavior records,…
June 16, 2008
Creationists and Darwinian skeptics often claim that natural selection could not produce the sort of improbability (often, for reasons that nobody is quite sure of, below 1 in 10 to the 500th power) that we see around us.
So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that UK skeptic and magician…
June 16, 2008
... why M. Night Shamaylanananan gets to make more movies. OK, Sixth Sense was cool, but really...
So read this summary script of The Hapeninening and save your ticket money.
Hat tip to Louanne Miller.
June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the…
June 14, 2008
I don't have a very positive experience of the State of Queensland's education system. Two children I brought here from Victoria when I took up my present position were doing well until they got here. Now both left before completing school amidst confusion and boredom to my great dismay. It's not…
June 11, 2008
History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this:
Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points out, the theory of evolution was around long before Charles Darwin. As…
June 11, 2008
I can't say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak's team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of lipids into miscelles that could contain DNA reactions. What is new to me…
June 10, 2008
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist.
Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him.