John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
May 18, 2008
I'm not a gardener, really I'm not. I once killed a cactus plant by underwatering it. I found it on the window sill one day three years after I last took note of it and it was black. I don't believe in the concept "weed". If a plant survives my tender ministrations, it deserves to be there. I call…
May 14, 2008
In a famous skit, Wayne and Schuster had Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, saying "Julie, don't go! It's the Ides of March!" Now we can see why Julie went. He was old, and worried...
This is a bust of Julius Caesar in his "old age" (old age be damned. He looks younger than I am) that has recently…
May 14, 2008
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda'…
May 13, 2008
No, not the use of Java to archive his music. This presence: A trapdoor spider named after him.
This cute fellow:
Hat tip: David Williams
May 11, 2008
From Wiley:
And while we're on the topic...
I went and watched the sermon in which the famous quotes appeared. And you know what? It surprises me that anyone would think them problematic. America really is engaged in a war of payback, and it is indeed reaping what it sowed (as all empires do…
May 9, 2008
So much has been happening in the world while I was giving a talk on the adaptiveness of religion in Sydney. The Platypus thing was one item I'd have blogged on if the rest of the blogosphere hadn't beaten me to it. All I can say is that no matter how many bloggers write on the mosaic nature of…
May 8, 2008
Sometime over tonight, this blog will pass the half a million visits mark. Say it out loud with me: half...a...million!
Now I know this is because the six regular readers routinely and obsessively visit me every fifteen seconds, and there are drugs being developed to cure that, but...
half...…
May 8, 2008
... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on
Women and superstition (parts one and two)
and
Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four).
Go check them and her out.
May 5, 2008
In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the "transcendental" relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents not visible or present, he claims. The…
May 4, 2008
The federal Australian government of Kevin Rudd has done its first act of pure bastardry. As I noted before, the PM thinks that marriage is reserved for heterosexuals only. He can think that. He can think that marriage ought only be performed between fertile postpubescents who are of the same race…
May 4, 2008
On a newsgroup that shall remain Nameless, one of the regulars, Bill Reich, just heard on the History Channel:
Smilodon is the ancestor of all the modern big cats.
Oy!
So this thread is for egregiously* wrong statements made on erstwhile factual television shows. Please state where you heard…
May 3, 2008
Duck and cover, folks. I'm about to upset somebody.
I have previously been fairly critical of DNA barcoding, the proposal to use a small fragment of the COI gene - a mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase, subunit I - as a surrogate marker for species. That is, in simple terms, the use of COI…
May 3, 2008
John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it's most likely wrong. In the process he explains effective population size. It's a…
May 2, 2008
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by…
April 29, 2008
For years people have been telling us the dinosaurs were killed off in an extinction event 65 million years ago. That always seemed a little too even for me. Did they round off, or was there doubt, or what? Now, thanks to a really good piece of detective work reported by Paleoblog, we know it…
April 29, 2008
The Australian government, still in the period of meeting its election promises, has legitimised the relations between homosexual couples so that they now have the same rights as defacto couples, which is long overdue. But they didn't quite get it right. Why not?
They didn't allow gays to get…
April 28, 2008
... Wilkins turns green with envy.
There's a special sort of immortality for those who work in paleontology which clearly outweighs the total lack of jobs and remuneration: having a species named after you. My friend and accredited geologist and paleontologist has now had a trilobite named after…
April 27, 2008
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment.
First of all, some of my commenters think that…
April 27, 2008
The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here.
One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are more important for allowing people to vent than actually proving anything,…
April 26, 2008
I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such…
April 25, 2008
Like Lynch, here is "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." So what I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights…
April 25, 2008
I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all.
This one's for Eli Gerson...
April 23, 2008
Have a look at the title bar at the top of this page. If it doesn't say "Scienceblogs" or "Evolving Thoughts", then you are reading it via a leech site that does nothing but steal the words I and other carefully craft, like this one. Now in my case while my blog is Creative Commons licensed so…
April 22, 2008
One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had causes quite unrelated to the Jews, mostly caused by the overweening ambitions of the German…
April 22, 2008
Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott"
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Level
Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)
Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)
Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)
Very High…
April 21, 2008
I just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs:
Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs.
It's things like these posts that make me wish I had been a proper biologist,
April 20, 2008
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith…