John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
January 30, 2008
For a long time, I thought that animals were pretty much as Descartes thought - largely unreasoning organic machines. This morning, my teacher on animal communications died.
Her name was Chesh, and she was 17 and a half. She was a year younger than my eldest, and a year older than my youngest…
January 27, 2008
And why would an Australian care? It's another country, so what business is it of mine?
Well, apart from the fact that whoever is US president affects the rest of the world (and historically the best party for Australian benefit is Republican, as their anti-protectionism tends to help Australian…
January 27, 2008
Given that the antievotees often declare evolution a religion (because after all, their view is purely based on wishful thinking and so they want to claim that everybody's views are), I got to thinking. What would the books of the Evolution Bible be called? Here's what I have so far:
Genes…
January 25, 2008
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print:
The only objections that have occurred to me are 1st that you have loaded yourself…
January 24, 2008
A passing reference to Language Log has introduced me to an excellent blog. For instance, this well-balanced post on hate speech. Why didn't someone notify me of it before?
January 24, 2008
We got delicioused, for the Basic Concepts Post, and wow, scores of links and (I hope) new readers. Some of the referrals [UPDATED]:
Del.icio.us
Geek Dad at Wired
Unbridled learning
Andy's classes
Farm School
A Small Speck
A Garden of Varied Delights
the Daily Irrelevant
Clipmarks
ABQNews…
January 24, 2008
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in…
January 22, 2008
You'll recall that we had a new logo and link for Blogging Peer Reviewed Research. This is now rebadged and has become Research Blogging. It will aggregate and feed the posts on peer reviewed research.
January 21, 2008
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of the life sciences, but the blurb covers topics I…
January 18, 2008
This conjoins a number of themes of late: poetry, postmodernism, and no doubt popery (Latin anyway)...
Two poems by A. D. Godley:
THE MEGALOPSYCHIAD
by: A.D. Godley
GREAT and good is the typical Don, and of evil and wrong the foe,
Good, and great, I'm a Don myself, and therefore I ought to…
January 18, 2008
... sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler – Robert Frost
It was a typical hot and humid summer's day, so I entered a nice dark bluestone pub, hoping the dark would offer some cool and beer. As it was about 11 in the morning, the bar was empty save for one fellow sitting at a table…
January 18, 2008
It is widely understood that philosophers aren't as a rule, intentionally funny. Partly this is because we are often old fogies whose sense of humour was formed in the early Jurassic. Mostly it's because when you deal with the absurd professionally, you tend not to find the funny side of things.…
January 17, 2008
Colin Purrington has a nice set of publicly available images for use in pro-science talks. Go check 'em out.
January 17, 2008
OK, so by now a number of you are either quite puzzled or are up in arms about this notion of mine that genes aren't information. First I'll recap and then make some general philosophical and historical points.
I argue that something can only be said to be information bearing if it is isomorphic…
January 17, 2008
Shelley at Restrospectacle gives a poem she learned in school, an excellent piece by A. E. Housman, So I got to thinking - what poem sticks with me? Is it the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by Eliot, who I think is a wonderful poet? Shakespeare? Kit Marlowe? I mulled and mulled for, oh, five…
January 16, 2008
This isn't something I would often write, but I think that the recent protest against the Pope speaking at the secular university La Sapienza in Rome is misplaced.
Critics say that the Pope, when he was of more humble rank, had in 1990 defended the Inquisition's judgement against Galileo in 1633…
January 16, 2008
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic...
OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out…
January 15, 2008
Anyone who knows the film The Princess Bride knows what happens next. Westley gets hit hard by a rodent about the size of a pitbull. However, it seems that ROUS's (Rodents of Unusual Size) actually may have existed, in Uruguay. Nature reports that the skull of one has been discovered, and the…
January 14, 2008
In an article on the Catholic or otherwise virtues of Harry Potter (didn't we do all this a while back), L'Osservatore Romano has an article claiming that Harry Potter is the wrong kind of hero. Why is that? Not, as you might think, because there are wizards in it - apparently Tolkein is OK. But…
January 13, 2008
TR Gregory at Scientific Blogging asks why advisors would encourage their students to publish. One of the reasons is:
Most of the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked directly have been quite excited by the possibility of seeing their names in print on a high quality piece…
January 12, 2008
Lawyers shouldn't determine who gets to read what. Religions shouldn't determine who gets to think what. But the worst combination is when religions use lawyers to stop criticism of their actions and beliefs.
Scientology, the money making scam purveyed by the mentally deficient (I can't think of…
January 12, 2008
I am blogging lightly while I write madly in Real World™ conditions - some deadlines approach, such as grant deadlines, paper deadlines, book review deadlines and editing deadlines. That said, I will pop up for a bit occasionally, but bear with me.
Deadlines being what they are, I will either…
January 10, 2008
A classic Abbott and Costello skit, done in Elizabethan English. Video below the fold.
January 10, 2008
One of my colleagues just raised a point I hadn't thought of vis á vis Special Relativity.
I had always thought that an observer on a photon would not experience time. My colleague suggests that each frame of reference - the fast moving and the "stationary" - would experience time as "normal"…
January 8, 2008
Some things I spotted today..
It's Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday. Mike Dunford has a post card. I always think that if Wallace had recognised that selection is not all about survival, he could have come up with an account of social selection causing big brains (the so-called Machiavelli…
January 7, 2008
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true?
For a start, I doubt that postmodernism was ever a coherent movement, but there were themes that are shared by many distinct schools of…
January 6, 2008
Let's see... what's happening in the world today?
Kenya is in turmoil and thousands are displaced and in danger of death by disease, starvation or tribal feuds.
Religious moneymaking scam Scientology is accused of threatening those who leave it with sex revelations (I'd believe anything of…
January 5, 2008
Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a man, displays the evolved nature of morality. I tend to agree with this view.
Huck decides, "Very…
January 5, 2008
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward, who died last year.
The Other 95% has a very nice roundup post on…
January 3, 2008
Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” and Endnote are synthetic lethals.
From The Futile Cycle. "A synthetic pair of genes are two gene variants that alone are fine, but when combined into the same organism, cause it to die."
Why? When you have Endnoted a paper and send it to a friend or coauthor,…