John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
December 17, 2007
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while.
So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another problem, and it turns on what a species is. Texas named the Guadalupe bass its state fish in 1989.…
December 13, 2007
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I do try to communicate clearly when it is needed. My kids indicate that maybe I am not so…
December 10, 2007
From Henry Gee's blog:
I had thought that people who write marketing and advertising blurb for publishers occupied a rung on the scala naturae slightly above creationists. This may be true, but whatever the height of their perch, it is still below that of estate agents, as judged from this flyer…
December 10, 2007
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it.
Along comes someone,…
December 9, 2007
Just to head off the obvious:
Do people kill because their religion or ideology tells them that nonbelievers are subhuman? Yes. Do people go to war because their religion or ideology tells them it is their patriotic duty? Yes. Do people walk into a church or missionary school and kill people…
December 9, 2007
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR.
Many thanks to Noelie Alito for buying me the copy. Now that it's scanned, I'll have it rebound, one day.
December 8, 2007
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to find out what people actually think before launching into the sorts of…
December 8, 2007
The sole reason that I have any Microsoft products on my machine at all, is compatibility with Endnote. Once upon a time, Endnote was equally capable with a number of word and document processors, but now it only works with Word or by scanning RTF, which is a Bad Format and routinely messes up…
December 8, 2007
John, hear me.
What? Who said that?
It is I, God.
Oh come on. PZ, is that you? I'm not buying it.
It is I, God. Look, I'll prove it. [Clouds in the sky form the letters "Yep, It's Me" for a minute and then evaporate.]
Ummm, OK, for the sake of argument, let's say it is You, and I'm not…
December 7, 2007
I'm angry. The business with the CIA and the torture tape leaves me angry. Why oh why have the Democrats not immediately impeached Bush, Cheney, the Attorneys General involved, the Secretaries of State and Foreign Affairs, the heads of the CIA and the military, and anyone else involved in torture…
December 7, 2007
Anyone who has access to COSMOS magazine, published in Australia, will be able to find an article of mine on what good philosophers of science are for science. If you have a copy, scan it and send it to me, will you? I haven't seen it yet.
Also, I have submitted a piece to Auckland Museum…
December 5, 2007
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was subsequently reviewed by Patricia Churchland, in Nature.…
December 4, 2007
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere.
So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it is either called "vegetative reproduction" (think:…
December 3, 2007
Way back in the 1910s, when human evolution was poorly known, some trickster, probably Charles Dawson, its discoverer, set up a hoax: Piltdown man. This was enthusiastically accepted by many British experts because it made Britain, and in particular, England, a leading locale in human evolution.…
December 2, 2007
The Institute for Intellectual Disco Dancing has spun its recent debacle at Minnesota thus:
The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque.
Note that in passing it is not a fallacy to be ad hominem if the point is relevant to the argument…
December 1, 2007
[Australian politics: look away]
Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the single most important aspect of education in Australia is…
November 30, 2007
This guy is a great drinker, ranconteur, and wit, all with an Irish accent. It turns out he's also a great teacher.
November 29, 2007
The term "radical" is a very loose term. It basically means "something that differs wildly from the consensus" in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won't take offense if I say that they have a radical interpretation of the nature of classification. In a couple of recent…
November 26, 2007
This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren't clever enough at thinking up counterexamples...
The sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", was presented by Chomsky, as a great example of a series of…
November 26, 2007
This is kicking a man when he's down, but the iPod popped this up to me last night, and I thought how appropriate it is to the election outcome:
I'm looking through you
Where did you go
I thought I knew you
What did I know
You don't look different
But you have changed
I'm looking through you
You…
November 26, 2007
Brian Leiter is reporting, and the University of Cambridge confirms it, that Peter Lipton, a well known philosopher of science, has died. Leiter will put up an obit later. For now, here is a very good paper of Lipton's explaining philosophy of science to scientists.
November 25, 2007
This paragraph:
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God…
November 25, 2007
From Henry Gee's blog:
Dear Professor Trellis
Thank you for your manuscript entitled “On the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of the first two…
November 24, 2007
I have a rule (Wilkins' Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the…
November 24, 2007
Unlike PZ Moorsch, I don't get much abusive email, because I'm so much more mild mannered than he is. But I got this gem from an Australian using his cousin's South African email account:
your feedback on the one subject of macroevolution being observed is only
grounded on consumptions and no…
November 24, 2007
As I watched the total collapse of the conservatives in the federal election, and the landslide of Labor wins, I mused...
Nobody in the media is saying it, but I think there are a number of reasons why the Howard government collapsed. They are: Tony Abbott, Phillip Ruddock, Peter Costello,…
November 24, 2007
... a book was published that changed the way we thought of biology.
November 21, 2007
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts.
Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases…
November 21, 2007
This is the fourth of a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Wilson and Wilson (W&W) then continue on to employ some recent work on individuals as groups, and the "major transitions" literature.
Ed Wilson is well known for his idea of "superorganisms", in which eusocial hives or colonies of…
November 20, 2007
The African apes don't get much good news these days. But the Congo has just announced they are setting up a preserve to protect the bonobo. The size of the Sankuru Nature Reserve is 11,803 square miles (in real money, 30 569.629 square kilometers), which makes it nearly half the size of Tasmania…