John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
July 9, 2007
I probably agree with Christopher Hitchens on many substantive points. But I won't be reading his book. Instead, we can thank this reviewer for their critical, ascerbic, and I suspect in the end accurate review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
July 9, 2007
Proving, contrary to the father's comments in the story, that it really is the dark ages, an Australian Catholic Church school has banned (and since rescinded) a child whose surname is "Hell". In German, "hell" means "light" or "bright".
Mr Hell, of Austrian heritage, says the name means light…
July 9, 2007
A woman who stabbed her entire family, killing her father and teenage sister, in Sydney, turns out to be a psychotic. She had been diagnosed and prescribed drugs to control it. But her parent, Scientologists, disapproved and convinced her to stop them.
I feel enormously sorry for this poor woman…
July 7, 2007
Naturalised Brazilian, Dutch biologist Marc van Roosmalen, has been sentenced to 14 years jail in Brazil for running a monkey refuge without a permit from Ibama, the local environmental agency. Not that he didn't apply, mark you, but Ibama didn't respond, and the received local wisdom is that if…
July 6, 2007
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
told to do
one doubt
one voice
one war
one truth
one dream
Peter Gabriel, So, "Milgram's 37 (we do what we're told)"
July 6, 2007
We have to do this, apparently, or the chain will be broken and ill fortune will follow...
First, the Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog…
July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument…
June 26, 2007
Run by Matt Haber at Utah, it's a forum for discussions of work in progress, student matters like employment, tech issues and biology and society topics, to mention only a few. It's in alpha form now, but expect it to grow. The sidebar blurb is this:
Thank you for visiting the Philsophy of…
June 25, 2007
OK, so while the vandals are playing some weird game on another thread, I suppose I better tell the rest of you what's happening.
1. I'm applying for a real job, and another postdoc.
2. I have two conference papers to prepare and deliver, and travel to and from (including what looks like a…
June 25, 2007
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]
June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and…
June 20, 2007
... as I attend to a bunch of administrative, career and professional duties. Please be patient. Your thoughts are important to us, and the next trained monkeyoperator will attend as soon as possible...
June 20, 2007
A very thoughtful and interesting, dare I say almost philosophical, discussion of the Manichaean nature of the Bush Administration is in the present Salon here. A quote:
The power to order people detained and imprisoned based solely on accusation is one of the most extraordinary and tyrannical…
June 20, 2007
A new paper in New Mexico Geology has the following rather tendentious title:
Fassett, J.E. 2007. The documentation of in-place dinosaur fossils in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and Animas Formation in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado mandates a paradigm shift: dinosaurs can no…
June 19, 2007
No! Not orgasmic! [There, that should bump up the hits]
You all know, of course, the inestimable Darren Naish and his wonderful blog Tetrapod Zoology. What? You don't? Go there immediately and come back when you've read it all, and the old site too.
[Fifteen days later]
So, I wanted to…
June 19, 2007
In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was "neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing". He had no idea of the results made possible by molecular genetic studies, naturally, as nobody did at that…
June 19, 2007
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles…
June 15, 2007
After the Flood, the earth is repopulated, and so R and P give us a list of notable ancestors. In 10:4-5 they say "And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in…
June 14, 2007
Cardinal-Imam George Pell, who threatened Catholic politicians with excommunication indirectly (and exclusion from the sacraments directly) if they voted in favour of stem cell research being permitted in a new Bill, is liable to being held in contempt of the NSW Parliament, just as his west…
June 14, 2007
New Scientist is reporting that a case in Austria (not Australia - we share a love of beer, but that's about it) is set to decide if chimps have rights. They already do in Spain, and in New Zealand (which was, I think, the first country to enact rights for chimps).
They do not have rights in…
June 13, 2007
At the end of August 1932 Einstein wrote "My Credo" in Caputh. The original text was written in German. At the beginning of September he read it for a recording by order and to the benefit of the German League of Human Rights.
"My Credo
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and…
June 12, 2007
Marc Ereshfsky's entry on "Species" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been updated, though not to remove the classic "Essentialism Story" that has been called into question by a number of scholars lately. Under the fold, I will quote Marc's comments and critique them. [I can do this…
June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria…
June 10, 2007
The Flood is perhaps the most scientifically interesting story in Genesis, and it has, in fact, been discussed by scientists for over 400 years. Now we are taking the text to tell us of a world, not taking the world to tell us what to think of the text, but let's consider what the Flood story…
June 10, 2007
In case you are getting all confused about which creationist organisation ot oppose and why, Duae Quartunciae has an excellent roundup of the present AiG/CMI dispute.
June 10, 2007
The world is divided, runs the old joke (which I heard when it wasn't so old), into two kinds: those who divided the world into two kinds, and those who don't. [There's actually an interesting feature of the history of logic here that... never mind. Later.]
We all, or very nearly all, like to…
June 9, 2007
Bertrand Russell, a leading philosopher in his prime, was also a wonderful writer. And, it appears, many of my views were formed when I was but still Young in the Discipline of Philosophy by reading Russell. Here is an essay (stolen from here) from 1953, when I still was not, in which he expresses…
June 9, 2007
Everyone else is noting the pulse of migration to the SEED stable that occurred here a year ago. Oddly, my ecto links tell me I first posted here on the 25th of June, not the 9th, but who cares. Below the fold is my first post at Science Blogs. How'm I doing?
Welcome to the new Evolving Thoughts…