John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
June 8, 2007
A 26 year old woman is convicted of twice driving while on probation for having done so drunk earlier. She is an adult who knew very well what the consequences of her actions would be, for her. Fortunately, she didn't kill or maim anyone. She is sentenced to a 45 day stay in a minimum security…
June 8, 2007
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural period. But YHWH (just the single name now) seems to value meat more than crops, for when Abel…
June 8, 2007
The Leiter Report has a brief obit. Richard Rorty was a significant thinker, although I must say that what I learned from his work Philosophy and the MIrror of Nature, I had to unlearn later on. But that is the way of philosophical discussions.
More from Telos, courtesy of Mixing Memory.
I…
June 7, 2007
Schadenfreude , n. Pleasure found in the misfortunes of Answers in Genesis, who employed a pornography actor to play Adam. Well, at least it makes sense - didn't Adam and Eve fall because they had sex? I'm sure some Baptist told me that once...
June 6, 2007
Clerical Catholic Imam, George Pell, has done it again. Proven why secularism is a necessity, that is.
He has threatened politicians who are Catholics with exclusion from communion, which is not quite excommunication but nevertheless still pretty drastic, if they vote in favour of a secular law…
June 6, 2007
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based…
June 5, 2007
The Fall. What can we say about the Fall that hasn't been said many times before? Well, if all you read is the text, quite a lot.
The Serpent is interesting, for a start. He talks, and so he's a magical creature. He has a human-like personality, for he is "crafty" (although I really prefer the…
June 5, 2007
Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching debates about how you can tell if you're…
June 5, 2007
It is also likely that if God re-issued Genesis 2, he'd do it as a comic strip like this.
Oops I forgot to link it... fixed now.
June 4, 2007
This three-part series is a talk I gave a while back to some ecologists and molecular biologists. It is a brief overview of the aims and relationship between science and philosophy of science, with a special reference to the classification wars in systematics, and the interface of science and the…
June 2, 2007
Well blow me down and call me a dishmop. Reed Elsevier, who I recently criticised for running arms exhibitions while publishing medical and other intellectual journals, and who were boycotted by medical authors, has folded. They are, according to this story, getting out of the arms exhibition…
June 2, 2007
I only recently discovered 9 Chickwood Lane, which is a really odd cartoon strip with ballet dancers, veterinarians and a visiting space alien named Thorax. Before I found this (and Pibgorn, which is in the same universe), Thorax officated at the marriage of two of the characters. Being an alien,…
June 1, 2007
So in chapter 2, we shift stories. Now we have a story that is far older than the first chapter, and is regarded by scholars as the "Yahwist" creation story, and it focuses primarily on humans. The story is far more familiar than the first chapter is (the first few sentences notwithstanding), so…
May 31, 2007
We're in the third day, and Elohim has made dry land, but no sun or stars or moon. Still, he's keen to see something growing, so he tells the land to produce, by spontaneous generation as it was later known, "seed bearing plants and plants bearing fruit with their proper seed inside". Seed here is…
May 29, 2007
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by…
May 29, 2007
Denver Post is reporting that the US Army wants to use a major fossil site for bombing practice. The Picket Wire Canyonlands, in the Commanche National Grasslands, is included in a series of maps the Army has drawn up for increasing its ordinance ranges.
The landscape of southeast Colorado also…
May 29, 2007
Creationists and literalists like to talk about the book of Genesis as if it were a science textbook, which they can interpret to find anything that science has independently discovered unless they don't like it, such as evolution.
A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be…
May 29, 2007
Are you a philosopher? Then stop reading and go think about something [else].
Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Click Here to take survey
May 28, 2007
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library:
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from…
May 27, 2007
From which this wonderful quote:
There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but whenever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or television. There are no satellites based on feminist…
May 27, 2007
This is about Australian politics, for the passersby.
The wife of the present Labor leader and would-be prime minister of Australia is a successful business woman, running a company that places contract workers. After a slip in which an acquired set of contracts were substantially below what one…
May 26, 2007
OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an…
May 25, 2007
The recent "What kind of Atheist" posts have led to a discussion on Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog. Go read it, because I'm being as clear there as I'll ever likely be...
May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I…
May 25, 2007
Do you remember a series of posts I did on microbial species? Well it evolved into a paper that has just been accepted, with some very constructive criticisms by a reviewer, for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. I thank all my commenters for suggestions and help.
This paper had a…
May 25, 2007
... so it looks like I'll be blogging a lot longer than I had expected.
An 81 year old woman with severe Alzheimer's apparently can still make some wicked puns.
May 23, 2007
Talk about skewing the results with a leading question... but anyway:
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More…
May 22, 2007
An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all…
May 22, 2007
This is the top level list of Basic Concepts in Science posts.
Welcome to the Basic Concepts blog. This is not your ordinary blog. Instead of regular posts, it has a few post pages that will track and link to new posts of Basic Concepts in Science, and to pages that will list them by field or…
May 22, 2007
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review. It was a fun night. I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.