John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
May 22, 2007
Since Linnaeus' birthday is tomorrow, my time, and I stuffed up the last post, here's another little treat for you:
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1770, from 1761 Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus)
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named…
May 21, 2007
As big as he wants to be? Apparently it varies between 200 and 1400lbs. Me, I'm on the lower end of the scale... but I think we ought to start metricating gorilla weights: a 200kg gorilla sounds so much more appealing, even for a silverback like me...
May 21, 2007
First, having dumped on the Smithsonian in the last post, let me cheer them for putting over 6000 images on Flickr... most of which are public domain. There's a wicked Dunkelosteus skull and nearly 800 of Muybridge's motion photographs (cyanotypes).
Second, let me note the good work of Andrew…
May 21, 2007
The Smithsonian, it is being reported, toned down an exhibit on the Arctic for fear of reprisals in funding levels from the Bush Administration. While there is no evidence that the Administration directly threatened the Institute, the atmosphere of "do science our way" is so palpable that even the…
May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have…
May 20, 2007
Why did Edith Rodriguez die unattended by medical staff in an ER? Was it because she was obese? Or Hispanic? Or because the US health system, and in particular this hospital, is so stretched that triage is by rapid prejudice rather than medical criteria?
As a subsidiary question, how is it that…
May 20, 2007
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders:
The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a…
May 19, 2007
"King Phillip Came Over From German Soil" - anyone remember that? It's a mnemonic, designed to make it easier to recall the Linnean ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Unfortunately, ranks change (Phylum and Family were inserted in the 1870s at an international meeting…
May 19, 2007
Because it's easier than thinking and composing thoughtful essays, I am forced to follow Grrlscientist's example:
The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the…
May 19, 2007
In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind. This distinction was originally made by Charles Sanders Peirce back in (if memory serves) the 1870s (he…
May 16, 2007
Now, I have never studied at Harvard, and all universities are somewhat silly in their planning, but the release reproduced below the fold strikes me as one of the better proposals for undergraduate level tertiary education. It suggests that even science students might need to understand their…
May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was…
May 15, 2007
So, Oprah is sending The Secret back to Australia. It's starting to get TV coverage here. Oy. Look guys, when we export Woo to the US, we really don't want it returned, OK?
The Secret appears to be (backed by "leading philosophers? Yeah, right) basically the idea that if you really really want…
May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of…
May 13, 2007
In a number of cases recently, I have been struck at how ahistorical scientists are about their own discipline or field. For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as…
May 12, 2007
In what is for this furriner a somewhat perplexing column, Kathleen Parker, who is supposedly one of the Washington Post stable of writers, argues that the question asked of Republican nominees for presidency - Do you believe in evolution? - was unfair.
I fail to see why. Sure, nobody expects…
May 10, 2007
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I…
May 2, 2007
For the next few days, my beloved Mac 12" Powerbook is going in for intestinal surgery - it seems to have lost connection with its wireless, DVD/RW and microphone, which indicates Major Problems (although I do recall a desktop that had dust gathered on a particular point and shorted it out once,…
May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking…
April 30, 2007
So, it appears that one's metabolic rate and hunger triggers are set by in utero factors. This means that leptin and insulin have different effects depending on early experiences in life, particularly the brain's desire to feed.
Worse, it seems that once you have the weight, you are unlikely to…
April 30, 2007
Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of…
April 28, 2007
The Eight Day Adventist calendar has rotated into phase with your infidel calendar, so it is time for a sermon. Our subject today is secularism.
I noted an article about the decline in secular standards in Turkey, which of all modern societies is the one most deeply founded as a nation in…
April 28, 2007
This is a wonderful piece about a man in his late 50s learning to read. Medlar Comfits delivers again.
April 27, 2007
Following Scientific American's blog's description of Shelley at Retrospectacle, in the context of the the Wiley situation, as "seems to be attractive and avian-friendly", I now want it to be known henceforth that your favourite albino silverback is "obviously witty, attractive and good with…
April 27, 2007
I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (…
April 27, 2007
Tonight my boss and colleague Paul Griffiths asked me who I would exile in the Greek manner for the good of the polis in which I live. After some thought I suggested George Pell, Cardinal of the Catholic Church and general ignoramus about science. Paul asked why, and I said that he was divisive in…
April 25, 2007
The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which…
April 25, 2007
Some phrases no science or other journalist should ever write about science:
"could rewrite theories about evolution"
"medical breakthrough"
"scientific breakthrough
Any suggestions (with links, please)?
[ht: What You're Doing is Rather Desperate
April 25, 2007
I'll be in London (the one in the UK, not any American knockoff) on Sunday 22nd and Monday 23rd July. I'm meeting someone at University College London, but I'll be free in the evenings if anyone wants to meet up (and offer a couch I can sleep on, if possible).
There's a conference in Exeter…