John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
April 25, 2007
I am not sure what exactly this is about, but it is being launched tomorrow. It appears to be a website that corrals news and information about the ecology and biodiversity, global warming and so on. I guess we'll have to wait until the launch to find out. The blurb that was sent to me is below…
April 25, 2007
If an author publishes work and I copy it for my own purpose, then I have stolen something from the author (and publisher, if the copyright is held by both). But if I quote something of the author's for the purposes of discussion, then I have committed no theft, in pretty well every jurisdiction…
April 24, 2007
According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.
Thomas Henry Huxley
John Pieret, of Thoughts in a Haystack, has a nice further discussion of this…
April 24, 2007
Chris Mooney, who is too damned young and handsome, was in Sydney yesterday (well for a few days before that) so I decided the decent thing was to fly down from Brisbane to meet him, given that he travelled across some small bit of water to get here. The astonishing thing was how much he found out…
April 23, 2007
My friend Neil Levy has published yet another book (how does he do it?) entitled Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century.
Here's the publisher's blurb:
Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for…
April 22, 2007
Well, I'm off to Sin City, sorry, Sydney, tomorrow to visit Chris Mooney, who's giving a talk in that metropolis, and Tim Lambert, another Sb Scibling. But before I go, I just had to note this study on the effects of the gun buyback and stricter controls in Australia following the Port Arthur…
April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators,…
April 20, 2007
Lewis Carroll, AKA Charles Dodgson, was a philosopher's dream author. Indeed, it is almost formally impossible to complete a philosophy degree and not quote him on some subject or another. Now Strange Maps publishes the Bellman's Map from Hunting of the Snark, which accompanies the following…
April 20, 2007
Yesterday was Willi Hennig's birthday. Hennig invented cladistics (though he called it "phylogenetic systematics"), which is the foundation for all modern taxonomy. Frölich Geburtstag, Willi!
Via Paleoblog.
Oops, my mistake. Philosophers are not always good at math.
April 20, 2007
Yesterday, a commenter asked why I said this and what I meant by it:
All species at a given time have exactly the same evolutionary duration, and on average, probably the same number of ancestral species, as their nearest relatives.
Consider this diagram:
This is an evolutionary tree, or…
April 20, 2007
I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well…
April 20, 2007
Current media is reporting a relative of Cho, the VT murderer, as saying he was "autistic". I'd like to see a formal diagnosis, because the so-called "autism spectrum disorder" (ASD) scale is, in my view, a ragbag of etiologies based on an overall similarity of symptoms. But suppose he had…
April 18, 2007
By the end of today, we will have over 200,000 visits to Evolving Thoughts. That's in not quite two years, ever since PZ Myers outed me back in June 2004. On average around 5000 visits and 8000 page reads a week. Assuming nobody visits more than once a day, that's a thousand readers. PZ might…
April 18, 2007
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution.
Ergo...
The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of…
April 17, 2007
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, a survivor of the Holocaust and renowned scientist, died in the massacre trying to block the gunman's entrance into the room, and in so doing probably saved some of the students who were able to leave via the window of the second story room.
April 16, 2007
It is always a Very Bad Idea, as Pooh Bear might have said, for a foreigner to comment on another nation's internal policy after a tragedy. As I am inveterately attracted to Very Bad Ideas, being a Philosopher of Little Brain, this does not deter me. If one cannot comment on gun policy after a…
April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-…
April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in…
April 14, 2007
Hank Fox at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has posted an Atheist Declaration of Rights. With two minor changes I reprint it below the fold.
Nonreligious Declaration of Rights
1. Freedom from Fear and Hate:
In every part of a secular society, the nonreligious have the right to live free of fear for…
April 12, 2007
Sometimes life hands you nice ironies and wry humour. The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of…
April 12, 2007
Suppose for a minute that everything the creationists say about evolution were true. Now suppose you had lost your mind... but I repeat myself. What would the history of that ersatz and terrible "science" be?
Wonder no more. Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a…
April 11, 2007
One of the best of all American writers - I'd put him up with Twain - has died, leaving us all the poorer.
HT: Dynamics of Cats
April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the…
April 11, 2007
Francis Darwin, that is, son of Charles and editor of his correspondence.
In Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume I, Francis reprinted a number of letters of Darwin's on the issue of religious belief, and in a footnote, he noted the following:
Dr. Aveling has published an account of a…
April 10, 2007
SYDNEY broadcaster Alan Jones' comments before the 2005 Cronulla riots were likely to have encouraged brutality and vilified people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, Australia's broadcasting regulator says.
Source
April 10, 2007
This is Australian parochial politics - pass by if you have no interest.
The PM, the minister for Immigration, and the minister for Foreign Affairs, the leader of the Opposition and various other pollies have called for the mufti of Australia, Sheik al Hilali, to leave Australia.
Look, the man…
April 9, 2007
This is a guest post by Carl Bajema, a retired evolutionary biologist, first posted on the Richard Dawkins website on Darwin's birthday.
Happy 198th Birthday Charlie Darwin from Carl Bajema...
Organisms with their intricate adaptations for surviving and reproducing could not have evolved by…
April 9, 2007
John Hawks links to Greg Laden's blog in which he points out that Nisbet and Mooney misused the notion of framing. It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they…