Species and systematics
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2008
I get so tired of comments like this:
The Grim Reaper is taking a rest, and inherited differences in the ability to withstand cold, starvation or disease no longer power Darwin's machine. Those who die from such killers do so when they are so old that natural selection has lost interest.
Right. Tell the folk in Darfur that. Tell those in Bangladesh after a cyclone. Tell folks in New Orleans, or Indonesia, or native populations in Nunavit, Australia, New Zealand, the Amazon, South Africa and Tierra del Fuego. Tell those whose access to health care is patchy at best. Even in the UK that is…
evolvingthoughts | October 2, 2008
Today I finalised my manuscript, printed it out, annotated it, made sure all the figures were there, that they had the least ugly photos of me, burned the CD, and ticked all the boxes. Tomorrow, Species: A history of the idea physically travels to University of California Press, where they will do publishing things to it until it instantiates as a book. This is great, given that I am now in the job market, with an actual interview in two weeks, and possibly many more to come. What gets up my nose is that the Australian department of education treats a 300pp book as the equivalent of five…
evolvingthoughts | September 28, 2008
Readers know I think religion is post-agricultural, which raises some difficulties if we find evidence of organised religious behaviours before the onset of agriculture. The case in point here being Göbeli Tepe. Now a recent model of the process of cereal domestication has set back the beginnings of agriculture some ten thousand years earlier than the c10kya version, the "rapid onset" model, in favour of a "protracted transition" model.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog has a very nice roundup of the issues, and there is a summary at Science Daily. The crucial question resolved by this…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2008
There's a guest post at the Panda's Thumb by myrmidon Alex Wild on the new "primitive" ant just reported. Go read it.
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2008
A paper I recently saw in EMBO Reports made the following assertion:
Ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork for the scientific tradition of critical inquiry, but they nevertheless missed out on one aspect important to modern science. Many philosophers obtained their results through a tradition of contemplation and thought rather than experimental procedure, which, not surprisingly, led to errors. Aristotle’s belief that the brain is a cooling organ for the blood was definitely not based on anything that scientists today would consider scientific evidence. He also thought that in…
evolvingthoughts | September 15, 2008
Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology, has a very nice takedown of Thomas Nagel's qualified support for teaching creationism on his blog. Hat tip Leiter.
Richard Losick has an excellent piece on the problems of using cultured lab strains when studying microbes, at Small Things Considered.
A new blog on politics and science, A Vote for Science, has started up at the mothership. Hopefully, when the present unpleasantness in the US has concluded for four years, we can get onto some wider and more interesting matters.
Wesley Elsberry has a plaintive cri de coeur about the joys of sleep…
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
At Kevin Zelnio's The Other 95%. Much crunchy goodness about taxonomy.
evolvingthoughts | September 4, 2008
Once again I have manflu, the most despicable disease known to man (and to women, who also suffer indirectly from it).
So blogging is patchy. Also, I have to do some teaching stuff, which involves thinking about what the essays say.
I am writing, slowly, a piece about the recent paper on ratite origins first author of which is my friend and occasional sparring partner John Harshman. As this means I have to learn stuff first, it's taking a while, but I want it to be a good one. Be patient, and in the meantime read this.
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2008The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately.
evolvingthoughts | August 30, 2008
One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which institution was founded in part by my illustrious namesake, Bp John Wilkins.
Although the actual publications are online only in JStor, to which a subscription is required, the Philosophical Transactions were republished by the Royal Society in the early 1800s, and they are online…
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
I don't read a lot of logic, having been sufficiently innoculated as an undergraduate to avoid further infection, but occasionally something pops up that is interesting way beyond the boundaries of that intersection of philosophy and mathematics. Siris points us at a paper in a new journal, Review of Symbolic Logic, which appears to be Open Access, by the redoubtable Graham Priest, on whether existential quantifiers imply existence. Why this matters is a deep issue in metaphysics: on the one hand we have the noneists, following Meinong, who hold that a quantifier in a formal sentence (and…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2008
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords:
Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late.
Of course, this is not the first time this has been said, and recommendations made before have not been acted upon:
"Systematic biology appears to be suffering the consequences of a situation where diffuse responsibility (among government departments) results in no responsibility," the report says.
Concerns about the state of…
evolvingthoughts | August 16, 2008Want this, from Systematic Biology
on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough...
Hat tip Henry Simon
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2008The heir apparent to some minor European royal family has again demonstrated his lack of knowledge and trust in scientific matters. The Prince, who has previously said that he talks to plants and consults gurus, apparently failed to talk to any actual, you know, scientists who might clear up a few confusions he has. Of course the environmental extremists have leapt all over it.
He has now said this in the august paper of record in Britain, the Daily Telegraph:
The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has…
evolvingthoughts | August 9, 2008
This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in 1951 and made the archival articles free to all. Since the discovery of organisms is a once-off affair, subsequent researchers need access to the item that announced it in peer-reviewed print to be able to be sure they are working on the right species. So more than most sciences, taxonomy is a historical science, and since bugs (the…
evolvingthoughts | August 8, 2008
Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and nonspecialists. We can fix up their errors later when they get the basics.
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright's initial metaphor and ideas and how they changed (it hadn't occurred to me, but should have, that the landscape metaphor fails to deal with new mutations, which change the landscape itself (although I did say something like this in my 1998 paper). Anya Plutinski discusses the iconography of Wright's…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to semantic strip mining, and discuss the species concept that Jason Bond ("Bond. Jason Bond") and his collaborator Amy Stockman used to identify and discriminate these species. But first, here's the interview (or "sketch", as the Colbert writers call it) between Colbert and Bond (which I can't access…