John Wilkins
evolvingthoughts
Posts by this author
February 24, 2007
In another interesting piece about demarcation of science from nonscience (see my previous items about this here, here and here), Janet Stemwedel has a nice series of hand-drawn flowcharts that make the difference between creationist arguments and real science clear.
Janet, I would have done…
February 24, 2007
As I recently mentioned Grene's book with Depew, it's worth noting an interview with her by The Believer (Benjamin Cohen) here. It explains some of the themes in the book. Thanks to Benjamin for the heads up.
February 24, 2007
I spent a lot of time not doing my thesis. I used to call all the internet articles, posts and latterly blogs Avoiding The Thingy (the thesis that dare not speak its name). Simultaneously, as a manager, I adhered to what I called Lazy Manager Theory - the guiding principle of which was that any…
February 24, 2007
Larry Moran discusses whether dogs are really poisoned by chocolate. His conclusion is that "It's probably better to be safe than sorry. If you have a dog then it's a good idea to remove all chocolate from the house. If you have a dog and a wife/girlfriend then you have to make a hard choice."…
February 23, 2007
When one is starting in a field for the first time, the choice of textbook is crucial, as it will often set the tone for the rest of one's study. Last year and the year before I helped teach Philosophy of the Life Sciences here, and we used, respectively, one textbook and no textbook. Right now I'…
February 22, 2007
All this talk about how Republicans or Democrats support the troops in Iraq (rarely Afghanistan, notice?) got me thinking. Why should we support troops?
Don't get me wrong. You probably have me pegged as a radical leftwing communist pacifist anarchist. Not at all (I'm not even libertarian; they…
February 20, 2007
James Randerson, at the GrauniadGuardian blog site makes an interesting point about the new bionic eye. It's only a 4x4 grid of monochrome pixels, but it's revolutionised the life of a blind man. Of what use is 1/2^n of an eye? Well it's enough to navigate. Randerson points out that this totally…
February 20, 2007
Tom Hayden, who is some guy from some state in some country, writes a rather courageous thing, addressed to Christian clergy. Read on for the money quote:
When I chaired the Natural Resources Committee in the California senate, I noticed that the clergy never testified against the destruction of…
February 20, 2007
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an…
February 19, 2007
A recent report noted that studies that rely on evolutionary processesto explain, say, antibiotic resistance among pathogens, tend not to use the "E-word" in medical journals, instead using terms like "emerging", "spreading" and "increasing". The reason appears to be the bad connotations "…
February 18, 2007
A paper out in Nature 15 February, uses a novel technique devised by one of the authors, Dan Faith, called Phylogenetic Diversity (PD), to assess the biodiversity and conservation value of endangered species and regions in terms of how unique they are in evolutionary history.
The summary article…
February 18, 2007
I get notifications of the incredibly bigoted and stupid comments at Town Hall.Com via Google. I usually ignore them - that's PZ's domain. But this has to be commented on.
Some idiotic ignoramus named Mary Grabar attacks Sam Harris, who most likely knows three orders of magnitude more than she…
February 18, 2007
This announcement of an essay competition at Inter-Research, a German-located research group, may be of interest to students:
Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics
Ethics of Climate Change
CALL FOR ESSAYSMajor consequences of climate change are now predictable to a reasonable degree of…
February 17, 2007
I'm late to this party, no doubt, but courtesy of Nobel Intent, here is a number of interviews with scientists and philosophers discussing the Evil Undead Zombies of creationism and intelligent design.
February 16, 2007
Apparently this was a real exam answer. I sympathise.
Thanks to Rich Baldwin...
Late note: Some more are available here.
February 16, 2007
As everyone is tired now of hearing, Intelligent Design booster Michael Behe has argued there is an "irreducible complexity" in some biological processes that means they cannot have evolved. The basic logic is pretty simple - if a system needs all its parts, then the lack of any part means it…
February 16, 2007
At last, my grant application is in. I reckon there's about the same amount of work in a grant application as in a good size novel paper, which is to say a paper on a topic you haven't published before. To add to that, I finalised a paper for final submission - which I hope meets the exacting…
February 15, 2007
Theory: A word that gets used a lot in discussing science, or attacking it.
Theories are only verified hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best, but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed. [Claude Bernard, 1865,…
February 14, 2007
Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years?
"The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the…
February 11, 2007
Another stupid piece by DIsco, in which David Klinghofer tries to blame Darwin for eugenics, totally overlooking the fact that the mediate source is animal husbandry, which predates Darwin by several thousand years, and that the immediate source is genetics, not evolution. I think that we should…
February 11, 2007
One of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn’t know how to define a species. [Futuyma 1983: 152]
Comments like Futuyma's have been published in scores of textbooks and repeated ad nauseum.…
February 11, 2007
I went to see this film because it looked like a light comedy, starring Will Ferrell. Boy, was I wrong.
It's a highly intelligent piece which deals with representations, metarepresentations, moral choices, the nature of fiction and rhetoric, individual freedom, personal responsibility, and most…
February 10, 2007
Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Science and Ethics has asked scientists what they (as opposed to philosophers) mean by "theory". I intend to write how philosophers have use the term sometime soon, when this grant application is done and a paper revised, but if you are a scientist, go visit her…
February 8, 2007
From David Hume's Natural History of Religion Sect III (found via Dennett's Breaking the Spell):
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are…
February 7, 2007
Sahotra Sarkar has published a book on Intelligent Design, that is rather different from other offerings. Sarkar uses the topic as a way to riff off matters of epistemology, the sociology of science and the use of science in society. I haven't seen the published version, but I read an earlier ms…
February 7, 2007
Leiter reports that ISU is downsizing, for no apparent reason, its philosophy and physics departments. This is not unique to ISU. I have seen it occur in a couple of Australian universities too. The odd thing is that this is not because student enrolments are low; teaching loads are large in some…
February 6, 2007
It pays to remember that people go up in those contraptions all made by the lowest bidder. Here's a statement from Lisa Nowack's family:
"We are naturally saddened and extremely concerned about the serious allegations being made against Lisa. We love her very much, and right now, our primary…
February 5, 2007
I'm not adhering to the Just Science week, because
1. I'm not a scientist
2. This blog is for whatever happens to pass through my frontal lobes at the moment, and
3. It's altogether too much hard work. So there.
Anyone want to discuss intelligent design of creationist antivaccination?
February 5, 2007
I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle...
A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable…
February 4, 2007
The Biohumanities Project of Paul Griffiths, of which I am a minor part, has a page up of talks and discussions at conferences and workshops, recorded for podcasting. We have just revamped and shifted our podcast page to here. If you want to stay abreast of these, subscribe to our RSS feed.
Some…