tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69411512011-12-15T12:37:25.128+10:00Evolution, culture, philosophy and chocolate! John Wilkins' continuing struggle to come to terms with impermanence... "Humanus sum, nihil humanum a me alienum puto" - TerenceJohn S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4011100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-10425699474811982662007-02-07T04:06:00.000+10:002007-02-07T04:06:15.373+10:00

Basic Concepts in Science - A list

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149565535080488062006-09-13T14:33:00.000+10:002006-09-13T14:39:35.436+10:00

Dear folks. I have defected to Seed Blogs on a promise of fame, fortune and women. So this will be my last ever post at this site. The new link is here, and the news feed in Atom form is here. It's been fun, so drop by for a chat.I will repost some oldies from here to begin with, and continue our discussions.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149812762800468412006-06-09T10:23:00.000+10:002006-06-09T10:27:03.340+10:00

Dear readers, for reasons that will shortly become clear, there is a blogging delay here. Hmm... "blogging" in that context sounds like a swear word... "another blogging delay! Dammit!"Stay tuned and in a day or so All Will Be Revealed.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149492872414749622006-06-05T17:23:00.000+10:002006-06-05T17:34:32.573+10:00

I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the extreme laisse faire capitalist conservatism. For it appears to me that these systems would work just fine, if only they didn't involve any human beings. And that raises an interesting question in my

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149297610288832912006-06-03T11:18:00.000+10:002006-06-03T11:20:10.483+10:00

A funny story on a site called Community Press about one woman's struggle against dandelions in the yard makes a nice followup to my piece on lawns a while back. In case the link changes, I will give the story here (and here is the direct link):Tales from the imperfect rural wife: Chuck had it all wrong in the survival gameby Paula Cassidy 06.02.06I had just chopped off their heads, but by the

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149224317550933042006-06-02T14:33:00.000+10:002006-06-02T18:10:24.160+10:00

In an execrable display of taste, Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has linked to this blog, and discussed the Michael Ghiselin quote I put up a few days ago. He rightly notes the standard story is a bit harsh, and suggests some extra reading (to which I would add the series of papers from a special issue of Journal of the History of Biology last year, in particular Jon Hodge's article).I would like to add

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149222642088411402006-06-02T14:27:00.000+10:002006-06-02T14:30:42.106+10:00

Talking Points Memo links to a number of debunkings of the myth that a frog will stay in a gradually heated pot and so boil. Yet Another Thing Everybody Knows that is false. J.B.S. Haldane called this the Aunt Jobisca Theorem: it is a thing that everyone knows.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149207266560056002006-06-02T10:09:00.000+10:002006-06-02T10:14:26.560+10:00

Researchers have found a 300 mile (that's around 480km in real money) crater beneath the Antarctic ice sheet that dates to around the time of the Permian extinction. Bolides seem to be at or near most of the major extinctions. I wonder, idly*, if the impacts themselves aren't the killer blow but rather the subsequent tectonic vulcanism.* Idly = "wild eyed guess with no evidence or real

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149206493893385802006-06-02T10:00:00.000+10:002006-06-02T10:01:33.913+10:00

A while back I was at a dinner sitting next to Pete Richerson, a lovely guy who is an ornithologist who has written with Robert Boyd (who I haven't met, but I'm sure he's just as nice) some of the most sophisticated and sensible material on cultural evolution - it figures anyone who has to deal with the hyperintelligent Corvidae and other passerine birds would be interested in that. But the talk

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149166158129443722006-06-01T22:47:00.000+10:002006-06-01T22:51:04.096+10:00

Here's one I was going to leave until I could read the actual paper, because I am both suspicious and skeptical on the one hand and sympathetic to the underlying rationale on the other. And on the gripping hand...Writing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say higher temperatures near the equator speed up the metabolisms of the inhabitants, fueling genetic

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149136945032830012006-06-01T14:40:00.000+10:002006-06-01T14:42:25.046+10:00

is oft interred with their bones. The evil lives on after them in their posts and papers...The Explanatory Filter is being revived for SETI. See the post by Pim van Meurs at Panda's Thumb linked above.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149136058259924722006-06-01T14:26:00.000+10:002006-06-01T14:30:31.123+10:00

Well after reading many papers by various bacteriologists, mycologists, and other non-vertebrates specialists, I have come to the conclusion that there is no single set of conceptions or criteria (that much abused word!) for something being a species in non-sexual organisms, which I am here calling "microbial". Of course, as I noted, microbes can be "sexual" in various ways. They can share genes

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149133748565092872006-06-01T13:47:00.000+10:002006-06-01T22:43:32.506+10:00

The notion that "the" Synthesis was somehow complete at one time or another in its history implies that the participants were aiming at some culminating event, like the Resurrection of Christ.The canonical texts are being treated as if they were The Gospel according to Saint Doby, The Gospel according to Saint Ernst, The Gospel according to Saint G. G., The Gospel according to Saint Julian, The

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149130036545621522006-06-01T12:35:00.000+10:002006-06-01T12:47:16.873+10:00

In a hole in the ground there was found a hobbit...The Independent is reporting objections to the recent claims by the Microcephaly Proponents that the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) had brains that were too small to make the stone tools found with them.James Phillips, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that it was wrong to suggest that the stone tools could

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149123223608333152006-06-01T10:52:00.000+10:002006-06-01T10:55:31.926+10:00

Israeli researchers have described eight new species of crustaceans and invertebrates in a recently discovered limestone cave isolated from the external world. They live in and around an underground lake fed by deep water sources rather than rainfall from above.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149122540872011552006-06-01T10:40:00.000+10:002006-06-01T10:42:21.103+10:00

The Guardian reports that parents of students at Sir Peter Vardy's Trinity school, the school that gained some notoriety for being partially government funded but also teaching creationism, are complaining that it is expelling students for any kind of religious or cultural nonconformity, thereby selecting both academically and religiously. The school denies this.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1149050974834025372006-05-31T14:47:00.000+10:002006-05-31T14:54:55.496+10:00

Francis Bacon wrote of thosethat have pretended to find the truth of all natural philosophy in the Scriptures; scandalizing and traducing all other philosophy as heathenish and profane. But there is no such enmity between God's word and His works; neither do they give honour to the Scriptures, as they suppose, but much imbase them. For to seek heaven and earth in the word of God, (whereof it is

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148874640476297572006-05-29T13:39:00.000+10:002006-05-29T13:50:40.503+10:00

Here is a nice image that shows that even among eukaryotes, reciprocal monophyly is not always the case for species. It's from a paper in PLOS Computational Biology critical of the DNA Barcoding proposal.Each version shows two species, X and Y. In A, X and Y are reciprocally monophyletic, which means that the coalescent (or last common shared genomic node in the tree, shown by the open stars) is

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148873913992779462006-05-29T13:32:00.000+10:002006-05-29T13:38:34.013+10:00

Well, everybody's doing it (doing it, doing it) so I have to. Yes, if everybody else jumped off a cliff I would too, mum. This is what the HTML tags look like for this site when run through the websitesasgraphs Java Applet. It is also what the mental contents of my my brain look like when viewed through any medium at all.I can't believe Pharyngula's was so tidy. Maybe his HTML is cleaner than

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148863935465307472006-05-29T10:50:00.000+10:002006-05-31T14:53:47.000+10:00

While I'm working through the conceptual tangle I've gotten myself in over microbial species. allow me to mention this item from Mike Dunford's The Questionable Authority: apparently the US Army National Cemetery Administration will not permit Wiccans to use a symbol for the headstones of dead veterans.Guys, the reason why there's a separation of church and state in the first place is because of

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148726890595174242006-05-27T20:45:00.000+10:002006-05-27T20:48:10.796+10:00

Here is a small piece in the Korea Herald, by Arne Jernelov on how evolution explains cultural excellence. It's all about sexual selection, you see - if you do something that is very hard and very costly, you are attracting mates, and this explains sports, painting, literature and science. It is only coincidental that the author is a scientist (an environmental biochemist). I bet he also plays

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148646818826937012006-05-26T22:30:00.000+10:002006-05-28T01:14:06.026+10:00

When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems. The Recombination Model is one such attempt. Sure, some microbial species exchange genes. Others do it more frequently and more completely. There appears to be a continuum of gene exchange all the way

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148620704031379742006-05-26T15:15:00.000+10:002006-05-26T15:27:35.170+10:00

The second main approach to a natural conception of microbial species (by which I mean, as opposed to operational, practical or conventional ones, collectively called "artificial" conceptions) is what I will call the Quasispecies Model. According to the concept developed by Manfred Eigen for viral species, a quasispecies ("as-if-species") is a cluster of genomes in a genome space of the

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148522097514563072006-05-25T11:07:00.000+10:002006-05-25T14:23:42.280+10:00

The cluster of genomes of asexual organisms forms what is called a "phylotype" (Denniston 1974, a term coined by C. W. Cotterman in unpublished notes dated 1960; I like to track these things down). Phylotype is a taxon-neutral term, though, that is determined entirely by the arbitrary level of genetic identity chosen. For example, "species" in asexuals might be specified as being 98%+ similarity

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148455603696896292006-05-24T17:19:00.000+10:002006-05-24T17:31:58.843+10:00

OK, this is one of a series of posts in which I will play with ideas that might become a paper.The problem is this: usually we define a species as a group of related organisms that share genes (or a gene pool, which amounts to the same thing). Sometimes we include also ecological considerations (either in the form of natural selection, or in terms of sharing a niche).But many microbial species

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148264801450294162006-05-22T12:24:00.000+10:002006-05-22T12:26:41.993+10:00

Darren Naish [via Pharyngula] has a lovely article about the morphology and taxonomic and phylogenetic relationships of Lagomorpha, rabbits and hares. In the course of the piece, Naish quotes one Albert Wood, from 1957, whose paper with the title of this post starts outThe title of this paper is slightly modified from that of an article I encountered some years ago, which appeared to be

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148175800028292752006-05-21T11:40:00.000+10:002006-05-21T11:43:20.176+10:00

The Times is reporting that 20 young boys were bought from an Islamist leader, Gud Khan, in Pakistan, who runs a "pure Islamic environment" at a centre initially funded by al-Qaeda, by Osama bin Laden directly. The sale was made to a Christian missionary who was freeing them and returning them to their parents, from whom they had been kidnapped. Khan apparently knows that the children will be

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148010305533188632006-05-19T13:42:00.000+10:002006-05-19T13:45:05.543+10:00

Famously, the Beatles lost a lot of customers when John Lennon said that they (the group) were "bigger than Jesus" (meaning they had more fans than Jesus did at that particular moment). British litotes and irony failed to register with Americans, and so there were the famous LP burnings (and damn, aren't the people who kept their original LPs in good order happier now).Ian McKellen nearly got

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1148008641992365452006-05-19T13:14:00.000+10:002006-05-25T14:26:40.350+10:00

I apologise for the lack of posts. My hindbrain (Powerbook G4 12") was out being serviced, and I (i) was stuck on a PC (*shudder* How do people work on those things?), and (ii) I got busy with other stuff, which may find its way here anyway.So while I was incommunicado (is anyone ever communicado?) the "news" that humans and chimps were hybridising for several millions of years appeared in the

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147656230860541932006-05-15T11:21:00.000+10:002006-05-15T11:23:53.976+10:00

Via Uncertain Principles via Jim Henley, at last a guide to terms and types of Christianity for those whose idea of an education is reading the Sports Page. In particular, I find the description of fundamentalism enlightening:FundamentalismThe belief that basic elements of play - like passing, ball handling, and defense - are the essential building blocks of a winning basketball team is generally

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147387683631053742006-05-15T06:36:00.000+10:002006-05-15T06:39:03.090+10:00

Folks, I've been invited to join the Seed Magazine Science Blog site that Pharyngula, Aetiology, Evolgen, Stranger Fruit and others have joined. If it's good enough for PZ Variablename, it has to be good enough for me. But I wonder how this might affect the fifteen readers who aren't part of my family. So please, let me know what you think. Should I? Or shouldn't I?Later: Well the ayes have it.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147522297651333822006-05-13T22:08:00.000+10:002006-05-13T22:11:37.673+10:00

One of the problems in having a philosophy related blog is that ideas are hard things to generate on demand, so often you need someone to raise the problems for you to think about. Being naturally (and preternaturally!) lazy, I don't go out looking for problems (of a philosophical nature; the ordinary kind seem to find me like flies find rotting garbage). Hence, this blog is sporadic.Well, I just

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147491719396117572006-05-13T13:18:00.000+10:002006-05-13T13:41:59.870+10:00

Tom Wolfe, whose works often show a considerable pretentiousness in my opinion, has a piece in the New York Sun entitled "Darwin meets his match". In this he adduces Zola and Weber, and most of all the 1950s American sociologists whose works stressed status seeking and display, to show that there is something missing from Darwinian theory.Like social dominance ethology and psychology never

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147433892969961832006-05-12T21:35:00.000+10:002006-05-12T21:38:13.220+10:00

Bush and the law...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147391557776969002006-05-12T09:50:00.000+10:002006-05-12T09:52:37.786+10:00

or so I found out from Grrlscientist. Given the extreme focus of US conservation policies on individual species, and the Endangered Species Act itself, now under attack from conservatives, I suppose this is a good thing. But one wonders, when will they have National Endangered Ecosystems Day?They'd need to have it every week, I should think.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147389607565437002006-05-12T09:04:00.000+10:002006-05-12T09:20:07.576+10:00

I have a long standing interest in hybridisation, one that appeared out of nowhere after I read Jan Sapp's Evolution by Association, which is about another intuition-breaking aspect of evolution, symbiosis.Hybridisation as an explanation of biodiversity goes back at least to Aristotle's History of Animals (Bk VIII, ch 28).As a general rule, wild animals are at their wildest in Asia, at their

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147169216144801172006-05-09T20:05:00.000+10:002006-05-09T20:06:56.306+10:00

Here is a model paper, the very paradigm of what a scientific paper should be...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147133895298820952006-05-09T10:16:00.000+10:002006-05-09T10:18:15.626+10:00

John Hawks is involved in a bit of a stir by suggesting that there was little or no overlap between sapiens and neanderthalensis occupation in the Near East and Europe. A Yahoo report today gives the claims of those for and against the idea of there being little overlap. It seems that Aurignacian culture, which ended around 29,000ybp, may have been Neandertal, rather than modern human. This may

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1147045733333072612006-05-08T09:47:00.000+10:002006-05-08T09:48:53.353+10:00

Click on the comic to see it at home.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146982489800798092006-05-07T16:11:00.000+10:002006-05-08T09:42:57.396+10:00

PZ Noun laments the need to mow his lawn. So do we all (I have a Darwinian view of gardening - anything that can survive my tender ministrations deserves to be there. I once killed a cactus by under-watering. I have a shriveled black thumb). But nobody asks the obvious question: why do we have lawns at all?I have a theory. It is mine (ahem). Consider what lawns are - they are composed of early

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146968965222816672006-05-07T12:27:00.000+10:002006-05-07T13:22:52.970+10:00

Here is an interesting item at Counterpunch on the anti-environmentalist Senator Representative Rick Pombo (R, CA). An opponent of the Environmental Species Act, Pombo wrote a book described here as "the book acquired the allure of a Gnostic gospel among the "Wise Use" crowd, whose concept of wise use derives from God's commandment to Adam in the book of Genesis to pillage the earth's natural

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146921158008281122006-05-06T23:10:00.000+10:002006-05-06T23:12:38.046+10:00

Well, no surprise here:You Should Be a Science Fiction WriterYour ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you're from.And while you may have some problems being "normal," you'll have no problems writing sci-fi.Whether it's epic films, important novels, or vivid comics...Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world!What Type of Writer Should You Be?From

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146819418598491642006-05-05T18:54:00.000+10:002006-05-05T18:56:59.713+10:00

Over in Oregon, a couple of ID shills are giving a talk. Just based on this article, let's see how may errors they can stuff in (find the fallacies listed at The Fallacy Files):A nationally known author, a local attorney and a University professor teamed up to argue on Wednesday night that a powerful being created all life and that evolution-supporting scientists engage in “intellectual

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146791371578584202006-05-05T11:07:00.000+10:002006-05-05T11:09:31.586+10:00

A University of Vermont botanist is visiting China to see whether 168 described species actually are. Using modern techniques, David Barrington is going to revisit the descriptions of the endemic flora of China to see if the morphologically based criteria actually dilineated rela species (where "real" equals "Mayrian definitions of species").I truly hope he also recasts them in terms of some of

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146788066732065022006-05-05T10:09:00.000+10:002006-05-05T10:14:26.880+10:00

Sorry. A politicohistorical one today.In a famous case in Australia, an autocratic and corrupt state premier was asked on television what the three arms of the government were and the separation of powers. He stammered through something about the police, the bureaucracy and the premier's office, and was almost immediately ejected from office at the next election.Oddly, in Australia, the three

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1146355426677705752006-04-30T10:01:00.000+10:002006-04-30T10:03:46.833+10:00

Frinktank notes that the Discovery Channel is announcing that there is a "growing body of evidence that there is no scientific basis for star signs, such as Aries, Taurus and so on". Frink suggested that the study should be called "Hey Asshole! The Universe Doesn't Revolve Around You!", which might be a message that Behe needs to hear, given that he said at the Dover trial that astrology could be

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145924812294922592006-04-25T10:26:00.000+10:002006-04-25T10:26:52.450+10:00

The Lawrence World Journal is reporting that the police have closed their files on the Mirecki beating for lack of evidence. At least they didn't try to fit him up with fraudulent reporting, which is what might have been expect when we heard they confiscated his computer.Predictably, the wingnuts are claiming this is evidence he did fake the beating.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145857862594750432006-04-24T15:50:00.000+10:002006-05-01T09:37:43.603+10:00

Whew. After the last few posts, I'm exhausted, and unable to say anything sensible (or rather, any more sensible than is in those posts). So here's a meme, taken from Janet Stemwedel's Adventures in Science and Ethics, films one ought to have seen. Janet has asterisked the science-relevant ones, I've bolded the ones I have seen:*"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick"The 400 Blows" (1959)

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145854283503017902006-04-24T14:48:00.000+10:002006-04-30T12:17:39.536+10:00

So, as my commenters have noted, I screwed up. Badly. The paper I cited as having 54 races actually had six clusters those populations fit into. I don't mind - I said at the beginning I was ignorant of this, and these posts are my way of learning about the topic and getting a free education ("Yes! He can be taught!").Before I respond to the very gracious response by Razib (I say "race", and you

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145841980730374242006-04-24T11:25:00.000+10:002006-04-24T11:26:20.843+10:00

While I prepare a response to the responses... etc., for the race thread, go read this article in the Pinnacle News about changes to the Endangered Species Act, driven by a Republican congressman, Pombo, with respect to critical habitats (in this case, for the red-legged frog in California).

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145776409881336692006-04-23T17:11:00.000+10:002006-04-23T17:22:48.406+10:00

Razib at Gene Expression has responded to my comments, and the original author Mike McIntosh, has updated his original piece with a few comments in response also. Good for both of them - I am not an expert in this matter, and I need the education. But first, let me deal with a few misunderstandings of what I said brought about by my execrable abuse of the English language (hey, I'm an Australian,

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145707467340965302006-04-22T21:38:00.000+10:002006-04-22T22:11:19.946+10:00

Every so often, a correspondent asks me about something I haven't really given much thought to. Having had the question raised, I am attuned to things I might otherwise have passed over. You know how that happens?One person asked me for my view on human races. My default view was that of Richard Lewontin's - that race is a biological construct [RealAudio stream], and that biological differences

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145675104358353702006-04-22T13:04:00.000+10:002006-04-22T13:05:04.363+10:00

The Philosophy of Biology blog is dead. Mike Sprague, who was the principal, is leaving the field and couldn't find anyone to take over the blog at FSU. So I have removed it from my blogroll.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145462210845702652006-04-20T01:55:00.000+10:002006-04-20T08:16:23.460+10:00

It's not often one gets to see a dustup between taxonomists in the media. After all, taxonomy is such a civilised discipline, usually nobody gets killed and hospitalisation is rare. But here, in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, is a piece on a match between Rob Roy Ramey, and Tim King, both field biologists, over the status of a mouse.What's at issue is its status under the US Endangered Species Act

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145409164050196542006-04-19T11:11:00.000+10:002006-04-19T11:12:44.150+10:00

Sorry, philosophy fans, I'm not riffing off Nagel here. Instead, let me link you to that rat bastard Paul Mhgfs, who has another of his wonderfully written pieces on development and evolution in "How to make a bat" on Pharyngula - the second best science blog after the Journal of Irreproducible Results.Myliz, whose name is unaccountably impossible to spell, makes a number of points about how bats

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145346325497323102006-04-18T17:45:00.000+10:002006-04-18T17:49:23.680+10:00

OK, I did it, but I'm not going to tell you what I got. Go do it yourself. Just don't tell me what your result is. It's bad enough all those Science Blog folk have to tell us...[Hint: I'm part of the 15%]

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145195220636433712006-04-16T23:45:00.000+10:002006-04-16T23:47:01.476+10:00

Abstract objects are difficult to specify. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on abstract objects, Gideon Rosen notes that the distinction before the 20th century was primarily about words, and the general and particular distinction of the nominalist debate. In modern philosophy following Frege's theory of logic, abstractions become objects. Basically an abstract object is something

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145156992096126692006-04-16T13:08:00.000+10:002006-04-16T13:10:16.963+10:00

So, carrying on the line of argument from the Abstract and Concrete in Biology post, let us ask the obvious question: Why do scientific abstractions, or models, represent the world at all?One way to approach this philosophically is to follow Russell and say that they denote. That is, the variables of the model have a true interpretation. But this doesn't help us here - it may be that they do, but

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1145072731914870812006-04-15T13:43:00.000+10:002006-04-15T13:45:32.013+10:00

Here's a great takedown of deluded and ill-informed Windows boosters on the Boot Camp and Workstation advances. If I have a criticism it is that Jason Snell, the author, gives too little credence for the claim that Macs are better than Windows machines for graphics. Anyone who has wrestled with colour profiles for Windows and Macs knows that the Macs are far superior to Windows machines in terms

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143385299884372652006-04-14T13:48:00.000+10:002006-04-14T14:35:38.340+10:00

I suspect that as soon as humans evolved a language capable of assigning nouns to types, they started to make abstractions, and to think that abstractions were real things. Abstraction is a necessary part of knowledge if you want to be able to generalise beyond particulars. But it brings with it dangers, and one of these is what Gould (2002) called the fallacy of abstract reification, and more

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144898539455736292006-04-13T13:20:00.000+10:002006-04-13T13:22:19.533+10:00

Well that didn't take long. A company called Parallels has developed (in beta form now) a way of running any version of Windows, Linux, OS/2, Solaris, or DOS, to name a few, as virtual computers on an Intel Mac, which they call Workstation. Moreover, you can run them simultaneously.So, assuming we put some version of Windows and a Linux, the OSes available on your Mac Intel would be:1. Unix BSD

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144894246848744942006-04-13T12:09:00.000+10:002006-04-13T13:25:53.236+10:00

Pianka has a short essay entitled "What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know" on his home page. I'm going to quote most of it here and intersperse some commentary:I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144753537530487742006-04-11T21:03:00.000+10:002006-04-11T21:05:37.686+10:00

Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has done a bit more digging and it transpires that it was a misunderstanding. Good for him correcting the record. So while I stick by what I said otherwise, they didn't take the articles down out of concern for their inaccuracy.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144736866433594422006-04-11T16:26:00.000+10:002006-04-11T16:27:46.530+10:00

Is this evidence that God the Designer wants us all to be happy?

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144506778185539582006-04-08T23:46:00.000+10:002006-04-09T00:32:59.036+10:00

This week I am an Eighth Day Agnostic, as recent reformers in my irreligion have decided that we also don't know what a week is. My sermon for today begins with a question: When did it become possible to be an atheist?On Friday I attended an interesting PhD confirmation seminar on the Marquis de Sade. Apart from a nice dirty graphic used as the backdrop, rather distractingly, for the PowerPoint

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144462996826662672006-04-08T12:23:00.000+10:002006-04-13T16:47:02.653+10:00

There has been a lot of chat recently about a talk given by University of Texas ecologist Eric Pianka. Pianka said what many ecologists think, that it is inevitable, given our density of population, that there will be a major pandemic of some kind, because we have set up the preconditions for it, and that as much as 90% of the human species will be killed as a result.I'm not able to assess

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144315560137443572006-04-06T19:18:00.000+10:002006-04-06T19:26:00.150+10:00

Like Luke, he was tempted, but he did in the end give in to his baser instincts. Steve Jobs has allowed Apple to release a way to boot Windows on an Intel Mac, called Boot Camp (to be a standard component of the next release, Leopard. Sigh.What I hoped they'd do was write code to replace Windows system calls in OS X itself, so that you could run a Windows program natively under OS X. I suppose

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1144131106947452152006-04-04T16:10:00.000+10:002006-04-04T16:11:46.956+10:00

Die Heimatssicherheitabteilung strikes again!

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143951504124939772006-04-02T14:18:00.000+10:002006-04-02T14:22:52.820+10:00

I'm a day late with this one, but it's important. In a major advance in computing, Atomic Bird has released CrashBlocker Pro, a tool which prevent your Mac OS X from crashing. The release says this:(April 1 2006) Atomic Bird announces CrashBlocker Pro, a groundbreaking new Mac OS X utility. CrashBlocker Pro makes you more productive and reduces stress by preventing applications from crashing,

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143869218120969402006-04-02T12:39:00.000+10:002006-04-02T00:41:57.563+10:00

I've been rereading some of Hugh Paterson's writings on species lately, as well as revisiting Alan Templeton's more recent cluster concept. Each of these use what might be termed a "positive" conception of (sexual) species, rather than the "negative" ones of Mayr and Dobzhansky that preceded them.In Paterson's view, a (sexual) species is a group of organisms that share a common reproductive

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143886270919888152006-04-01T20:11:00.000+10:002006-04-01T20:11:11.000+10:00

Afarensis has resolved the problem of Precambrian Archaeology. Of course, there are still some details to be filled in, and a few inferences to be tidied up. But after all that waiting, something we can actually test.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143859034128020382006-04-01T12:33:00.000+10:002006-04-01T12:37:14.130+10:00

Dear folks, I'm trying to generate a moderate amount of income by including ads here. It's to pay for the domain name and a few other incidentals, and occasionally to pay for a book. I hope you don't mind. I've tried to filter out the creationists and intelligent designers, but if anything gets by, email me and I'll fix it. Thanks.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143794599655015592006-03-31T18:38:00.000+10:002006-03-31T18:44:19.870+10:00

It's a denial of the obvious...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143604920572329752006-03-29T14:02:00.000+10:002006-03-29T14:02:00.666+10:00

Dr Freeride (aka Janet Stemwedel) is doing a great fisking of Steve Fuller on Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science which Fuller thinks is advocacy for "clients". Read it.One thing that occurred to me is that talk of "clients" suggests that scientists are somehow just another interest-bearer in the public polity. While this is true, that's a bit like saying that elite athletes are

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143520431100206912006-03-28T14:33:00.000+10:002006-03-28T14:33:51.180+10:00

You Are 56% EvilYou are evil, but you haven't yet mastered the dark side.Fear not though - you are on your way to world domination.How Evil Are You?I promise no more for a while.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143510229345895462006-03-28T11:07:00.000+10:002006-03-28T12:35:35.363+10:00

Recently there has been a bit of a kerfuffle about Michael Ruse, the author of many books on Darwinism and design, releasing to William Dembski the private email of Daniel Dennett. Now there is a very bad Op-Ed piece in the Grauniad. Pharyngula, Evolution Blog, and Pulp Adair dispose of this, so I won't, here.But I wonder what it is that Ruse and Dennett are doing, exactly? Ruse appears to be

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143503764335913232006-03-28T09:38:00.000+10:002006-04-09T00:35:46.800+10:00

It's not often I get email from a bona fide prophet. Even rarer (N = 0) does a prophet offer me a new new testament. Of course, there's a catch - you have to buy it. Now we here at Evolving Thoughts do not as a rule endorse commercial products. This is because we have no disposable income. But sometimes the Word has to get out. As a practising Pastafarian (linguini last night), I am duty bound to

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143411472439145202006-03-27T08:17:00.000+10:002006-03-27T08:18:24.780+10:00

Evolutionary Biology Research Techniques Predict CancerHere's an interesting study - precancerous tumours, those that are not yet proliferating but are mutant cell clusters, are more likely to become cancers if the genetic diversity in the cells is high. On reflection this is obvious - if becoming malignant depends on having a series of mutations that ends up with a cell line not apoptosing when

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143384482754451012006-03-27T00:47:00.000+10:002006-03-27T00:48:02.866+10:00

You Passed the US Citizenship TestCongratulations - you got 8 out of 10 correct!Could You Pass the US Citizenship Test?

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143116124307854492006-03-23T22:13:00.000+10:002006-03-24T22:06:43.336+10:00

Hi ya'll. Thanks for reading the interview on Daily Kos. Darksyde said you'd be dropping by. To give you a hint of this blog, apart from the puns and cartoons, here's a list of some of the more substantial posts from the last six months:ReligionJewish fundamentalismMy pessimistic sermon on the new Dark AgesSaturday evening sermonPhilosophyDarwin, evolution, and PopperTribalism, evolving societies

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143088417991846462006-03-23T14:33:00.000+10:002006-03-23T14:33:38.006+10:00

FOXNews.com - not the most reliable source - is denying that Isaac Hayes ever quit South Park, but someone else did it for him. Apparently Hayes is presently recovering from a stroke, and did and said nothing about the show.Hmm...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143074559334927522006-03-23T10:42:00.000+10:002006-03-23T13:58:00.410+10:00

Nature has a paper in this week about the nature of plant species. It's an interesting claim - according to Loren Reiseberg, Troy Wood and Eric Baack at Indianan University, around 70% of the species identified through traditional taxonomy are, in fact, reproductively isolated lineages, somewhat better than animal species, at around 40%. So much for the vertebrate bias... (although of course

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1143020359252514992006-03-22T19:26:00.000+10:002006-04-28T09:44:21.176+10:00

In my long-delayed book on the species concept, I find myself concurring with historians like Polly Winsor and Ron Amundson that there never was an "essentialist" view of species before Darwin. In fact it is my opinion that essentialism in biology postdates Darwin, and was in fact due to the revival of Thomism among German and French speaking Catholic biologists who were reacting to the

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142984916224870512006-03-22T09:23:00.000+10:002006-03-22T10:59:23.863+10:00

In one of my favourite films, Donnie Darko, there is a scene where a teacher loses her job for teaching poetry that is ever so slightly subversive. Now comes a story where a teacher in Bennett, Colorado, has lost her job, wait for it, for showing an opera to her students. The teacher, who is herself an opera singer, showed a clip from the school library of Charles Gounod's Faust. She showed a 12

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142953258858758022006-03-22T01:00:00.000+10:002006-03-22T01:00:59.020+10:00

The Daily Transcript has a description of various subdisciplines in biology that may help those considering a career in one of them. Help them running screaming in the other direction, that is...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142923393724880922006-03-21T16:41:00.000+10:002006-03-21T16:46:22.713+10:00

When I was a kid, I used to go lie in the rain on the roof and watch the lightning. Hey, it was better than fireworks, free, and delivered to your door. What can I say?One night I saw the most amazing thing - I was about 11 or 12. A glowing ball of light about 50 feet up (this was before they allowed meters into Australia) which was about half a meter across (OK, I give in) moved slowly through

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142815555502336032006-03-20T10:45:00.000+10:002006-03-20T11:06:51.150+10:00

Normally I'd leave this sort of thing to my friend Ian Musgrave at Astroblog to explain, but it's cool, so there. NASA explains Lagrange Points for the WMAP Observatory in an accessible and cool way. I particularly like the "contour" diagram of forces acting on a body in the system. L1, L2 and L3 are effectively unstable because they are at the "top" of the gravitational potentials, like marbles

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142689780764755492006-03-18T23:49:00.000+10:002006-03-18T23:49:40.840+10:00

It seems Nelson had no teeth in his recent debate with Sahotra Sarkar. He tried to gum evolution to death, and all he showed was that ID really isn't science after all. There will be an online recording of the debate around the 25th of this month.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142662458706719262006-03-18T16:14:00.000+10:002006-03-18T16:14:18.840+10:00

Because I can, but only just. I scored 8/10 (one I can't believe I missed, the other I'd never heard of before) in the BBC - Science & Nature - Fakes & mistakes quiz. Much better than those silly personality quizzes bloggers see, to do all the time lately.Speaking of which, Dr Free-Ride mentions yet another one.

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142654956699055962006-03-18T14:09:00.000+10:002006-03-18T14:11:34.213+10:00

Alfred Russel Wallace rejected the idea that human capacities like math or music could have evolved. I wonder what he'd have made of Chris Bliss Juggling? And the music isn't bad either...From Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142653045500357742006-03-18T13:34:00.000+10:002006-03-18T13:39:02.186+10:00

If I were 20 years younger and undoctored, this would be a cool opportunity:Darwin Trust Scholarship in HPSThe Darwin Trust invites applications for a postgraduate researchscholarship tenable at any UK university from graduates, of anynationality, who wish to study for a PhD in the history orphilosophy of science and technology. The scholarship will providea maintenance grant of £12,000 per

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142421647235620752006-03-15T21:20:00.000+10:002006-03-15T21:27:02.256+10:00

Pandagon has a review of the debate between Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute and Sahotra Sarkar on ID, this time in from of an academic audience. Nelson didn't go down well, and Sarkar, who has a book on the epistemology of ID coming out, basically put the political aspects of ID front and centre. I wish I'd been there. Another report is at The Ethical Werewolf.Sarkar's book, which I have

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142406984667612692006-03-15T17:16:00.001+10:002006-03-15T17:16:24.680+10:00

That naughty Pat Robertson.After claiming that God caused 9/11 because of all the gays, that the levees in New Orleans broke because of all the gays, that God would cause a terrible disaster to be visited upon Dover PA because of all ... strike that, because they had rejected God by voting out the ID boosters (who were very careful not to mention creationism. One mentioned it once, but we think

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142336454363901322006-03-14T21:40:00.000+10:002006-03-14T21:41:39.346+10:00

Isaac Hayes quits 'South Park' go the reports, because he is upset about the satire of religion. Of course, it didn't stop him being involved in the show while it satirised Christianity, Judaism, or Mormonism. But when it got a bit too close to home - the celebrities' religion lite, $cientology, of which Hayes is a member - he suddenly discovered his civil rights past and quit. How

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142132254283280792006-03-12T12:54:00.000+10:002006-03-12T12:57:34.296+10:00

What do you blog, when you are behind on a paper due today, and you have nothing intelligent to say? That's right. You do one of those bogus personality tests:You Are Bart SimpsonVery misunderstood, most people just dismiss you as "trouble." Little do they know that you're wise and well accomplished beyond your years.You will be remembered for: starring in your own TV show and saving the town

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1142061747703740632006-03-11T17:15:00.000+10:002006-03-11T17:23:10.743+10:00

I was moved to deliver this sermon by a post on the talk.origins newsgroup by one of the fundamentalists there about why their son was an atheist. As I am a fully paid up Seventh Day Agnostic, this is my holy day (in Australia - it may still be Friday elsewhere, in which case you are no doubt thanking whatever deity floats your boat).Ten tips for the Conflicted Christian parentChristians who want

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1141964959017780112006-03-10T14:17:00.000+10:002006-03-12T16:28:35.686+10:00

The Leiter Report has this choice piece about incompetence at the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security (sorry, the Heimatssicherheitabteilung) in which accounts of stupidity like taking an envelope containing white powder through the office of the head to empty it outside the window are recorded. Then there's the suspicious bag left in the carpark:Former guard Bryan Adams

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1141878082154472512006-03-09T14:20:00.000+10:002006-03-09T14:21:22.170+10:00

General Information on Mimicry is a simple but rich website on, well, mimicry, specifically Batesian and Mullerian mimicry. It's on Jim Mallett's web page, a guy who (to my joy) accepts sympatric speciation by host race diversification, but who, to my displeasure, thinks there is a One True Species Definition (although his version is pretty good for many purposes).Anyway, if you ever wanted to

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1141605188554977722006-03-06T10:33:00.000+10:002006-03-08T14:13:32.603+10:00

Jim Lippard shows what the primary focus is for the creationist organisations. Follow the money as Deep Throat said. Recently, Answers in Genesis split into two, an American site (which garners some $10mUS per annum! and pays it's "directors" accordingly) remains known as "Answers in Genesis" while the international version, which will occasionally criticise it's creationist colleagues unlike the

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6941151.post-1141601290595330182006-03-06T09:24:00.000+10:002006-03-06T09:28:11.710+10:00

Good golly Miss Molly! I've been nominated for some Koufax Awards: Best New Blog, and Best Single Issue Blog. OK, so nobody's actually voted for me yet (not even me. Damn that Mryes, he's even got control over me with his Jedi mind tricks), but just being nominated means there are more folk than my family reading this...

John S. Wilkinsnoreply@blogger.com0