Monthly Archives: October 2009
On journals and citation styles
We live, you might have noticed, in an electronic age, right? So why, for heaven’s sake, don’t journals provide either a named Endnote or similar style for their journals? Springer in particular are very bad at this – they give … Continue reading
Filed under Education, Philosophy
Arendt and Heidegger – moral failures?
Slate has an essay on Arendt and Heidegger by Ron Rosenbaum that suggests they never really disavowed or freed themselves from fascist ideology. Worth a read.
Filed under Philosophy, Politics, Race and politics
The lying Origin
How can you tell when a creationist is lying on TV? When their lips move… Ray Comfort has published an “edition” of the Origin of Species, with, of course, a 50 page “introduction” that repeats all the usual creationist lies. … Continue reading
Filed under Creationism and Intelligent Design, Evolution
Repost: The Song of the Scientist
I found this on my old blog and liked it so much, I thought I’d replay it: A recent report on the songs of the eponymous “great tit”, a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops … Continue reading
Filed under Biology, Ecology and Biodiversity, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, Social evolution
An unnecessary rebuttal
A paper has been published formally rebutting the single most stupid idea ever published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS(USA)). The story is in Scientific American but the gist is that Lyn Margulis, who sees … Continue reading
On the need for critical reasoning
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s codiscoverer of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism, was something of a contradiction. On the one hand he argued with a flat earth advocate, getting involved in a lawsuit as a result. On the other he … Continue reading
Filed under Education, Science, Social evolution
Arbitrary execution
Question: If a state kills people of some country not their own, because they think but have not shown in a court of law that those people have committed a crime, and the people are not combatants of a legally … Continue reading
Filed under Politics
Darwin and Blumenbach
I recently became aware that the probable originator of the “biological” species concept, which I prefer to call the Reproductive Isolation Species Conception*, or RISC, was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). He presented this in his doctoral thesis On the natural … Continue reading
Filed under Biology, Evolution, Genetics, History, Natural Classification, Philosophy, Science, Species concept
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
Steve Fuller is crying martyr to that horrible fascist, Norman Levitt, whose terrible sin against the intellectual in the 21st century was to point out that the sort of fashionable nonsense which Fuller is so capable of is, well, nonsense. … Continue reading
Filed under Philosophy, Science, Social evolution
OK, so Ares works
I’m not proud. Well, not too proud. I admit I was wrong about the Ares 1-X – it seemed to work fine without excessive vibration and probably will work as a human rated booster. I still would have liked to … Continue reading
Filed under General Science, Technology
