The year’s substantial posts

So in lieu of doing something useful, here is a list of links to my substantial posts of 2011:

General posts, roughly in date order

• Turtles all the way down: the origins of the myth
• The undergraduate effect and the gravity wells of knowledge
• Time to re-evaluate higher education
• Is reality liberal biased? Are liberals reality biased?
• Religions, cults and wacos
• An education reform
• Goodbye freedom
• What killed Steve Jobs?
• The mind of the ecological engineer
• Attack of the Unlibrarian
• The meaning of Christmas
• Happy Newtonmas

Evolution

• Darwin Day: Enough already
• On the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin
• The first biological species concept revisited
• Pope on evolution: more of the same teleological thinking
• Is Brian Blessed a monkey or an ape?
• The evolution of common sense on Scientific American – the Scientific American guest blog is here
• Did humans lose dominance?
• Repost: Evolution and truth
• Belief and evolution
• Repost: Wittgenstein, transformation, and evolution
• What should evolutionary psychology comprise?
• Yet another “post-Darwinism” – a review of Shapiro’s book
• Ecological speciation

Philosophy

• The nature of philosophy and its role in modern society
• Descartes before the horse – does information exist?
• Did Synthese bow to Intelligent Design pressure?
• Us, them and the real issue
• Believing and knowing
• Is the soul something we should be agnostic about?
• Rapture and risk
• Why do philosophy of science
• What is philosophy? My most read piece this year.
• Naturalism and investigating the unnatural
• The nature of stochastic events in a block universe
• Science is not a religion, nor does it involve faith

Natural classification

• The false analogy between species and art
• Phylogeny, induction, and the straight rule of homology
• Logic, evolution, and classification
• Modus Darwin and the real modus darvinii
• What is systematics and what is taxonomy?
• Counting species
• The taxonomy of disease

Phenomena, theory dependence and species

• Pattern cladism and the myth of theory dependence of observation
• Species, phenomena and data
• More on phenomena
• Disambiguating the Theory-Dependence of Observation thesis (TDOT)
• Domains and theories in science
• Domains, disciplines and levels

Atheism and agnosticism

• On dictionaries, movements and rhetorical flourishes: “Dictionary atheism”
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 1: the landscape
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 2: What it is to have a belief
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 3: Knowledge claims about gods
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 4: Existence claims
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 5: Scope and indexing
• Atheism, agnosticism and theism 6: Conclusion
• On the suspension of belief and disbelief
• Once more into the fray, dear agnostics
• Prescriptions for atheists
• Positivism about agnosticism
• [Agnostic versus atheist chess]
• Can an atheist have a code of ethics?

Reductionism

• Reduction and emergence
• Reduction and surprisal, or, why water is wet
• Downward Causation

Rise of the Planet of the Apes and philosophy

• Passing thoughts on Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 1: Introduction
• Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 2: chains and trees
• Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 3: clades and grades
• Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 4: Predicting traits
• Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 5: Social Dominance and Power

Selves and minds

• A sense of self
• The principle of charity, qualia, and philosophy
• Zombies of qualia and intentionality

Evolutionary novelties

• Notes on novelty 1: Introduction
• Notes on novelty 2: Historical considerations – Before and after evolution
• Notes on novelty 3: The meaning of evolutionary novelty
• Notes on Novelty 4: Examples – the beetle’s horns and the turtle’s shell
• Notes on novelty 5: evolutionary radiations and individuation
• To be continued…

Holy logorrhoea, Batman! Enjoy. Maybe I should publish Evolving Thoughts as a book.