Category Archives: Evolution

Evolution quotes: Socialism

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running … Continue reading

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Filed under Evolution, Politics, Quotes

Why eat meat?

A while back, the New York Times held a blog competition on justifications for eating meat, in 600 words or less. I submitted mine, but I bet it didn’t get far up the selection tree, as the winner is effectively … Continue reading

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Filed under Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, Philosophy

Analytic thinking, religion and science – the rhetoric and the psychology

Over the past few decades there has been an increasingly large literature on styles of thinking and cognitive biases (to which I am grateful to Jocelyn Stoller, a reader of this blog, for introducing me) in psychology, culminating in the marvellous … Continue reading

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Filed under Cognition, Epistemology, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Social evolution

Carnival of Evolution 47: All the Evolution News that’s Fit to Blog

Welcome to the 47th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. We have had our science reporters out in force hunting down the best of the blogosphere on evolution and related subjects, and here they are for your delectation and delight … Continue reading

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Filed under Ecology and Biodiversity, Evolution, Genetics, History, Natural Classification, Species and systematics, Systematics

Get your Evolution Carnival posts in soon!

There’s only a week left to submit to the next Carnival of Evolution hosted here! Hop to it folks, or I’ll have to link to my own posts, and nobody wants that.

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Filed under Administrative, Evolution

Bayes, evolutionary clocks, and biogeography

I just received a review by Gareth Nelson of Michael Heads’ book Molecular Panbiogeography of the Tropics (publishers’ site). I should have blogged this before, since I got a copy, being on the editorial board for this series (the same one … Continue reading

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, Natural Classification, Philosophy, Science, Species and systematics, Systematics

What warrant is there for belief in God?

Every morning on the way to the campus of the University of Melbourne I pass by the United Faculty of Theology, and I often wish that someone would come out and engage me in a debate. Partly because I am … Continue reading

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion

What, however, is the EAAN?

[Previous posts: One and Two] I may have been too hasty in my acceptance that Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism was not what I had originally given. As commenter Nick Matzke pointed out, Plantinga seems to be doing a bit … Continue reading

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Plantinga’s EAAN revisited

Blogs are places where one tosses out a hastily constructed piece of argument, or commentary, and not where one slowly and thoughtfully writes something that one will eventually earn an income from (unless you are PZ Myers). So when I … Continue reading

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Religion, Science

Did Popper and Quine invent “Aristotelian essentialism”?

There are many narratives told about evolution. One of the most widely told is the Essentialism Story, replayed in textbook, popular storytelling and philosophy alike. It goes like this: Before Darwin, biologists were constrained by essentialist thinking, in which they … Continue reading

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Filed under Biology, Evolution, History, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Science, Species and systematics, Species concept, Systematics