A leading philosopher blogs… about cuttlefish! 4 Jul 20124 Jul 2012 Peter Godfrey-Smith is one of the leading philosophers of biology and science, and he is presently Distinguished Professor of philosophy at CUNY’s Graduate Centre. He also blogs! It’s nice to see that employed academics are catching up with the rest of us. What’s really interesting is that Peter is focussing on evolutionary and mind questions by discussing cephalopods (that should please PZ Myers). And not just what philosophers think about cephalopods, as is the standard practice, but the science behind it. It’s very infrequent, but should inhabit your feed. And I’m not saying this just because Peter complimented my blog last night. He’d been drinking. Biology Evolution Philosophy Science
Evolution An interesting paper on cultural evolution 31 Dec 2009 PNAS has a very interesting paper about cultural evolution in Taiwan at the beginning of the 20th Century, by Melissa Brown and Marcus Feldman. It basically argues that two different selective forces, Cultural and Social, influenced the decline in footbinding – it became seen as a low status practice, which… Read More
Evolution Creation, a personal reflection on the movie 18 Jul 201022 Jun 2018 I just saw the movie Creation, with Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly (Bettany’s real life wife) as Emma Darwin. And I am very pleasantly surprised how well it worked as a film, as well as how effectively it represented the era. My quibbles are just that, quibbles. Mostly,… Read More
Philosophy De mortuis nil nisi bonum 28 Oct 2009 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. That Fuller does this in what is supposed to be… Read More