A biosphere for Brisbane 26 Aug 200818 Sep 2017 A few doors down from my office there’s a guy with a ready laugh and a shared love of Macintoshes named Dom Hyde, a philosopher who works on the logic of vagueness among other things. He’s also very active in environmental matters, particularly those associated with the D’Aguilar Range, which is a beautiful tall timber forested region just to the northeast of Brisbane, where I live. It also includes the water catchment for Brisbane. So you might think that when Dom and his friends proposed that this range should be a UNESCO Biosphere, government would fall over itself in protecting this crucial area. Well, you would if you didn’t know Queensland politics and the influence of developers here. However, agreement from the councils and State government has been reached, and the proposal is now underway. Congrats to Dom. He’s a powerhouse in the face of apathy. Ecology and Biodiversity Politics
Evolution A final note on Expelled 24 Mar 2008 This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously “framed” more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn’t help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was a sort of microcosm of America, and let me tell you… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Expelled producer admits lying to atheist interviewees 4 Jan 2009 Well, he admits that it was a theist diatribe from the beginning, and not the even handed interaction between science and faith doco he told Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers among others. Always nice to find out that those who assert that only with faith in God can we have… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution and the law 17 Jun 2009 A new paper by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg entitled “Why Evolutionary Biology Is (So Far) Irrelevant To Legal Regulation” argues that evolution does not provide the legal system with any useful rules or guidance. Here’s the abstract: Evolutionary biology – or, more precisely, two (purported) applications of Darwin’s theory… Read More
Three cheers for Dom! We were undergrads together, and even then he was building his couches from leftover beer crates and spare bicycle parts. Sort of took the “well, one thing can just become another thing easy enough” to heart, and in retrospect it all led to activism and vagueness.
Three cheers for Dom! We were undergrads together, and even then he was building his couches from leftover beer crates and spare bicycle parts. Sort of took the “well, one thing can just become another thing easy enough” to heart, and in retrospect it all led to activism and vagueness.