A kiwi on moas 24 Sep 2007 This is a nice post by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms, a kiwi studying spider systematics (and what’s not to love about that; cephalopods be buggered!) on the species of moas that used to live in New Zealand. I didn’t realise they’d be forest dwellers. It’s a worthwhile blog to get the feed for. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution Species and systematics
Education Science Communication and the Business Model 22 Mar 2009 There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer’s twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a… Read More
Biology Evidence and Evolution 23 Jul 2009 I have just finished doing a review (for Systematic Biology) that took me six months. It was not because I was slack. It was because I had to read it in three page segments. The book is “Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science” (Elliott Sober) Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity What is a disease? 13 Feb 200818 Sep 2017 Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the “normal” type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers know, since David Hume, that normativity doesn’t develop out of facts…. Read More
> cephalopods be buggered Yeah, go on, piss off the people who agree with you about everything else 🙂
Then you’d better get to the NZ Ecological Society conference at the end of this year. “The conference features a major symposium titled “Feathers to Fur: the ecological transformation of Aotearoa”. This is an update of 21 years of progress on the topics that make New Zealand unique, following on from the 1986 conference “Moas, Mammals and Climate” which was published in a special issue of New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 1989.” I spent several days caving with Trevor Worthy examining a new cave system jam packed with the fossils of extinct NZ species, including a number of moa species. Just awesome.