About I am an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. I’m a mature-aged but late PhD’d (2004) historian and philosopher of science. My thesis issued in a couple of books and I’ve published a couple more since. I also publish academic papers and do casual tutoring and lecturing to keep body and soul together. [Update: I’m out of the academic game now. But I aim to publish more books.] I have a PhD from the University of Melbourne and have worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up an ARC research fellowship at the University of Sydney, followed by lecturing at Bond, UNSW and Melbourne. I am presently an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, and a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, headquartered in Montclair, NJ, USA. I have an Erdös number of three, of which I am unwarrantedly proud: Wilkins, John S., and Wesley R. Elsberry. 2001. The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance. Biology and Philosophy 16 (November):711-724. Elsberry, Wesley, and Jeffrey Shallit. 2011. Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”. Synthese 178 (2):237-270. Erdös, Paul, and Jeffrey O. Shallit. 1991. New bounds on the length of finite pierce and Engel series. Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeux 3 (1):43-53. [Among several others] After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, I finally completed my thesis on species concepts in 2004. Since then I have wandered aimlessly through the world dispensing unasked-for advice with faux gravitas. This blog is designed evolved to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors… My publications ResearchGate PhilPapers Mastodon