Briefly 13 Jul 2009 Just a short note to interrupt the no doubt by now telepathic game of Mornington Crescent being played on this blog… I have give both my papers, one the the local conference and one to the international. It’s always really comforting when the leading historians in the field are sitting in your audience as you deliver some revisionary historical interpretation (in this case about Whewell and Mill)… and they’re nodding vigorously! Happened once before when I was criticising Ernst Mayr and one of his doctoral students, Jon Hodge, was in the audience at Exeter a couple of years ago. This is the first time my talk was on the first day of the conference, so I can now go and get pissed for the remaining three days. I may not be back for some time. Also, I seem to have lost my power supply for the Mac. But fear not! I am alive, and will return to blogging anon. Administrative History
Biology Darwin was not badly received by the church 26 Nov 2009 Robert J. Berry is a geneticist at University College London. He is also an evangelical Christian and has written a number of works on the compatibility of religion (his kind, anyway) and evolution. He has a quite accurate letter in today’s Nature. Since that is behind a paywall, I have… Read More
Epistemology Modus Darwin and the *real* modus darvinii 2 Feb 2011 Elliot Sober has published a claim (Sober 1999, Sober 2008: §4.1, 265ff) that Darwin used, and we should too, a particular syllogism: similarity, ergo common ancestry. This cannot be right, for several reasons: logical, historical and inferential. First the logical, as this is rather vapid, and can be guarded against… Read More
Administrative A notice of ET 8 Apr 2010 We here at the Institute for Making Computer Keys Click are often disheartened by the lack of public notice of our efforts, unlike that rat bastard PZ Meds who seems to have cornered the entire internet, and that which he doesn’t have, that rat bastard Bora at A Blog Around… Read More