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
Creationism and Intelligent Design Pope on evolution: more of the same teleological thinking 26 Apr 201126 Apr 2011 Recently, the Pope did what religious leaders appear increasingly inclined to do on Easter: bash science: Benedict emphasised the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily, saying it was wrong to think at some point “in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of… Read More
Evolution Quotemining in the 19thC 23 Jul 2009 Dispersal of Darwin again has an excellent piece of the history of evolution: he traces the quotemining by the theologians in the 1880s of John Tyndal, a known Darwinian of the day, to “show” that evolution is unproven and speculation. It seems that the dishonesty is unchanging. Read More
Epistemology Peirce on Darwin (1877) 18 Aug 2009 The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to say what the movements of any particular molecule of… Read More