What’s a personal blog for, if not to blow my own horn? Well, it can only be to blow the horns of those who I…
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Published 8 Sep 2023
Category: Biology
Published 23 Nov 2022
Feet of clay problem
What to do with historical bastardry in our heroes? This is republished from my substack. Henceforth such posts – the equivalent of a magazine article…
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Published 9 Oct 2021
How to do numerical taxonomy
Hint: use only original IBM punch cards
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Published 30 Sep 2020
The first phylogeny
The only diagram in the Origin is famously the hypothetical series of species forming a tree structure, but it isn’t an actual classification based on his…
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Published 4 Aug 2020
Do we need, and can we get, a single authoritative list of species?
In a recent paper, Garnett et al. [2020] have set up what they refer to as the principles for creating a single authoritative list of all…
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Published 18 Mar 2020
Virulence and vectors
Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of Paul Ewald’s book Evolution of infectious disease (1994). Ewald begins with the question of whether parasites and pathogens evolve…
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Published 29 Jan 2020
Putnam on taxonomic terms
Terms with respect to which we defer to experts include both technical terms in science and such terms as ‘elm’ or ‘beech’ (in the United…
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Published 6 Dec 2019
Environmentalism timetable
I prepared this for my students and thought others might like it. It’s a timetable of environmental law, politics, publications of note, events and disasters…
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Published 21 Sep 2019
Is racism Christian?
I was taught that racism developed out of Johannes Blumenbach’s Anthropological Treatises in the late eighteenth century, specifically his doctoral thesis On the Natural Variety…
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Published 29 Jul 2019
New book contract
Well CRC Press haven’t learned their lesson yet, and have given me, Frank Zachos (Vienna) and Igor Pavlinov (Moscow) a contract for an edited book…
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