What to do with historical bastardry in our heroes? This is republished from my substack. Henceforth such posts – the equivalent of a magazine article…
Published 23 Nov 2022
Feet of clay problem
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Category: Evolution
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 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 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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Published 18 Jul 2019
A not terribly good post on the species problem
As a biological phenomenon the species problem is worthy of serious study as an end in itself, and not as a mere corollary to work…
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Published 23 Nov 2018
What is special about humans?
As soon as somebody asks the question “what is a ____?” we get into trouble. Not because we do not know about the thing in the blank, but because we tend to have the wrong idea about how to answer that question. Since the Greeks, the general feeling is that to answer a question about such matters, one must define the shared and unique features of the type of thing.
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Published 29 Jul 2018
What was Darwin’s Origin actually called
So, I got caught parroting half-remembered factoids, to Down House no less, that the Origin dropped the “On” from the start of the title with the fourth edition. In my defence, I was making use of Darwin Online, the Cambridge University site that collates all of Darwin’s publications and a whole lot more, in their list of editions of the Origin in English. So I got called out, and rightly so. If you’re going to be a pedant, at least be an accurate one.
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Published 20 May 2018
Superstition and the fossil record
Superstition is not without value. Generally held beliefs give apparent order and coherence to human communities, qualities that are valued by some persons, especially those…
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Published 15 Oct 2017
50 words for snow 5; species
Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena All classificatory terms are…
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Published 11 Oct 2017
Species: The evolution of the idea
My revised book is now titled Species: The evolution of the idea, and now contains a philosophy section as well as a complete list of species…
