Evolution Christianity Today = Inanity Today? 29 Aug 2007 Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil “Lucy” to the US with the closing paragraph: It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory… Continue Reading
Evolution Verne Grant died 24 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 I’m very late to this, but one of the significant figures in the synthesis, Verne Grant, died in May. Grant’s book The Origin of Adaptations (1963) was one that influenced a lot of theorising about evolution. His essay on species concepts in 1957 pointed out that botanical notions of species… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper on bacterial speciation 23 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 You’ll remember, because you have all memorised my blog going back two years, that I blogged on what microbial species are before, and have a paper on that subject coming out in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. In it I argue that microbial species, particularly bacterial species, are… Continue Reading
Evolution New ape fossil 22 Aug 2007 The National Geographic and the news services are touting a new ape fossil found in Ethiopia as “forcing a rethink on human evolution”. As usual, the headlines are hyperbolic. This ape is fragmentary, and so far only teeth and a jaw bone have been found, and the teeth are similar… Continue Reading
Evolution The Essentialism Story 22 Aug 2007 Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural… Continue Reading
Book My species definitions reader is accepted for publication 15 Aug 2007 I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of “species” in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It’s designed as a reader for scholars to see how the notion[s] have evolved separately in the… Continue Reading
Evolution Popper peeps papally at UD 15 Aug 2007 Popper’s view of science has been supplanted by a number of later views, not least being the sociological accounts of Kuhn and Lakatos, which, being sociological, don’t tell us what is science but only how it proceeds descriptively. Prescriptive views of science are much more nuanced than Popper these days, and they lack a simple slogan like the cry of “falsifiability!” They typically focus on the heuristics (rules of inference) and how they have developed overall and in particular disciplines. If you want to argue that ID is science, go read van Fraassen, or Hacking, or Giere, or Laudan and get back to me. Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper by moi 12 Aug 2007 I have a review of the centenary festschrift for Mayr, published by the National Academies of Science, in the latest Biology and Philosophy here. I worked pretty hard on this one, so it’s more than your average dashed off review article… Hey, Jody; Fitch, Walter M.; Ayala, Francisco J., eds…. Continue Reading
Evolution An essay on the evolution of human evolution 12 Aug 2007 Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It’s one of the few blog posts in which you’ll read of… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity What is an individual? 11 Aug 2007 Rob Wilson has a new entry up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled “The Biological notion of an individual”. It discusses an interesting problem, one that goes back to discussions by Julian Huxley in 1911. What is an individual in biology? Continue Reading