Biology Obit: Chris Humphries 18 Aug 2009 The Telegraph in the UK has an obituary for Chris Humphries, the botanist and systematist who died recently. Humphries was also a major player in the use of biogeography for conservation. Continue Reading
Species and systematics Wheeler on Yoon on species 8 Aug 2009 Quentin Wheeler has an interesting discussion of the recent book Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon; in which he (rightly) dismisses her apparent claim (I haven’t read the book) that species are subjective. Go read it. Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity Chris Humphries dies 6 Aug 2009 Influential botanist and conservation biologist Chris Humphries has died aged 62. Roberto Keller has more. Continue Reading
Biology The second in the series “Species and Systematics” 1 Aug 2009 Readers know my book is the first cab off the rank known as “Species and Systematics” at the University of California Press. It was too good to last that I would be the only one. Now Parenti and Ebach have published their Comparative Biogeography as the second volume. They have… Continue Reading
Biology Evidence and Evolution 23 Jul 2009 I have just finished doing a review (for Systematic Biology) that took me six months. It was not because I was slack. It was because I had to read it in three page segments. The book is “Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science” (Elliott Sober) Continue Reading
Biology So much to say, so little time 9 Jul 2009 As I prepare for the conferences I start attending and blathering at from tomorrow, I of course find a treasure trove of things to blog about. Since I can’t really do them all justice, I will merely put a one liner for each below the fold. Continue Reading
Evolution BBC show on Ediacaran fauna 7 Jul 2009 A commenter just posted this: Greetings Ediacara fans, You may be interested in tuning into In Our Time BBC Radio 4, at 0900 BST on Thursday (9th) July. See here for the links. Continue Reading
Evolution Lynch’s challenge to the Orang crowd 7 Jul 2009 Further to the claim I mentioned a while back, on orangutans being the closest species to humans, not chimps, John Lynch has a post up on the phylogeny of ERV sequences in the great apes which show, independently of the methods that Grehan and Schwartz criticised. He asks how they… Continue Reading
Metaphysics On hierarchies 29 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 We often make an appeal to hierarchical relations, in social and political discourse, in religion, in metaphysics (or that odd part of it called mereology) and more recently in social behaviour in animals, called ethology. But what we don’t do much is discuss what it is that a hierarchy is,… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity On speciation 26 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 The Atavism has some thoughts on speciation in response to a high school teacher’s query. He uses the following nice diagram to indicate what some of the core species definitions mean: It’s neat, and therefore… wrong. By which I mean that given the rule that biological organisms do what they… Continue Reading