Biology What is systematics and what is taxonomy? 5 Feb 201123 Jul 2023 Over the past few years there have been increasing numbers of calls for governments to properly fund systematics and taxonomy (and a number of largely molecular-focused biologists insisting they can do the requisite tasks with magic molecule detectors, so don’t fund old-school, fund new-fangled-tech). But I think that there is… Continue Reading
Administrative Update on a pilgrim’s progress 21 Jan 201122 Jun 2018 Okay, well it’s more like the John Wayne sense of “pilgrim” than John Bunyan, but here I am, having gotten out of Dodge Brisbane just as the latest natural disaster hit. “Here” being the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. Once my goods and chattels were “uplifted”, to use the quaint… Continue Reading
Epistemology Phylogeny, induction, and the straight rule of homology 8 Jan 201122 Jun 2018 Continuing my “natural classification” series, which I am writing with Dr Malte Ebach of UNSW. After having experienced the circulation of the blood in human creatures, we make no doubt that it takes place in Titius and Maevius. But from its circulation in frogs and fishes, it is only a… Continue Reading
Natural Classification A quote on science 7 Jan 2011 “All science is either, A. Science of Discovery; B. Science of Review; or C. Practical Science. By “science of review” is meant the business of those who occupy themselves with arranging the results of discovery… The classification of the sciences belongs to this department”. (C.S. Peirce, An Outline Classification of the… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity How many species of plant are there? 3 Jan 2011 It should be a simple question. After all, we have been describing, naming, and studying species of plants for 500 years, and the whole system of nomenclature and classification was developed in order to list plants. Estimate range widely, from 200,000 to nearly 300,000 or even 400,000 [also here] and… Continue Reading
Evolution Darwin’s motivation 5 Dec 2010 For some time now I have been convinced that Darwin’s original and most pressing problem was not adaptation. It was the existence of taxonomic diversity. I have thought that the debates over what was a natural classification amongst the unjustly derided Quinarians William Sharp Macleay and William Swainson were the… Continue Reading
Administrative My present work 10 Oct 2010 Life can be … interesting, for Chinese values thereof. No, I don’t mean the Nobel Prize, although good choice. I mean that I’m presently undergoing some kind of curse. I think it’s called “work” . Work!? So what I’m doing doesn’t translate to meaningful blog posts. Not always (but eventually,… Continue Reading
Epistemology Similarity 4 Sep 2010 Brandon in a comment to the last post in this series mentioned this text of Plato: Well, at any rate, he said, justice has some resemblance to holiness; for anything in the world has some sort of resemblance to any other thing. Thus there is a point in which white… Continue Reading
Epistemology Homology and analogy 27 Aug 201018 Sep 2017 Last time I noted that phylogenetic classification was based on homologies, which I have elsewhere discussed. Now I want to consider how we might generalise it across all the sciences. And in particular I want to consider the other form of classificatory activity, by analogy, might also generalise. This will… Continue Reading
Biology Ranking 24 Aug 2010 A diversion in the natural classification series. In natural classification, we typically do not find that patterns due to the process of historical causation come arrayed neatly in boxes within boxes, and yet one of the most common temptations is for classifiers to set up fixed ranks. The Linnaean scheme… Continue Reading