Evolution Sunday sermon: on cultural isolation 22 Dec 2007 Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters. Because that’s what you are, you know, if you don’t exactly… Continue Reading
Evolution Levitt on Fuller 19 Dec 2007 As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller’s defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely,… Continue Reading
Evolution Do bacteria think? 10 Dec 2007 Let’s suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it. Along comes someone,… Continue Reading
Evolution When academics attack 5 Dec 2007 I love a good academic stoush, so long as I’m just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was subsequently reviewed by Patricia Churchland, in Nature. Unfortunately,… Continue Reading
Evolution 148 years ago today 24 Nov 2007 … a book was published that changed the way we thought of biology. Continue Reading
General Science Magnetic anomaly map finished 4 Nov 200718 Sep 2017 [A guest post by palentologist and geologist Chris Nedin] It’s taken the best part of 50 years but it’s finally here! 50 years after the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that took a global geophysical view of the globe, one of the outcomes of that global geophysical view has just been… Continue Reading
Evolution Upstream Issues 3 Nov 2007 Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don’t care. A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity Small world 31 Oct 2007 Here is an article in Harvard Magazine on bacteria and other wee beasties that make up the bulk of the living world, that is worth reading. It’s called “The Undiscovered Planet”. Hat tip to Jason Grossman. Continue Reading
Administrative Icons for peer-reviewed blogging 29 Oct 200718 Sep 2017 The above are icons to be used when blogging on actual peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular reports or kookery). I had a marginal involvement in this (I made some passing comments early on) so it is with great pride… no, actually, it’s all down to Dave Munger, who was… Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity How not to Feyerabend 5 Oct 2007 On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled “How to Feyerabend”, arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I’d tell you more about his talk, but… Continue Reading