What’s a personal blog for, if not to blow my own horn? Well, it can only be to blow the horns of those who I…
1 Comment Published 8 Sep 2023
Category: Species and systematics
Published 27 Apr 2022
Operative concepts
Gave a talk “The Good Species” yesterday (26 April 2022) to the HPS crowd at UniMelb. The discussion went a way I didn’t expect: classification…
Comments closed 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…
1 Comment Published 11 Feb 2020
My species book receives a Choice award
I am delighted to tell you that my book Species: The Evolution of the Idea has received a 2019 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Award!…
4 Comments Published 29 Jan 2020
Putnam on taxonomic terms
Terms with respect to which we defer to experts include both technical terms in science and such terms as ‘elm’ or ‘beech’ (in the United…
Comments closed Published 21 Sep 2019
Is racism Christian?
I was taught that racism developed out of Johannes Blumenbach’s Anthropological Treatises in the late eighteenth century, specifically his doctoral thesis On the Natural Variety…
17 Comments
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…
Comments closed
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…
1 Comment
Published 11 May 2019
Draft of talk, for comment
I will be presenting this talk in Brisbane in a few weeks. Have a look and make suggestions.
2 Comments
