Hunting for the Hat Gene 16 Nov 2009 Mark Liberman has a good essay on why we shouldn’t be seeking genes for X here. Biology Evolution Genetics Philosophy Science
Evolution Are species life forms? 19 Jun 201719 Jun 2017 This is a section of my forthcoming revision to Species, presented here for comments that I can steal – umm, I mean for peer commentary. The philosophical ideas and terms of Wittgenstein have played an interesting and underappreciated role in the species debate: we saw Beckner appeal to family resemblance… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Teacher, there’s a god in my evolutionary soup… 12 Dec 200818 Sep 2017 … shh, not so loud or everyone will want one. Here’s a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying “It’s not a clean-cut… Read More
Biology Species: The evolution of the idea 12 Oct 2017 My revised book is now titled Species: The evolution of the idea, and now contains a philosophy section as well as a complete list of species concept[ion]s and an appendix of all taxonomic levels I could locate. It is due out in February 2018 from CRC Press. I have done a… Read More
Years and years ago, in the first heyday of Sociobiology, in the mid 70s I think, there were lots of people talking about the gene for this and that — with even less basis, obviously, than at present. The reductio ad absurdum that someone proposed then was the gene for cooking. After all, the behavior is universal and advantageous and unique to our clade, so there must be a gene for it.