In the mind of a microbial paper 25 Aug 2009 Over at Small Things Considered is a point by point explanation and explication of a recent paper. For us nonscientists it’s a useful guide to how papers come to be written, how techniques and subjects are chosen, and so forth. Peer into the heads of some scientists and read it. Biology
Biology Godfrey Smith’s book 27 Jul 2009 Peter Godfrey Smith is a leading philosopher of biology, a professor at Harvard. He has recently published an important book on the nature of evolution, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, in which he moves away from the gene centrism of Dawkins to a reproducer view in which objects that form… Read More
Biology Does life exist? 11 Jan 2014 Life, I believe, is what physics does on one particular planet on a Wednesday. More exactly, it is a series of chemical and physical dynamics that occurs between 3.85 billion years ago and now on this planet. Ferris Jabr, an editor at the Scientific American site, has a piece entitled “Why… Read More
Biology Gilbert White on Instinct: stepping back from Nature 20 Jan 201320 Jan 2013 In the course of helping teach a “History of Nature” course for Sara Maroske just lately, I re-encountered Gilbert White’s lovely Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne, a classic of literature and field biology. As a philosopher I hadn’t read him closely as there is little abstract argument in it, but this… Read More
And once you’ve figured out where the proteins are, you’ll have to figure out when they are. The standard of what counts as an explanation keeps getting raised. I recall when a eukaryotic cell (though nobody called ’em that at the time) was just a an irregular circular shape with a smaller circle inside that represented the nucleus. As somebody once remarked to me, Watson and Crick discovered the meaning of life back in ’53 but it was only the meaning of life until the advance of biology upped the ante.