Interdisciplinarity never works 18 Jun 2010 Wait until the psych students convince the physics students that they are just hallucinating their pendulums. The the philosophy students will show them all that it’s just a matter of an error in language and they can all go about getting on with their oof!… where did that come from? Education Humor Metaphysics Philosophy Science Philosophy
Biology Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 2: chains and trees 18 Oct 201122 Jun 2018 Rise of the Planet of the Moralists Series1: Introduction2: Chains and Trees 3: Clades and grades4: Predicting traits5: Social dominance and power Very famously, Darwin came up with the idea of the evolutionary tree. What is not often realized is that it is the tree that is more uniquely Darwin’s than natural selection, for which… Read More
History On Grayling on the Jesuits 23 Aug 2009 A long time ago I would debate the local Jesuits over scotch, when I was still a Christian theology student. I learned two things: 1. those guys could really hold their liquor (I drank much more sparingly); and 2. Jesuits are really really smart. But as a theolog, I also… Read More
Evolution Going backwards, or, devolution? 29 Sep 2009 Carl Zimmer has another one of his excellent summary articles, this time about the problems encountered by a research group that tried to make a protein that had evolved into one form, evolve back to the starting point. This is being touted as a molecular version of “Dollo’s Law” (which is… Read More
But, you know, those interdisciplinary literary critics who go on and on about theory of mind deserve to bopped in the head by a pendulum. And, come to think of it, let’s make that a Foucault pendulum. Call it Michel’s Revenge. Whap!
Inopportune invocations of M. Foucault are considered an act of war (and rather tacky) in most English literature seminars, you know (:
OMG. I was in a an institute retreat this week. We were talked at by a couple of sociologists. I think one of them should do a study of academic communication, and explain why they speak in such general terms, and why this annoys scientists so. In fairness, I was in a stats conference in Norway at the start of the week. I had a *ducks* fascinating chat on the train about creating random fields that were Markov, and *ducks* which even worked on manifolds. *ducks* thud Owwww. Physics is not as deterministic as they told us.