Miscellany 8 Nov 2007 Some things that piqued my interest without triggering a full post: The readability of this blog is high school level, which is good. That’s pretty much how I pitch it: There’s a new species of killer whale in the Antarctic. [HT: Jason] Toads will mate across species if things get tough. This has also been documented in other species such as ducks. Administrative Evolution Species and systematics
Evolution Even more FAPPery 8 May 2010 Richard Lewontin reviews FAPP in the New York Review of Books. It is a much more moderate review than many of the other reviews we have linked to. He ends up suggesting that biologists should not speculate on the origins of traits when such speculation is idle. However, like FAPP,… Read More
Evolution On the “Darwin Year” 1 Jul 2008 Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn’t made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven’t needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer’s piece, over at his new digs with Discover… Read More
Evolution Homology 10 Nov 20074 Oct 2017 I’ve been so busy reading and assimilating the latest issue of Biology and Philosophy I forgot to let you all know about it. It’s a special issue on Homology, edited by Paul Griffiths and Ingo Brigandt. A discussion group has now been set up at Matt Haber’s blog The Philosophy… Read More
The response comes back suspiciously quickly on the reading level of the blog. I also have a high school reading level on mine. When I compare my writing to yours, I would put mine at the middle-school level.
My blog comes up as “Genius”, which I’m assuming means that no bugger can read it or be bothered to try. The “new killer whale” has been floating about for a while, I think. A number of cetacean “species” (including the killer whale, but also the common dolphin and the minke whale) fall into that taxonomic limbo where it’s a widely-known secret that there’s probably a number of species currently lumped under the one name, but there’s a bit of reluctance for anyone to leap in and try and sort them out, both because of the amount of work involved with a shortage of specimens, and because there’s a great list of synonymised names that would have to be examined to see if any of them correspond to any re-identified separate species.
Yeah, I’m a ‘genius’, too. Seriously, when a fella like me rates as a ‘genius’ and a serious, erudite (and often esoteric) real-life scholar like John Wilkins is judged to be at a ‘high school reading level’ there’s something wrong with me.
Yeah, I’m a ‘genius’, too. Seriously, when a fella like me rates as a ‘genius’ and a serious, erudite (and often esoteric) real-life scholar like John Wilkins is judged to be at a ‘high school reading level’ there’s something wrong with me.