Outstanding topics

I have, I must confess, started a number of projects here that I haven’t finished. Teaching is getting the better of me (and no, I’m not going to put my lectures down on cognitive science, as I do them “freeform”,, so I’d have to do a lot of work to get them down in written form).

Some of the things I intend to one day finish:

1. The World According to Genesis. Reader Michael Gardner put in a lot of work doing the Abraham story outline for me, but to my shame I haven’t had time to add my bits. Sorry Michael – you haven’t been forgotten. I aim to cover the patriarchal stories pretty quickly, and then move on to the Moses story and the Exodus story. That will about do it as far as the biblical worldview goes. Maybe I’ll finish up looking that the 8th century BCE prophets’ worldview. Ezekiel is pretty weird.
2. The national view of eugenics and selection. This is the missing fourth part of my Darwin and the Holocaust series. The problem is that I have to go refind a bunch of material I haven’t read for ten years or more, on the ways various nations cast themselves as being in a Darwinian struggle.
3. The current series on what life is. I’m working from lecture notes from a couple of years back, so it should be easy to continue.
4. The theoretical role of “species” – as it occurs to me I will add new material. This is the first rough cut of a paper.
5. Darwin on species. Initially this was a rebuttal to Peter Dear’s book, but there’s a lot more to say. Now that I have organised my sourcebook and commentary on species definitions, I really should finalise this.
6. Basic concepts. I haven’t updated these for a bit. Soon, I promise. There have been new entries on other sites, and hell, I may even write one or two of my own. If that doesn’t trigger guilt feelings in other bloggers, well, there’s always the comfy chair.

Anything else I have left undone? I already checked my fly.

On a different note, I was interviewed by (= “had a long rant with) Carl Zimmer last night for an article he is doing on species concepts. It was great fun, and of course I advanced my own special heresies ike the myth of essentialism at great length. Nice chatting with you Carl.