Evolution Verne Grant died 24 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 I’m very late to this, but one of the significant figures in the synthesis, Verne Grant, died in May. Grant’s book The Origin of Adaptations (1963) was one that influenced a lot of theorising about evolution. His essay on species concepts in 1957 pointed out that botanical notions of species… Continue Reading
Politics War on Abstractions 24 Aug 2007 As part of the “War on Drugs” an entire family of hydroponics sellers, selling legally available material, were sentenced to prison without parole. Gary Tucker has just been released after a ten year stretch and confiscation of all his goods and money. His brother Steve died of cancer in prison…. Continue Reading
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper on bacterial speciation 23 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 You’ll remember, because you have all memorised my blog going back two years, that I blogged on what microbial species are before, and have a paper on that subject coming out in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. In it I argue that microbial species, particularly bacterial species, are… Continue Reading
Evolution New ape fossil 22 Aug 2007 The National Geographic and the news services are touting a new ape fossil found in Ethiopia as “forcing a rethink on human evolution”. As usual, the headlines are hyperbolic. This ape is fragmentary, and so far only teeth and a jaw bone have been found, and the teeth are similar… Continue Reading
Evolution The Essentialism Story 22 Aug 2007 Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural… Continue Reading
Administrative I aten’t dead 21 Aug 200718 Sep 2017 … I’m teaching. First years. Cognitive science. It turns out that a lot of what I thought was common knowledge isn’t common at all. And what I count as a simple introduction leaves a lot of folk behind. Now I know I’m not that ordinary in many senses – the… Continue Reading
Politics Rudd’s strip joint visit 18 Aug 2007 I do not care if a politicians visits a strip club. In fact, a politician that did it and owns up without embarassment would be a good choice to pick, because you know he’s not going to pull that family values crap in the future. But a politician who visits… Continue Reading
Administrative Icon for Blogging Peer Reviewed research 15 Aug 2007 Dear readers, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has suggested that we have a universally available icon to indicate that the blogger is blogging about peer reviewed research, and he has created a discussion blog at BPR3. Please go make suggestions and add to the discussion. Muggins here will implement it… Continue Reading
Book My species definitions reader is accepted for publication 15 Aug 2007 I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of “species” in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It’s designed as a reader for scholars to see how the notion[s] have evolved separately in the… Continue Reading
Evolution Popper peeps papally at UD 15 Aug 2007 Popper’s view of science has been supplanted by a number of later views, not least being the sociological accounts of Kuhn and Lakatos, which, being sociological, don’t tell us what is science but only how it proceeds descriptively. Prescriptive views of science are much more nuanced than Popper these days, and they lack a simple slogan like the cry of “falsifiability!” They typically focus on the heuristics (rules of inference) and how they have developed overall and in particular disciplines. If you want to argue that ID is science, go read van Fraassen, or Hacking, or Giere, or Laudan and get back to me. Continue Reading