Rieppel reviews my book 24 Sep 2010 … at Metascience here. The book, of course, is my Species: A history of the idea. The concluding paragraph is this: Does Wilkins deliver on his promise? Does the ‘essentialism story’ capture the essence of the centuries old debate about ‘what is a species’? Wilkins delivers a resounding NO, and he does so in a highly accessible language. This will be important especially for the biologists and paleontologists among his readers, who get a clear exposition of sometimes difficult to understand philosophical issues underlying logical versus biological classification. I can live with that. Book History Species concept History
History Happy Newtonmas 25 Dec 201122 Jun 2018 Isaac Newton was born on the 25th of December (under the old Calendar; in our calendar he was born on 4 January, but ignore that for this post). In a wonderful marriage of good scholarship and computers (often a very bad arrangement), Cambridge University Library’s Digital Library project has digitised… Read More
Administrative Competition winners 2 Nov 20112 Nov 2011 In case people did not notice my announcement in the comments of that post, the winners of a signed copy of my species history book are: Cameron Peters Doug G Elais Jackson Jesse Schaefer Lorax sbh Send me an email with your addresses. I will send the books as soon as… Read More
Book Yet another “post-Darwinism” 2 Aug 201122 Jun 2018 Over the years there have been many books that purport to “radically revise” or “supplant” Darwinian evolutionary biology; they come with predictable regularity. Usually they are of three kinds: something is wrong with natural selection, something is wrong with inheritance, or something is wrong with phylogeny. This book, by geneticist… Read More
If Springer thinks that I’m going to pay $34 to download a review of your book then I can only say that someone to Springer needs their head examined!
Sorry that’s €34 and not $34 which makes it even more ridiculous (but a friendly ape sent me a copy!).
“Needing head examined” is, I think, a good description of Springer when it comes to pricing practices. The review is about 3/4 the price of the book and almost as much as the current price for the Kindle version. (Amazon.com currently has the Kindle edition at $39.) I think UT-Austin has a Metascience subscription, so it will probably show up there by the time I’m next downtown. (It does show up as $34 for me; Springer is stiffing Europeans even more than Americans.)
My university library also has a Metascience subscription but I was at home today at not in the library.
This is a nice review – it makes me want to read your book, at any rate. Now I’ve got to go order a copy.