History How many ways can you make a logical mistake? 31 May 2009 A while back I got interested in the various taxonomies of fallacies, such as the Fallacy Files, each giving their own set of names. It set me thinking: how many fallacies are there? From that question it hit me: there are as many fallacies as their are of unique ways… Read More
History The Times purveys some science myths 4 Jun 2009 This is just bad reporting and scholarship. Probably done to fill some space in a hurry or something. Hannah Devlin is claiming that there are several cases of scientific plagiarism including, you guessed, Darwin from Wallace. They claim Copernicus stole from a Persian astronomer, al-Tusi, becuase the same diagrams were… Read More
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… Read More