Some of my recent talks 30 May 201222 Jun 2018 I just discovered SlideRocket, a Google app that displays slides, and so I thought I’d put up some of my talks. Here goes. I hope they work. This is a talk about whether God could create a world in which Darwinian accidents occur. It ended up as a paper in Zygon: This is a talk about the philosophical origins of biological essentialism. Several chapters and papers are coming out about this in various books and journals, and this will also become a later paper. This is a talk on changing how we look at the idea of biological species, in conjunction with Brent Mishler, director of the Berkeley Herbarium, which I gave to a botany conference late last year: And finally, a talk I gave with Neil Thomason and Lewis Murray on the evolution of argument maps, both recently and historically (I did the historical bits, of course): The transitions and animations are a bit screwed up, and some of the images didn’t come through, and of course you miss out on my handsome face, dulcet tones and witty repartee, but the gist is there. Enjoy. Epistemology Evolution History Logic and philosophy Philosophy Religion Science
Administrative News from Ediacara 27 Oct 2008 The Ediacaran period is the era between around 635Mybp and 540Mybp, just before the Cambrian. You pronounce it “ed-ee-ack-a-ran”. It is also the name of a new blog by the inimitable Chris Nedin, erstwhile paleontologist who specialised in the Ediacaran fauna before joining the Dark Side (federal public service) in… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper by moi 12 Aug 2007 I have a review of the centenary festschrift for Mayr, published by the National Academies of Science, in the latest Biology and Philosophy here. I worked pretty hard on this one, so it’s more than your average dashed off review article… Hey, Jody; Fitch, Walter M.; Ayala, Francisco J., eds…. Read More
Biology Do we need, and can we get, a single authoritative list of species? 4 Aug 202025 Aug 2020 In a recent paper, Garnett et al. [2020] have set up what they refer to as the principles for creating a single authoritative list of all known species. This is required because there are no such singular lists (one was attempted in the 1990s, and another in the naughties) to which… Read More
Though mind maps are ubiquitous and argument maps should therefore be an obvious idea, it took your post to prompt me to try doing them. Thanks. Used some freeware instead, however, in order to produce argument maps for an evolutionary paradox. Though the results are a bit primitive (might have been achieved with PowerPoint or the Open Office equivalent as well) they may nevertheless do the job of getting some philosopher of biology addressing the issue. P.S.: As my blog does not link back or I’m to stupid to know how to make it do that, here’s the link given the pedestrian way: Argument maps for the paradox of sex.
So far I’ve only watched the first one (intend to watch the others, but you know what Time can be like). Here are a few notes in response. * I find the Darwin quote on slide six nearly incomprehensible. It doesn’t help that English has changed since Darwin’s day (e.g. implicatures of the word “admit”) , but in the second half of the paragraph I really think Darwin was having a bad day and not writing clearly even by his own standards. * On the general subject of intelligent design vs theistic evolution, I take intelligent design to be a claim about evidence, whereas theistic evolution is a claim about the world. Therefore we can define four quadrants with acceptance or rejection of intelligent design along one axis and acceptance or rejection of theistic evolution along the other. For example, back when I was a Christian, I was a theistic evolutionist because I believed that God influenced evolution to some degree and used it as a method of creation, but I was never an intelligent design theorist because I would not have agreed that the complexity of biological organisms constitutes evidence for divine involvement. (My mother, on the other hand, would be both a theistic evolutionist and intelligent design theorist by this definition.) * Some theistic evolutionists might believe God micromanaged everything, others believe God only intervened in human evolution, and there are a variety of other positions. My own position as a Christian was that expecting to know precisely how much God intervened in natural history is itself somewhat heretical, as it isn’t something we as humans are entitled to be told, and not likely to be discoverable by rational enquiry. I might have suggested a lower bound (enough to ensure that something like humans evolved, capable of religion) and an upper bound (little enough to keep the fossil evidence consistent with purely naturalistic Darwinian evolution) but maintained an agnostic position between these. * Re slide 32 “tell your flocks”, that’s a very Catholic way of putting it, and my Protestant background makes me wince at it a little. Jesus allegedly described himself as a shepherd but there’s nothing in the book about authorising priests to do the same. * There are some bugs in the slideshow. I may have missed some things as a result of these.