Understanding Species is here in hard copy 19 Apr 202319 Apr 2023 When I first watched Back to the future, I was mid-undergraduate studies, and had no thought that I would ever publish anything, but I was taken by Grispin Glover’s George McFly getting a box of what looked like 50 copies of his latest novel. The most I have ever gotten for any of my books was nine: things are less generous now than in the 80s, I guess. Also, academic books are orders of magnitude lower in numbers than commercial fiction. Still, the hard copies for any book are treasured, and thus I reveal to you: The interesting thing is that this is a compact size, around A5, which I guess is the thing now, what with Very Short Introductions to topics and so on. It’s still only £14.99/US$19.99, (AUS$28.95) so go get a copy. I think the price goes up in May. As a teaser, here’s a figure illustrating what different definitions of species do to our own species: Philosophy
Cognition Are emotions 2D? 7 Oct 20137 Oct 2013 I recently became aware that there is a new development in emotion classification. Previously, as far as I knew, emotions were thought to be human universals, give or take some variation (such as the emotion “metagu” among the Ifaluk islanders, see Linquist 2007) and researchers like Paul Ekman, who works as… Read More
Evolution Gods above 6 Jul 200922 Jun 2018 It’s no real coincidence that the standard metaphor for approaching gods is one of height. Humans not only defer to those who are “above” them in the social hierarchy, they also tend to defer to people who are literally taller than they are. Taller individuals tend to have higher status… Read More
Biology Darwin and Blumenbach 28 Oct 200918 Sep 2017 I recently became aware that the probable originator of the “biological” species concept, which I prefer to call the Reproductive Isolation Species Conception*, or RISC, was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). He presented this in his doctoral thesis On the natural varieties of mankind (1776), and I missed putting it in… Read More