Vote now! 3 Jun 2010 I have a couple of posts nominated (one by me – it’s time to stop being humble) at the 3quarksdaily Science competition here. I won’t win, because that torrent of good science writing, Ed Yong, is nominated, not to mention Carl Zimmer and sundry others, and the Pharynguloids will of course vote for PZ, but you should either go vote reflexively for me, or actually read some of the nominations and vote sensibly… Administrative Science Administrative
Evolution Could God Have Set Up Darwinian Accidents? 9 Jul 20119 Jul 2011 I have a paper forthcoming in the Theology and Philosophy journal Zygon, that I thought some of the readers of this blog might find interesting. Here’s the PhilPapers entry: John S. Wilkins (forthcoming). Could God Have Set Up Darwinian Accidents? Zygon. Charles Darwin, in his discussions with Asa Gray and in… Read More
Biology Reduction and emergence 8 Aug 20118 Aug 2011 I have been having a metaphysical debate on Twitter, which is more surreal than reading the Tractatus. My interlocutors said a few things which leads me to want to clarify my views a little more than Twitter allows. Hence… My thesis is this: Emergent properties are no different, ontologically speaking,… Read More
Epistemology Operative concepts 27 Apr 202227 Apr 2022 Gave a talk “The Good Species” yesterday (26 April 2022) to the HPS crowd at UniMelb. The discussion went a way I didn’t expect: classification in the psychiatric and medical domains. I proposed a third kind of concept formation in science: what I am calling “operative concepts”: folk terms and… Read More
Well, I had to go back and read lots of complicated stuff with Big Words, many of which start with P. Then I chose your evolution thing. That Myzers guy will hypnotize his slavish golems, who gleefully punk anything that includes voting, so he will probably win. However, we know what he thinks of online votes: meaningless. So, even if he wins, does it matter?
Don’t forget that to “win” the voting round merely means to be in the top 25%. I actually glanced at all of the nominations, read all the promising ones, and voted sensibly. As you follow me on Twitter (GoldHoarder), you already know who I voted for. Other favourites will get blog links in due course. I left comments on a few, sometimes as Adrian Morgan, sometimes as outerhoard. Apparently I was the first person to point out (in a comment here) that two of the links were broken. This bothers me, because it implies that the vast majority of people don’t actually bother to peruse the list before voting, otherwise I never would have been first to report the error. My own view is that my vote would be illegitimate in principle if I didn’t give every candidate a fair go.