Evolution is not natural selection. So wrote R. A. Fisher, mathematician, biological theorist and unfortunate eugenicist. This is the preface to a book that kick-started, although not on its own, the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and evolutionary theory in 1930: The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Fisher was, by all…
Philosophy
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On grief
I have lived with death in my world since I was six, and my friend Judith suddenly disappeared from school. I was told later she died from leukaemia, as in those days there was no treatment available for younger children. And as it was around 1961, no adult ever mentioned…
Biology
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A series of posts on Categories in systematics
They are on Substack of course, and I forgot to link to them here, so:
Ethics and Moral Philosophy
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Ethics in 5 minutes
“…ethics is a tradition. People sometimes get annoyed at the fact that they have to read Plato, Aristotle or some other old and very Western source. But this is the price one pays for entering a tradition, as any student of religion, literature, architecture, or art can tell you. But, and this is important, that is the academic or formal side of ethics. One can understand issues (not all of them) without knowing the canon.”
Book
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Historicism
I have made my latest Substack post available to all. In which I defend myself from heinous charges and calumnies, and defend a kind of historicism.
Freedom
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So, how did we get here?
This is not my beautiful world Shit got real just now, but it took a long time and a lot of inattention and complacency, basically since the 1950s. It began with the unholy alliance of manufacturing and the military during the Cold War and the technowashing of German military engineers…
History
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Imaginaries in Science
I wrote a thing. I started out skeptical, but ended up convincing myself that “imaginaries” is a good concept. I am annoyed by this.
Philosophy
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New book on Land Ethics
A friend and colleague, Roberta L. Millstein, who is emerit at UC Davis, has published a new book: The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, which is available from The University of Chicago Press here. She defends Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. The publisher’s blurb:…
Logic and philosophy
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Vale Michael Ghiselin
Michael Ghiselin, who was the originator of (the modern) view that species are individuals, died on 14 June 2024. He was a very generous person with his time for antipodean philosophers. With his passing, the authors of the SAI thesis, as it is called, are both gone: he and his…
Logic and philosophy
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A quote from Lewis Carroll
Well, it’s actually from Charles Dodgson’s The Game of Logic 1887: The world contains many Things (such as “Buns”, “Babies”, “Beetles”, “Battledores”, &c.) ; and the Things possess many Attributes (such as “baked”, “beautiful”, “black”, “broken”, &c: in fact, whatever can be “attributed to”, that is “said to belong to”,…