Evolving Thoughts

The Voltage Gate: Basic Concepts: What Is Ecology?

2007-02-07T04:06:00.000+10:00

Basic Concepts in Science - A list

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The last ever post here

2006-09-13T14:33:00.000+10:00

Dear folks. I have defected to Seed Blogs on a promise of fame, fortune and women. So this will be my last ever post at this site. The new link is here, and the news feed in Atom form is here. It's...

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A blogging delay

2006-06-09T10:23:00.000+10:00

Dear readers, for reasons that will shortly become clear, there is a blogging delay here. Hmm... "blogging" in that context sounds like a swear word... "another blogging delay! Dammit!"Stay tuned...

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Biologically feasible political systems

2006-06-05T17:23:00.000+10:00

I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the...

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Evolution and irony in the yard

2006-06-03T11:18:00.000+10:00

A funny story on a site called Community Press about one woman's struggle against dandelions in the yard makes a nice followup to my piece on lawns a while back. In case the link changes, I will give...

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The Synthesis and historiography

2006-06-02T14:33:00.000+10:00

In an execrable display of taste, Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has linked to this blog, and discussed the Michael Ghiselin quote I put up a few days ago. He rightly notes the standard story is a bit...

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Not cooking frogs

2006-06-02T14:27:00.000+10:00

Talking Points Memo links to a number of debunkings of the myth that a frog will stay in a gradually heated pot and so boil. Yet Another Thing Everybody Knows that is false. J.B.S. Haldane called...

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Possible cause of the Permian extinction

2006-06-02T10:09:00.000+10:00

Researchers have found a 300 mile (that's around 480km in real money) crater beneath the Antarctic ice sheet that dates to around the time of the Permian extinction. Bolides seem to be at or near...

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Invade America, and establish democracy there!

2006-06-02T10:00:00.000+10:00

A while back I was at a dinner sitting next to Pete Richerson, a lovely guy who is an ornithologist who has written with Robert Boyd (who I haven't met, but I'm sure he's just as nice) some of the...

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Cooking up a species

2006-06-01T22:47:00.000+10:00

Here's one I was going to leave until I could read the actual paper, because I am both suspicious and skeptical on the one hand and sympathetic to the underlying rationale on the other. And on the...

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The good that men do

2006-06-01T14:40:00.000+10:00

is oft interred with their bones. The evil lives on after them in their posts and papers...The Explanatory Filter is being revived for SETI. See the post by Pim van Meurs at Panda's Thumb linked...

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Microbial species 5: A new beginning

2006-06-01T14:26:00.000+10:00

Well after reading many papers by various bacteriologists, mycologists, and other non-vertebrates specialists, I have come to the conclusion that there is no single set of conceptions or criteria...

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Quote: Ghiselin on the Synthesis

2006-06-01T13:47:00.000+10:00

The notion that "the" Synthesis was somehow complete at one time or another in its history implies that the participants were aiming at some culminating event, like the Resurrection of Christ.The...

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Hobbits and tools

2006-06-01T12:35:00.000+10:00

In a hole in the ground there was found a hobbit...The Independent is reporting objections to the recent claims by the Microcephaly Proponents that the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) had brains that...

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New cave species found in Israel

2006-06-01T10:52:00.000+10:00

Israeli researchers have described eight new species of crustaceans and invertebrates in a recently discovered limestone cave isolated from the external world. They live in and around an underground...

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Creationist UK school expels anyone who doesn't conform

2006-06-01T10:40:00.000+10:00

The Guardian reports that parents of students at Sir Peter Vardy's Trinity school, the school that gained some notoriety for being partially government funded but also teaching creationism, are...

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A quote

2006-05-31T14:47:00.000+10:00

Francis Bacon wrote of thosethat have pretended to find the truth of all natural philosophy in the Scriptures; scandalizing and traducing all other philosophy as heathenish and profane. But there is...

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Microbial species 4a: monophyly and species

2006-05-29T13:39:00.000+10:00

Here is a nice image that shows that even among eukaryotes, reciprocal monophyly is not always the case for species. It's from a paper in PLOS Computational Biology critical of the DNA Barcoding...

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Evolving Thoughts up a tree

2006-05-29T13:32:00.000+10:00

Well, everybody's doing it (doing it, doing it) so I have to. Yes, if everybody else jumped off a cliff I would too, mum. This is what the HTML tags look like for this site when run through the...

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State religion encroaching on military freedoms to believe

2006-05-29T10:50:00.000+10:00

While I'm working through the conceptual tangle I've gotten myself in over microbial species. allow me to mention this item from Mike Dunford's The Questionable Authority: apparently the US Army...

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How not to apply evolution to culture

2006-05-27T20:45:00.000+10:00

Here is a small piece in the Korea Herald, by Arne Jernelov on how evolution explains cultural excellence. It's all about sexual selection, you see - if you do something that is very hard and very...

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Microbial species 4: degrees of sex

2006-05-26T22:30:00.000+10:00

When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems....

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Microbial species 3: Quasispecies and ecology

2006-05-26T15:15:00.000+10:00

The second main approach to a natural conception of microbial species (by which I mean, as opposed to operational, practical or conventional ones, collectively called "artificial" conceptions) is...

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Microbial species 2: recombination

2006-05-25T11:07:00.000+10:00

The cluster of genomes of asexual organisms forms what is called a "phylotype" (Denniston 1974, a term coined by C. W. Cotterman in unpublished notes dated 1960; I like to track these things down)....

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On microbial species

2006-05-24T17:19:00.000+10:00

OK, this is one of a series of posts in which I will play with ideas that might become a paper.The problem is this: usually we define a species as a group of related organisms that share genes (or a...

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