"More"... I didn't think you would not use morphology. Sorry if that is how it came across.
07.03.2026 04:37
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"More"... I didn't think you would not use morphology. Sorry if that is how it came across.
Seems like diatoms are now being more molecularly classified.
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Most of our marsupials look nothing like the opossum. In Australia.
Bill Wimsatt and Mark Wilson are each the author of a body of work whose fruitfulness is rivaled only by its forbiddingness. Despite deep sympathies between their approaches and conclusions, their work has not yet been read together. This paper makes the case for doing so. We identify a shared question at the heart of their work: how is it that limited beings such as ourselves come to possess genuine knowledge of a complex world? We then show that Wimsatt and Wilson arrive at similar answers to this question. Over a range of topics (investigative strategies, the uses of models, and theoretical and conceptual structure), both scholars emphasize the functional messiness of science. This is complemented by a pragmatist-leaning philosophical methodology that recognizes that one of the core uses of knowledge is to scaffold the acquisition of more knowledge. The core of the paper traces the mutually supportive interplay between their philosophical doctrines and methods. We end with two brief discussions: one a defense of their winding, playful writing styles, the other a brief consideration of the relationship between their work and Arthur Fine’s natural ontological attitude.
"Knowledge is not merely for describing the world. Nor is knowledge merely for getting around in the world. Knowledge is also for creating more knowledge."
By @consume.red & @philosofir.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1007/s104...
Fascists gonna fasch
I’m tired of this too, but we don’t know the threats the Americans have made against Australia
Is that Neil the Seal?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_th...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_th...
Interested in how race, ethnicity, and ancestry get used and misused in genetics? This talk is for you!
Register at www.hugera.org
#philsky #philsci #STS #HPbio #popgen
In a long tweet about Anthropic, Pete Hegseth, through the offical "SecWar" Twitter account says "the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic."
Hegseth is wholeheartedly endorsing the core premise of fascism: industry, as part of the private sphere, must be subordinated to the military objectives of the state.
New on the Archive:
Prieto, Guido I. and Fábregas-Tejeda, Alejandro (2026) Modeling versatility as the hallmark of model organisms. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 48. p. 12. ISSN 0391-9714
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28339/
This looks like it might be particularly interesting to folks in #hpbio e.g. interested in niche concepts or some of Lewontin's arguments. "Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea" by Chia et al. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
That’s it; rub it in
That's no curse. If there is a heaven, it consists entirely of the occasion to photograph hummingbirds, although I would have a much better camera and know how to use it.
Sanctions are positive or negative. I hope China isn’t going to reward misconduct. These days nothing is certain.
Excellent fellowship opportunity for animal ethics & animal studies scholars.
Since it has escaped the bubble, and people are talking about how evolutionary just so stories are used to legitimate rape, let me mention one of may favorite papers: Lisa Lloyd’s demolition of Thornhill & Palmer’s book “A Natural History of Rape”. #sts #hps repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcont...
I'm so envious of those who live in the range of hummingbirds. I would spend every day photographing them if I could.
Ohl, M. How many species are there?. Philos Stud (2026). doi.org/10.1007/s110...
Needed to be said: "Ainsi, il arrive à la Big science, qui impressionne tant les évaluateurs épris de bibliométrie, d'être à la fois trop ambitieuse et trop paresseuse" (Thus, Big science, which so impresses evaluators enamored with bibliometrics, happens to be both too ambitious and too lazy) 🧪
Last weekend I enjoyed recording two episodes for @bufordrat.bsky.social's excellent Elucidations podcast (elucidations.vercel.app). One episode was on ideas from my book, Evolution and the Machinery of Chance (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...). #evosky, #hpbio.
I defer and retract.
Yeah. Although moral philosophy was a pastime rather than a profession. But so was geology and astronomy.
Which of course was short for “natural philosophers”.
🚨 Our Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Computer Simulations in Science is now live. It was a lot of work but I’m proud of this substantial update. I hope it helps those in #philsci interested in the philosophical implications of computational methods.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/simu...
Episode 2 of "Nature in Crisis," the podcast I'm doing with
@meehancrist.bsky.social for the @lrb.co.uk is now up.
We discuss "The Light Eaters" by @zoeschlanger.bsky.social.
Plant intelligence, plant agency, the pace and place of plants.
www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
The very nature of representing structure in natural relationships is binary. So it’s unsurprising that clades look ramifying. They’re b-trees in a database. I get the impression that reticulation is everywhere.
