Posted in Evolution, Minds and Brains, Philosophy on April 6, 2008 | No Comments »
From an evolutionary point of view, consciousness is a bit of a conundrum. I’m a pretty hardcore adaptationist so I’m of the opinion that complex traits are either adaptations or related to adaptations in some way (by being byproducts or vestiges of them, or, if they are not shared by a significant proportion of the population, [...]
Posted in Evolution, Idle Speculation, Minds and Brains on August 17, 2007 | No Comments »
One thought experiment in the philosophy of mind is the inverted spectrum. It asks you to imagine a person that sees things in opposite colours (like a photo negative but not exactly - the light areas are still light and the dark areas are still dark, it’s just the colours that are different). This person would [...]
Posted in Animals, Evolution, Personal Minutiae on August 5, 2007 | No Comments »
The good thing about having a zoo membership is that I can go there between lectures and not have to worry about the expense. It’s not a bad zoo, certainly the only one I know of that has both a bear-cat and cat-bears. I went twice this week, to renew my membership and to meet [...]
Posted in Education, Evolution on August 3, 2007 | 1 Comment »
A lot of people don’t understand evolution and it never used to bother me too much. After all, people seem to function just fine without knowing the basics of any other scientific theory. For me, the problem is twofold: First, people who don’t understand evolution talk about it as if they do. Second, where evolution [...]
Posted in Animals, Evolution, Minds and Brains, Science News on July 20, 2007 | No Comments »
I often trawl science blogs and news sites when I’m on the web so here’s some of the science news I’ve collected. Since I’m going to study animal behaviour, I’ve started with three stories from the animal world involving psychotic rats, interspecies ape-love and duck genitalia.
