John S Wilkins

John S Wilkins
Research Scholar
History and Philosophy of Biology
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I am an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. I’m a mature aged but still more or less alert historian and philosopher of science. My thesis issued in a couple of books and I’ve published a couple more. I also publish academic papers.

I have a PhD from the University of Melbourne (2004) and have worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up an ARC research fellowship at the University of Sydney, followed by lecturing at Bond, UNSW and Melbourne. I am presently Honorary Fellow at The University of Melbourne, and a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, headquartered in Montclair, NJ, USA. 

I have an Erdos number of three, of which I am unwarrantedly proud:

Wilkins, John S., and Wesley R. Elsberry. 2001. The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance. Biology and Philosophy 16 (November):711-724.

Elsberry, Wesley, and Jeffrey Shallit. 2011. Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”. Synthese 178 (2):237-270.

Erdos, Paul, and Jeffrey O. Shallit. 1991. New bounds on the length of finite pierce and Engel series. Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeux3 (1):43-53. [Among several others]

After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, I finally completed my thesis on species concepts in 2004. Since then, I have wandered aimlessly through the world dispensing unasked-for advice with faux gravitas.

Contact John at john.s.wilkins@ronininstitute.org or john@wilkins.id.au

Biology, History, Philosophy, Taxonomy, Religion, Belief formation
History of Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science