Greetings!

This blog is a place where I’ll post occasional raves on subjects that interest me and may possibly attract another reader or two.

For the benefit of the search engines, I’m interested in plant taxonomy especially Iridaceae and Centrolepidaceae; breeding garden varieties of Watsonia; autistic culture; evolutionary theory that goes beyond genetic reductionism; Scientology; the politics of autism; Buddhism; and debunking junk science. Also (since I get paid for it) in applying botanical science to government policy on weed management as part of land management.

Some of my heroes and role models are: Lan CaiHe, ER Eddison, Padmasambhava, GK Chesterton, Agnes Arber, L Ron Hubbard, Vladimir Nabokov, HuiNeng, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Barbara McClintock, Olaf Stapledon, FaZang, Michael Polanyi, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace, John Coltrane, Emily Bronte, Simon Conway Morris, Pierre Bonnard, David Bellamy, Dennis Stephens, Michael Faraday, Lewis Mumford ….

I’m passionate about the need for our society to rediscover some intellectual roots. Mechanism and reductionism just won’t cut it anymore, but neither will a return to mysticism or superstition. By intellectual roots I mean knowing something real as a starting point for learning, and knowing how we know it: I’d call these things metaphysics and epistemology, if such words were not too oldfashioned for today’s hiphop-style academics.

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