In which Max shouts about AI from a rocking chair on the porch

In which Max explores some wacky (and not-so-wacky) attempts to explain the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian fauna (vintage 1895-1960)

In which Max presents a lost picture from the history of paleontology: Charles Walcott’s “Sidney crab” complete with massive claws (actually the appendages of a large radiodont)

In which Max finishes wrestling with a question that has always bugged him: how did uniformitarianism come to be associated with the view that nature’s laws are invariant in time and space? —Part 2 of...

In which Max wrestles with a question that has always bugged him: how did uniformitarianism come to be associated with the view that nature’s laws are invariant in time and space? (It’s interesting, I...

A deep cut: in which Max examines the durability and challenges of actualistic reasoning in paleontology

At the beginning of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century a great debate about the true nature of and the origin of fossils started in Italy, the cradle of Leonardo and Aldro…

My new paper in Paleobiology (OA), on some lesser known aspects of the early history of punctuated equilibria, is available to read online. It is, in effect, a synthesis of some of my older work on ...

In which Max asks what an argument for repatriating a fossil might look like in the absence of demonstrable illegality in the acquisition of that fossil

In which Max blows your little mind

Podcast Episode · The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · 19/10/2025 · 50m

In which Max has finally completed his two-part reading list for people interested in learning more about the history of geology

Submit work that examines how Hacking’s historical and pragmatic approach to philosophy has reshaped inquiries into psychiatry.

Podcast Episode · The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · 11/09/2025 · 48m

Florentino Ameghino was born on September 18, 1854. He came from a family of Italian immigrants who settled in 1854 in the town of Lujan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the extraction and exportati…

Problematica #40: In which Max pays tribute to the late paleontologist Richard Fortey by assembling some of his favorite Fortey-an sentences

Jon Hodge passed away peacefully on Friday August 29, 2025, in the Harrogate District Hospital, of complications following pneumonia. While in the hospital, Jon shared many stories and jokes with t…

Space shaped humanity—from asteroid extinctions to ice age shifts, Martian dust storm science, and solar technologies—revealing cosmic forces’ enduring influence.

Since I just posted my new paper on the historical challenge of classifying the Ediacaran biota , let me shamelessly promote another new paper, this one on the origin of the expression “Cambrian expl...

Hey, so I wrote a paper about the problem of classifying Ediacaran organisms, which I worked shopped in an old blog post. You can read it here. https://rdcu.be/exKL3

Growing evidence suggests that timescales for plastic degradation have been vastly underestimated. The fossil record of plastic-like biopolymers might provide a perspective on plastic fossilization in...

Okay, so… this morning, I read this fun little article in the New York Times, which describes a statistical model designed to rank baseball players across eras. Barry Bonds came out on top, which ...

In which Max remembers the biggest American geological brouhaha of the nineteenth century

In which Alison Laurence looks to La Brea's past and present during dire times

Evidence from DNA is extremely powerful: but what role should it play in reconstructing the evolutionary history of hominids? (By Helen De Cruz)