Hangin' out with Jeremy B

I had a great time at UCL STS yesterday, where I argued that some aspects of bacteriological methodology may be holding us back.  Robert Koch's pure culture laboratory techniques were enormously successful, enabling Koch to take the first steps in defeating tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax and paving the way for the Golden Age of microbiology. But the essentialist and reductionist ontology latent in the Kochian Legacy might be now be impeding further progress in defeating chronic infections, developing new antibiotics and getting a handle on the evolutionary significance of lateral gene transfer.

Other urgent questions we discussed on the day were: Is the legal profession imposing unreasonable demands for standardisation on science? Was it really all Koch's fault? Why did Jeremy Bentham wear such odd clothes? Do parents inevitably catch nits when their toddlers have them? Many thanks to Phyllis Illari, Emma Tobin, Jack Stilgoe, Brendan Clarke, Donald Gillies, Joe Cain and everyone else who came.

Sad news

 

It is with much sadness that I note the passing of Prof. Werner Callebaut (1952-2014). He was the jovial stalwart of my former workplace, the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Editor-in-chief of Biological Theory, Philosopher of Biology, Riedl scholar and also rather a lot of fun. He worked tirelessly, but he also gave me a taste for slivovitz that I'll never forget and often had a mischeivous glint in his eye as he regaled an audience with tales of philosophical punch-ups.

He will be widely missed by all the young academics whose early careers he helped to shelter and by the international philosophy of biology community in general.

http://www.kli.ac.at/callebaut

UCL STS Talk

12 Nov
Ellen Clarke (Oxford)

'On the subject of bacteriology'

Tea/Coffee 4pm, talk 4:30

UCL STS London

ToddlerFail

ToddlerCalm^TM: A guide for calmer toddlers and happier parents 

by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, Piatkus 2013.

I shouldn't have bought this book. My amazon app makes it far too easy to impulse buy.  If I'd looked at a big enough picture to have spotted the 'Foreword by Dr Oliver James' on the cover then I wouldn't have gone near it. Doh.

Oxford Philosophy of Biology Reading Group

Our provisional reading list...................

Scifi list

Over at Schwitzsplinters Eric Schwitzgebel has been collecting Philosophers' recommendations of science fiction for the philosophically-minded.

I couldn't resist piping up when I saw how recent most of the other suggestions are- Greg Egan and Ted Chiang came up loads: Ugh!! Modern scifi seems to me to have taken a really technical turn - its become more like science journalism, about showing off how many details about quantum theory can be included, for example, than about actually playing around with parameters of reality.

The oldies are the best I say. I grew up on good solid 1950s scifi, the kind that was printed in fan magazines, where the characters were reassuringly two dimensional. They were desperately sexist and the dialogue often terrible but it didn't matter, because they were all about the ideas. Attitudes to science have changed a lot since then. Technology used to be magical, something that could save us from work, take us around the galaxy and solve all of humanity's problems. Now we've lost that optimism and science has become somewhat elitist, intellectual, on the back foot under attack from the paranoid homeopathic antivaccination brigade. I feel that science fiction has in turn lost its playfulness, its bravado. I hope it comes back one day soon......

Here are my contributions to Eric's blog.....

Oxford Philosophy of Biology Reading group is go!

I'm pretty excited to announce that, as of friday this week, Jessica Laimann and I are convening a brand new shiny reading group. Theme is 'Inheritance and Cooperation', this week's reading is 'The major evolutionary transitions' by Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995 (the paper, not the book) and tickets are selling fast. Not literally, obviously, although I am thinking about flogging a commemorative mug.

On carlessness

Back before the bear was born, while we were taking turns to get caught in a panicked loop,  reeling off items whose possession we considered essential features of the parenthood that was nearly upon us (Me: lipstick, tinned food, prunes; Him: lampshades, a shed) there was one item that recurred: a car. We were full of all sorts of unrealistic and bizarre preconceptions concerning the essential nature of parents and their accoutrements, but car-ownership stood out as something with actual reason backing it up. Cars help you to carry things to places without getting wet. They enable you to drive to supermarkets and appointments. They permit last-minute scrambles for the safety of grandparents' houses. Everyone we know who has progeny has a car, we thought. Without a car you're second-class, not a proper grown-up, not to be trusted with raising a human.

Quarantine ethics

It was recently reported that residents of slums in Liberia and Sierra Leone have been placed under military-enforced quarantines: nobody in, nobody out.

The ebola crisis has been reasonably visible in western media, and there was some discussion of the uncomfortable fact that the lives of several white aid workers were saved by an antidote too scarce to be widely deployed. But I am surprised that there hasn't been a bigger western reaction to the tactics that seem to be in use to control the disease in the African countries it is affecting.

BSPS meeting

I'm giving a talk to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science next monday 13th, at the LSE.

Title: 'How to Count Organisms'

Abstract:

'Current biology struggles to settle a disagreement concerning the best way to conceptualise one of its key entities - the organism. In this talk I try to show that philosophers have tools they can offer to science, by utilising a simple story about natural kinds to build justification for a particular account of what it is to be a member of the class 'organism'. 

I offer a justified organism concept by tying it to scientific success in a way which offers us confidence that the class picked out is not merely a matter of taste but is, in a sense I will specify, the right answer. I argue for a characterisation of the organism problem as concerning the identification of the units we need to count if we want our models of  the selection of traits in real populations to truthfully capture the dynamics of evolutionary change.'

I'm looking forward to it!