Consolations of philosophy: on the ontological status of unborn children

Well there hasn't been an awful lot of blogging going on around here lately. The events of last summer just sucked the words out of me.

Conference announcement: Philosophy of Biology in the UK

Philosophy of Biology in the UK

Bristol, 8th-9th June 2016

The University of Bristol is hosting the 2016 meeting of Philosophy of Biology in the UK (PBUK), on the 8th-9th of June. This is the third meeting of PBUK, first hosted at All Souls College, Oxford in 2012 and then at Christ's College, Cambridge in 2014.  The conference seeks to bring together philosophers, philosophically-inclined biologists, and other researchers with an interest in foundational and conceptual issues in the biological sciences.  

Plenary speakers:

• Alexander Rosenberg (Philosophy, Duke University)
• Carolyn Price (Philosophy, Open University)
• Sabina Leonelli (Philosophy, Exeter)
• Innes Cuthill (Biology, University of Bristol)
• Tudor Baetu (Philosophy, University of Bristol)

Submissions:

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted through EasyChair, using the link below, by 15th March 2016. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by the 10th of April.

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pbuk2016

Details for registration and payment for attending the conference will follow.

Contact information:

For any inquiries, please contact pbuk-2016@bristol.ac.uk.

Conference webpage: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/events/2016/june/philosophy-of-biology-uk.html

Happier times ahead!

I couldn't be more pleased to shout to the world that the Clarke-Ducas' luck has changed: we're expecting another baby!

Look at this! Its me! On a science paper!! How cool is that?

Brown and Heyes: Social learning and the other cooperation problem

This is the latest in my series of blog posts summarising the talks and responses that took place at the meeting 'Inheritance and cooperation'.

Unfortunately, some idiot forgot to press the 'rec' button on this one (an idiot called 'Clarke'). So i cannot make any audio available I'm afraid : (

Dr Rachael Brown is a Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney who has written about learning, its ability to act as an inheritance mechanism and its effects upon evolutionary processes. Her talk, 'Generating benefit: Social learning and the “other” cooperation problem', explored the idea of treating social learning as a cultural inheritance mechanism, and one that occurs, furthermore, in non-human animals.  

Birch and Bentley: Time and relatedness in microbes and humans

Dr Jonathan Birch from the LSE is working on a book called 'The Philosophy of Social Evolution'. For this meeting Birch drew on his recent paper 'Gene mobility and the concept of relatedness' to talk about a foundational idea in contemporary evolutionary theory - Hamilton's theory of Kin Selection - and in particular at its application in the context of what has been called 'sociomicrobiology' - the study of sociality in bacteria and other microbes.

Missed

'Miscarriage' is such a cruel world. Like 'misconduct', it implies irresponsibility, fault, deliberately improper handling, by a woman, of her duty. She carried it wrong.

Powers and Clarke: Insititutions and the development of human sociality

Dr Simon Powers is a member of the Lehmann group in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, although he originally got his PhD in computer science.

Powers is concerned to explain how humans have moved from small-scale, self-sufficient tribes or kin-groups, to large-scale, differentiated exchange economies, a change which has elsewhere been called the 'Holocene transition'.

Merlin and Clark: Extending inheritance

Dr Francesca Merlin from the IHPST (CNRS, Paris) gave a talk based on her forthcoming paper which evaluates recent calls to extend our notion of inheritance. She starts with a commonsensical notion of inheritance as 'like begets like' and claims that the notion of inheritance is intended, primarily, to explain the fact that organisms produce organisms that are similar to them. It grounds continuity across generations of living things, in other words. She argues, thus, that there is a privileged link between inheritance and reproduction.

Helanterä and Uller: Superorganisms as model systems

For the first guest talk of the meeting, we heard from Dr Heikki Helanterä, who is a biologist from the University of Helsinki, working on eusocial insects. Heikki is beginning a new project in which he tests the idea that eusocial insect colonies can be compared with organisms. He considers the best candidates to be those colonies in which workers are sterile - terminally differentiated - because this is when 'the cool stuff happens'. For example, the queens can mate multiply, bringing all kinds of genetic diversity into the colony, because the workers aren't in a position to do anything about it.

Helanterä is interested in establishing whether sufficient heritable variation exists at the level of whole insect colonies to support a between-colony selection process, in which colonies act as units of selection in their own right.