Toddler food fads

 

My nearly- three year old has been through some odd food fads. At the moment he is going through a stage where he prefers not to eat food items that are mixed in with each other. He suddenly only eats salads of the 'deconstructed' variety.

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.