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I will return to the blogosphere next week. A recent topic of John Hawks', "Theory or law?" woke me up a little. I hope to add something constructive to the discussion. (Of course, by the time I get to it, Hawks will have already published 763 posts.)
My colleague Matt Haber (Philosophy, Utah) introduced me to his new venture, the Philosophy of Biology Cafe. According to the site:
This forum is a place to come, sit down, and have a hearty swig of the many topics concerning philosophy and biology. We try to keep things in a coffee-house theme (in case you didn't notice) so if you have any concerns, please contact one of our baristas (moderators).
It's nice to see some innovation in the blogosphere broadly construed. Matt has set up any number of forums, from research to biology & society to journals, to calls for papers. Everthing's there, nicely organized.
At the moment, the Philosophy of Biology Cafe is in alpha-testing, but I can see some momentum beginning to build, and beta-testing is around the corner. Stop by and take a look.
On Wednesday (18 April), all of us (me, my wife, my daughter) head off to Durham, England for my Fellowship period (through June) at the Institute of Advanced Study (housed in Cosins Hall pictured above) at Durham University. I'll be hosted at Van Mildert College.
There, I intend to get back to blogging (hard to believe?), mostly on the work I'll be doing, on Fisher, but also on what's going on at the Institute. There'll be a bit of a travelogue as well, assuming I remember to take the digital camera out of my suitcase.
There are two small, philosophy of biology conferences coming up, both of which are accepting submissions. The first is hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Biology at Duke University:
"Chance in Evolution"
April 6-8, 2007
Invited speakers include:
Richard Lewontin (Harvard)
Roberta Millstein (UC Davis)
John Beatty (University of British Columbia) and
Robert Brandon (Duke)
The conference is being organized by the Center's post doc, Chris Haufe, and he is accepting submissions until 1 March. Go here to see what's what.
The second conference follows on the heels of Duke's, and is the 22nd Regional Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science on microbial evolution at the University of Colorado, Boulder:
"Moving Beyond Darwin: The New Evolution"
April 13-15, 2007
Invited speakers include:
John Dupré (University of Exeter)
Jan Sapp (York University) and
Norm Pace (University of Colorado)
Abtract and paper submissions are being accepted through 6 March by Carol Cleland in the Department of Philosophy at Colorado. Go here to see what's what.
Looks like I'll submit to the Duke conference given that I've been thinking a lot about chance in evolution recently.
I draw your attention to the Biohumanities Project at the University of Queensland, Australia. Paul Griffiths, an ARC Federation Fellow, is director of the project. As the site explains,
Biohumanities studies 'biology' in two senses: the scientific discipline of biology and the objects it studies: biomolecules, animals, ecosystems and so forth. The history of biology encompasses not only scientific institutions, apparatus and laboratory practice, but also the objects of biological inquiry. The laboratory fruit fly or a cell-line preserved in laboratories around the world each have their own histories. Similarly, philosophers of biology conduct conceptual investigations of the nature of biological taxa (species, genera, families, etc) as well as studying the distinctive features of disciplines like biological taxonomy whose products are classifications rather than more stereotypical forms of scientific discovery.
I encourage readers to explore the site. But, in particular, I encourage readers to subscribe the Project's podcasts, which includes the proceedings of:
4th Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Evidence-based Medicine. January, 2007. Keynote Speaker: Jerry Ravetz.
3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Idealisation, Mechanism and Reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology. December, 2006. Keynote speakers: William Bechtel, Marcel Weber, Alexander Rosenberg.
2nd Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Philosophy of Ecology. June, 2006. Speakers include Mark Colyvan, Jay Odenbaugh, Kim Sterelny, Hugh Possingham, Greg Mikkelsen.
1st Queensland Biohumanities Conference: The Conceptual Impact of the Genomic Revolution. October 2005. Keynote addresses: Paul Griffiths & Karola Stotz, John Dupré & Maureen O'Malley, Kenneth Schaffner.
Other speakers featured on the site include Samir Okasha, Jonathan Kaplan and Robert Solomon. All worthwhile stuff!
Didn't we all have a subscription to Scientific American at one time or another? I know I did, and I loved it. (And I will again.) On my left-hand sidebar, you'll find some links to some great stuff over at SciAM, as well as their feed. Here are the links.
Science
Science News
Health News
Science and Technology
Science Magazine
Surf over and read awhile, and while you're at it, subscribe to their feed.The SciAm links and feed are now a permanent feature of this blog after a request to partner with me. How could I not oblige? Okay, they offered me a subscription. But they didn't have to twist my arm!
My stuff is showing up elsewhere.... (And, I'm pleased about it.)
Coturnix, of A Blog Around the Clock, had the great idea of putting together an anthology of science blogging. My series on the Fisher-Wright controversy, here, here, and here was nominated for inclusion as was my "10 Assertions About Evolution" as part of the larger "round robin" (here, here, here, and here). Coturnix says the final selections will get posted on Monday (8 January); we shall see if I make it that far. I've not done much with my 10 assertions, but my series on the Fisher-Wright controversy is the heart of a paper that's currently in press in Joe Cain and Michael Ruse's, Descended From Darwin: Insights Into American Evolutionary Studies, 1925-1950. I'll post the paper here once I get a final update on the status of the collection.
Razib recently wrote up a quite nice post on genetic draft on Gene Expression. He recommends reading my posts (here and here) and paper on draft. The paper has been in press at Philosophy of Science for going on three years; they're woefully behind publishing the journal. It'll be nice if people take a look at the paper before it comes out as old news in the journal (whenever that will be). I think the genetic draft stuff is very cool.
Anyway, I appreciate the attention. And, "thanks," to Coturnix and Razib.
No, not Ish Kabibble, ISHKABIBBLE, that is, the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology. It's just a quirky pronunciation for an otherwise unpronounceable abbreviation, ISHPSSB.
ISHPSSB is the largest society of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of the biological sciences in the world. Every other summer, the society has a conference, and 25-29 July, 2007, hosted by Egenis in Exeter, UK is the next one. The meeting can be both edifying and just plain fun. And as it happens, the call for papers, sessions, panels, etc. for the 2007 meeting is out. The deadline is 15 February, 2007.
Explore the ISHPSSB website and in particular the conference website. A session on blogging the life sciences would certainly be ... interesting.
I didn't want to be the blogger who lamented long periods of bloglessness. Yet, here I am, in spite of encouragement by my fellow bloggers. The blogger who wasn't there. When the autumn quarter arrived, I was hard pressed to sit down and write up something worth reading. And I refuse to blather on about politics, intelligent design creationism, which weird personality test I took, and so on. Dammit Jim, this blog is a research notebook, not a diary. And so I didn't really blog at all.
Of course, the last few months have been busy enough that I felt like I had to cut something loose. I was back to teaching after a year off. It's amazing what you forget --like that you have to order books. And jumping into a huge lecture course jammed with freshmen who have a bottomless pit of excuses and sob stories is no picnic. But that's over. And I had to get my tenure file put together and turned in. Good news: My department voted unanimously to tenure and promote me. I await the administration's view, but I predict being an Associate Professor at the start of next fall. I can't wait for those perks! Oh, wait. There are no perks. Huh. Also, I had to help (in some sense of the word) bring my daughter, Ella , into the world: November 15, 7:12 PM, 9 lbs. 7 oz. and absolutely perfect. In no uncertain terms, that was the ... best ... day ... ever.
I start back with winter quarter on 3 January. I'm teaching two courses, one upper level, undergraduate elective called, "Philosophy and Cognitive Ethology." A fun course on "animal minds." The other course is a graduate seminar called "History and Philosophy of Biology." That course is centered around the "rise and fall (?) of panselectionism" in evolutionary genetics from roughly the 1930s to roughly now. (Stay tuned for the reading list.) I'm going to be busy. Just plain busy. But then in the spring I and whole "fam" leave for the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Durham --the whole spring. All research (and other stuff). Can't wait.
Hopefully, blogging will pick up this winter in connection with the HPB course. Perhaps, even, I will force graduate students to ponder evolutionary genetics right here on this blog. Heck, some of what I'll be teaching is right here on this blog. I've got to find some way of "encouraging" the shrinking violets listed on the moribund "HPB Group" to the right to contribute to the blog. We shall see.
2006 has been good to me. I'll be happy if 2007 just maintains.
This is my 1958 (Dover, 2nd edition) of R. A. Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. To be sure, I would love a 1930 edition. Jealous Razib?
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