Our next meeting will be Wednesday, February 8 in West Duke Room 204. Stephen Friesen and Marc Bogonovich from Indiana University will be presenting a grant proposal to the Templeton foundation being developed with the participation and guidance of Dan McShea. The proposal is centered around and inspired by the zero force evolutionary law (ZFEL).
A short abstract is included here. As always, there will be snacks and drinks.
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“The project proposal will consist of two main components. 1) an empirical analysis of the ZFEL, pure complexity, and their implications (Bogonovich) and 2) a philosophical/historical analysis of abstract representations of nature that we believe the ZFEL somehow impinges on (Friesen).
Bogonovich is interested in the implications of the ZFEL on the long term trajectory of life, astrobiology, the evolution of intelligence, and potential tendencies and long term trajectories of life. He will share some ideas about how to explore and analyze these issues with data. Friesen will be developing and describing a notion of abstract representation of nature that he has termed Weltbilder from german literally meaning world-pictures. We will be proposing that there exists a representation largely, but in some sense not entirely, removed from empirical analysis. The following phrases evoke these kinds of representations e.g. ‘struggle for existence’, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, ‘scala naturae’. We wish to explore how these representations interface with models, theory (more familiar kinds of representations), and ultimately data.”