Duke University | Center for Philosophy of Biology

The next philosophy of biology reading group will be Tuesday February 19. We meet at 7:35 p.m. in the the West Duke building on East campus.

Our next reading group paper will be Alan Grafen’s “The Formal Darwinism a Mid-Term Report.” This is a mostly nontechnical sketch of an ongoing project. Formal Darwinism promises to be a hot area in the next few years, so it would be good for us to become familiar with it. now If you have the inclination and technical ability, I recommend going to his website to check out his other papers. Some are fairly short.
Finally, a philosopher of biology will be giving a talk next Friday, February 22. Matt Haber, from the University of Utah, is a good friend and a sharp mind. His talk promises to be interesting and insightful.

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, December 4 at 7:35 p.m. in the 2nd floor lounge of the West Duke building on East Campus.

Our paper is co-written by Aryn Conrad and Carlos Mariscal and concerns the nature of evolution. Briefly: evolution is occasionally used as a metaphor to describe the change over time of culture, chemistry, and stars, among other objects. This is sometimes taken to be more than a mere metaphor– as when authors claim cultural variants actually evolve according to the human environment. But much of Darwinian evolution is written in terms of populations that have offspring with discrete generations. These are ontological commitments that do not seem to have neat analogues in other systems. Most authors have attempted to refit the data to the theory to show how their domains of interest can be reinterpreted to fit the theory. Some authors reject the analogy altogether and argue that the different sorts of evolution are fundamentally different. In this paper, Conrad and Mariscal reanalyze the theory in light of the phenomena. They accept that there is one sort of evolution, of which biology is merely a special case. They explore this account and consider what it takes to be a strong evolutionary system.

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, November 20 at 7:35 p.m. in the 2nd floor lounge of the West Duke building on East Campus.    In any case, our next reading will be by Jonathan Birch. The paper, “Collective action in the fraternal transitions” is attached. It should be worthwhile to anybody interested in the major transitions or inclusive fitness theory.