Archetype

Evolution today and tomorrow – Lisbon’s conference

I spend last Thursday and Friday attending a conference held at the University of Lisbon: Evolution today and tomorrow: Darwin evaluated by contemporary evolutionary and philosophical theories. 23 – 24 April 2009. Don’t let the event’s webpage design fool you, the conference was well organized and brought together a diverse array of interesting speakers, both Portuguese and from abroad.

Each session was more or less arranged around controversial topics and the organizers made an effort to include people across disciplines- there were biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and even the odd economist. The latter is working on applying a Darwinian framework to study the evolution of political institutions, but appears to have a hard time convincing his peers that Darwinian evolutionary theory does not implies teleology nor does it provides a scientific justification for racism. Good luck with that.

The highlight for me was to meet philosopher of biology John Wilkins, who keeps one of my favorite blogs at ScienceBlogs. During his talk he covered the murky and much discussed topic of species. One of the basic premises of his work is that if you take the Essentialist story seriously and set out to study all those pre-Darwinian taxonomists who believed that species had essences and were therefore unable to accommodate evolution into their worldview, you won’t find any. Not even all the way to Aristotle. It is yet more research arriving at the conclusion that Ernts Mayr constructed a straw-man of unenlightened typologists just for marketing purposes while promoting his version of the Biological Species Concept. The fruits of Wilkins decade-long research on species is about to be published in the form of two books.

I was able to harass him during coffee breaks and dinner with annoying questions about philosophy of taxonomy. He is a very clear thinker and I’m happy to report that he answered all my questions graciously. And in case you were wondering, irl he looks just like the great white gorilla in his blog’s avatar. I know, it’s freakish.

Tags: Essentialism, Typological thinking