Postblogging the conference

Sorry that I didn't liveblog today. The room was too far to carry my Mac, and I was tired damn it. Blame Lynch, Todd Grantham, Michael Ghiselin and Roberta Millstein among others, who all made me drink beer. No, I swear, they really did. Anyway the final session (below the fold) was very interesting and revived my interest in some work I did ten years back, and even published.

Before I get into that, I should note a couple of non-philosophy items. First, the Chocolate Nazi. This way too thin to be a chocoholic gourmand who works a fine foods store in Salt Lake City tried to convince me (and the others) that there is a perfect chocolate (something from Venezuela at umpteen dollars a microgram and a lien on your first born). He convinced me that there is bad chocolate, but I really couldn't tell the difference between the quality varieties. This is no doubt because I do not believe in qualities as a matter of metaphysical principle, not because I lack all taste and sensibilities as some have unkindly remarked upon seeing how I dress. I had to drink beer just to get rid of the chocolate flavours, later (which adds to my lack of responsibility in that regards).

Second, the local museum of natural history which Lynch and I visited after lunch today. It clearly hasn't been updated since at least the late seventies. Nary a cladogram in sight, lots of signs about the evolution of "Man", whales were shown as distal from the Artiodactyls, and then there was this:

Now I don't know if you know your history of evolutionary theory, but the series of horse hoof morphologies is old - it was proposed by Huxley and Marsh back in the 1870s. Nowadays we know well that these are their own nodes on the evolutionary tree. Gould did an essay on it somewhere. The large primate in the picture is trying to express disgust. he found some amusement in this though:

This is both worrying and amusingly correct. Worrying because it probably got put there to assuage creationist sensibilities back in the 1970s when they were influential. Amusing because I say that species is a Latin word that just means (wait for it) "kind" in ordinary discourse of the 17th century and earlier, and so has no technical meaning until Ray defines it in 1686; and hence nothing said about species in logic can be applied to biological kinds before that date.

Well it amused me. Anyway, the sessions this morning.

Elihu M. Gerson (Tremont Institute), Beckett Sterner (U Chicago), and Chris Di Teresi (U Chicago) presented a general session on boundaries, including disciplinary boundaries and systems biology. These were very abstract (except Eli's) discussions about the boundaries of objects within the sciences. Beckett presented a sketch of a "multiple perspective" account of biological objects. It's a bit complex, so bear with me.

Taking as a starting point a genetic perspective of the organism, Beckett treated them as they have been since Sewall Wright in the 1930s - as objects characterised in a "space". The size of the space is determined by the number of "dimensions" (in this case the number of loci in the genetic sequence under discussions) and the number of values each dimension can have (in genetics, four, in protein space, 20, and so on). A view not unlike this was first developed by Maynard Smith in 1970, and it has recently been extended by Stuart Kaufmann, and lately, Sergey Gavrilets, who assiduous readers will know I favour.

So a science may treat an object as something that has a coordinate in a space set up by the way it is formally measured or modelled. It's a short step from that to see different approaches in a science like biology as competing, or even complementary, theoretical spaces. Why I like this is that I argued for something very similar ten years ago (and I wasn't first, of course; the Semantic Conception approaches of Suppe, van Fraassen, Paul Thompson and Lisa Lloyd are each also effectively a state space model of theories) in my very first paper:

Wilkins, John S. 1998. The evolutionary structure of scientific theories. Biology and Philosophy 13 (4): 479–504.

This is also notable as never having been cited since, but I was ever so excited to get something in print...

Chris's paper is a bit hazy in my memory, unfortunately. I was still mulling over Beckett's paper and composing a question, which I forgot to ask, so I asked another one. Chris discussed how the use of the same model organisms (zebrafish) allowed collaborating specialists in different fields to work cross-discipline when the funding and institutional divides were subdiscipline specific. It even allowed work to take results from one domain - developmental biology of the fish - to another - heart problems in humans.

Eli argued from the basis of a case study on masculinisation of mammals. The exemplar is work done on the ways in which the genitalia of females of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) has evolved to closely resemble male genitalia. This requires work in a range of disciplines from molecular biology to ecology and everything in between. It turns out that this is true of a number of species not closely related, including a lemur, an elephant, wallabies, and moles. But to study this requires funding and funding agencies don't like or are prevented by legislation from supporting cross-disciplinary research, and as Science reported recently, the funds for the hyena work, let alone the others (which is done by people who are connected with the Berkeley hyena group) are gone, leaving the study in doubt.

Okay, that's all I have to say. I get on a plane tomorrow and go back to Phoenix to see the bees that Hamilton is working on, and then back to Australia, where I only have three thousand undone jobs to complete...