Edges and Boundaries of Biological Objects

John Wilkins and I have been at the Edges and Boundaries of Biological Objects workshop here in Salt Lake City for the past few days. John live-blogged some of the talks, so you may want to check his posts out. Lots of interesting stuff was discussed about populations (here and here), the fossil record (here), ecosystems (here and here), system dynamics and boundaries (here and here), DNA bar-coding (here and here), species, rank-free classification, and homology. All in all some really thought-provoking ideas that will take me a good while to digest.

Discussions are likely to continue at the Philosophy of Biology Cafe.

More like this

Well, I am back from the Science Blogging Conference, exhilarated and exhausted! After months of preparation, and last few days of frantic last-minute work, the Big Day has come and I could finally relax and enjoy myself. And enjoy it I did! I hope the others did as well. First order of duty:…
OK, everyone is doing this (Janet was the last one I saw), so I'll do it, too. Instead of writing a creative year in review, just copy the first sentence of the first blogpost of each month in 2006. Until June 9th I had three blogs, so I have to pick the first sentence from the first post on each…
Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra —…
Every time there's an article about species barcoding--using a short DNA sequence to identify species--there always seems to be people who get all het up: Barcoding, which is something I have criticised and discussed before here, and here, treats species as things that have some invariant property…