Title: 'How to Count Organisms'
Abstract:
'Current biology struggles to settle a disagreement
concerning the best way to conceptualise one of its key entities - the
organism. In this talk I try to show that philosophers have tools they can
offer to science, by utilising a simple story about natural kinds to build
justification for a particular account of what it is to be a member of the
class 'organism'.
I offer a justified organism concept by tying it to
scientific success in a way which offers us confidence that the class picked
out is not merely a matter of taste but is, in a sense I will specify, the
right answer. I argue for a characterisation of the organism problem as
concerning the identification of the units we need to count if we want our
models of the selection of traits in real populations to truthfully
capture the dynamics of evolutionary change.'
I'm looking forward to it!
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