Technical Work

ISHPSSB's Future Directions conference

The Future Directions workshop of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology was held on the University of San Francisco campus last week, and it was a resounding success.

The workshop was the first "off year" meeting sponsored by the Society, and so was experimental. The workshop emphasized topics of interest to graduate students, such as finding a job and publishing strategies, although there were just as many sessions devoted to technical issues.

It's clear that many people are eager to organize workshops in years to come, and this should certainly become a routine part of the Society's activities.

I moderated a session on "Interdisciplinary issues", and presented a brief comment, which I'm posting here.

A discussion of the workshop is being held on the Philosophy of Biology blog, with an open thread for comments (which are, of course, welcome here too.

A paper on Evo-Devo

I've posted a draft paper on the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology (called "Evo-Devo"), which can be downloaded by clicking on the title in the list on the left. This is from a workshop last year at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. It's a lovely place, and the workshop was very productive and a lot of fun.

The workshop grew out of a session the year before at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA., which is one of the finer ornaments of civilization.

The papers from the workshop are going to be published in a book edited by Jane Maienschein and Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State, who also organized the workshop, gave papers, and made everything work right.

The paper sketches a major thread in a complicated argument I'm trying to make about the ways in which institutional arrangements influence the intellectual content of research. It focuses Evo-Devo, which is the most interesting and exciting area of research in biology today.