The Mistakes in Living Systems team, consisting of David Oderberg (PI), Jonathan Hill (CI), Ingo Bojak (CI), and Jon Gibbins (CI), part of the ‘(Re)Conceptualizing Function and Goal-Directedness’ cluster, recently published an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology, entitled: ‘Mistake-Making: A Theoretical Framework for Generating Research Questions in Biology, with Illustrative Application to Blood Clotting’. The article is open access and available online here.
Ben Allen, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Emmanuel College, and PI of the “Natural selection for collective purpose” project, recently co-authored “Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“We uncover a surprising result, that directionality can actually facilitate cooperation. We study this effect theoretically and also in empirical social networks. We suggest several practical implications, including how to modify the directions of social interactions to promote cooperation.”
The "Towards a science of intrinsic purposiveness: organizational theory of ecological functions and its implications for ecological research and environmental ethics" project is seeking a second postdoc. This position requires an interest in the Organizational Approach in the Philosophy of Life Sciences (Moreno & Mossio 2015; Nunes-Neto et al. 2014). One of the main activities will be to build agent-based models to deal with functional traits and groups that contribute to the closure of constraints in ecological systems.
- Deadline: 12 March 2022
- Interviews: via Zoom
- More information, including how to apply, is available here.
There are three weeks left to apply for a place in the "Bordeaux Summer School - Philosophy in biology and medicine" being held 7-10 June 2022. PI Alan Love is one of the course leaders. The school is open to second year Master students, doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows from the fields of philosophy, life sciences, and medicine. Participants will learn to use interdisciplinary methods to address conceptual issues in scientific research. The application deadline is 23 March 2022.
Pierrick Bourrat, PI for the “Transitions in individuality: from ecology to teleonomy” project, and his colleague, Peter Takacs, recently authored the paper “Fitness: static or dynamic?” published in the European Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
