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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260810T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260810T183000
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SUMMARY:Fitness landscapes past\, present\, and future - Andreas Wagner - University of Zurich
DESCRIPTION:Abstract \nThe fitness landscape or adaptive landscape is an iconic metaphor of evolutionary biology that has also been influential in unrelated areas of science\, such as psychology and operations research. I present a brief history of the concept in biology\, and discuss how early theory predicts that landscapes with many peaks – rugged landscapes – can impair Darwinian evolution (and similar optimization processes in other areas of science). I then discuss our most recent experiments to map such a landscape in the bacterium E. coli at a large scale. These experiments seemingly invalidate early theoretical predictions about ruggedness and adaptive evolution. I discuss possible reasons for this mismatch between theory and experiment. More generally\, recent research suggests that landscapes are more than just superficial metaphors but deep analogies with multiple unanticipated uses. They raise a number of questions that may be of potential interest to historians and philosophers. \n  \nShort Biosketch \nAndreas Wagner received his Ph.D. in 1995 at Yale University\, where his research won the J.S. Nicholas Prize for best dissertation in the field. He is currently a professor in the department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland)\, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex systems (Santa Fe\, NM). Wagner leads a laboratory of more than a dozen international researchers in evolutionary biology and complex systems studies.  He has (co)authored more than 250 scientific papers in journals that include Nature\, Science\, and PNAS. Wagner is also the author of six books. The most recent of them is Sleeping Beauties (OneWorld) a Times and Telegraph book of the year 2023. Wagner has held research fellowships at several institutions\, such as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Germany)\, the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Bures-sur-Yvette (France)\, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS\, South Africa). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences\, and an elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Wagner has served on the editorial boards of multiple scientific journals that include Scientific Advances\, Genome Biology\, and Bioessays. In recent years\, invited lectures have taken him to destinations that include Chile\, Taiwan\, Norway\, Spain\, India\, and Singapore\, as well as numerous cities in Switzerland\, France\, Germany\, the UK\, and the U.S.An Austrian-born U.S. citizen\, Wagner lives in Zurich\, Switzerland.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/fitness-landscapes-past-present-and-future-andreas-wagner-yale-university/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260824T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260824T183000
DTSTAMP:20260817T053411Z
CREATED:20260817T053411Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260817T053411Z
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SUMMARY:A war inside a war: fighting drug addiction during the decolonization of Vietnam - Claire Eddington - University of California
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: This talk opens in Hanoi on the eve of decolonization of French Indochina and the division of Vietnam into a Communist-controlled North\, and a US-backed South. After decades of administering a state-run opium monopoly\, in late 1953 the French government and its Vietnamese allies moved to ban all opium use and to require all drug users to register with the North Vietnam Health Service as an addict. This period of opium registration was short-lived. Nevertheless\, the policy is significant to the extent that it signaled how a long-term crisis of addiction\, fueled by expanding markets for drugs and hypodermic needles\, joined with an acute political crisis to force an official reconsideration of approaches to recovery. At the same time\, this talk attends to those other\, shadowy networks\, forged through rumor and gossip\, that shaped how drug users themselves came to understand what was happening and how they thought about their own prospects for recovery. By writing drug users back into the history of drugs in the region\, this talk asks what new storylines become possible. \nBio: Claire Edington is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California- San Diego where she specializes in the history of medicine and public health\, modern Southeast Asian history\, and colonial and postcolonial science studies. Her book\, Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam\, was published with Cornell University Press in 2019. Her second book with Cindy Ermus\, Epidemics: A Global History\, is forthcoming from University of California Press. She is currently researching the history of drug addiction in Vietnam across the twentieth century\, from the time of the French colonial opium monopoly through the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/a-war-inside-a-war-fighting-drug-addiction-during-the-decolonization-of-vietnam-claire-eddington-university-of-california/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260831T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260831T183000
DTSTAMP:20260817T061105Z
CREATED:20260817T061027Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260817T061105Z
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SUMMARY:Euthenics\, Women\, and the Making of Better Environments - David PD Munns - City University of New York
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: \nIn 1904\, Ellen Richards introduced “euthenics.” By 1912\, Lewellys Barker\, director of medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital\, would tell the New York Times that the “task of eugenics” and the “task of euthenics” was the “Task for the Nation.” Alongside the emergence of hereditarian eugenics\, where fate was firmly rooted in heredity\, this talk places euthenics into the same Progressive Era demands for the scientific management over environmental issues like life and labor\, health and hygiene\, sewage and sanitation. I argue that euthenics not only heralded women as leaders in the quest for what Richards and eugenicists termed “racial improvement” but understood reforms were to come through environmental and educational reform rather than hereditary interventions. Looking to recuperate the figure of Ellen Richards in the history of science\, I place Richards and her euthenics more into the debate over eugenics rather than over the emergence of home economics. Building on the work of Donald Opitz\, Staffan Bergwik\, and Brigette Van Tiggelen\, this talk shows\, first\, how Richards’ career threads the needle between the home and the laboratory as sites of science making\, not as separate spheres but as overlapping realms\, and helps recover how domestic concerns shaped the focus of the life sciences. Second\, this talk shows how euthenics shaped eugenics by looking at the writings of American eugenicists Charles Davenport\, Paul Popenoe\, and David Starr Jordan on “Eugenics and Euthenics.” Third\, I describe how euthenics took root in new academic departments of domestic science\, home economics\, and departments child welfare and family life in the 1920s and 1930s\, most notably the Institute of Euthenics at Vassar College after 1923\, where – super twist – Dr Spock taught for two summers\, recruited by Margaret Mead. \n  \nShort Bio: \nName: David PD Munns. \nEmail: dmunns@jjay.cuny.edu \nSocial media: https://jjay-cuny.academia.edu/DavidMunns ; www.worldoftrons.com \nCurrently a Professor of the History of Science at the City University of New York\, David Munns has taught nearly 10\,000 students across 200 classes and authored 7 books\, dealing with subjects including radio astronomy\, environmental and sanitary engineering\, plant physiology\, nuclear engineering\, Euthenics and Eugenics\, and the cultural history of the suffix *tron. He is currently working on a project entitled Big Science\, Down Under.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/euthenics-women-and-the-making-of-better-environments-david-pd-munns-city-university-of-new-york/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260907T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260907T183000
DTSTAMP:20260901T011242Z
CREATED:20260901T011242Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260901T011242Z
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SUMMARY:Multiple Routes to Enculturated Cognition - Professor Richard Menary - Macquarie University
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Accounts of distinctively human cognition increasingly agree that culture is constitutive rather than merely additive\, yet they continue to assume that each cognitive capacity has a canonical developmental pathway (Carruthers 2026; Tomasello 2024). The multiple routes model of enculturation denies this. There is no canonical route to an enculturated capacity\, and structurally different processes converge on one competence. This is what we should expect given degeneracy in the second of Edelman and Gally’s (2001) senses\, in which structurally different elements yield the same output rather than realising the same function. The model individuates routes as processes\, by the practices and vehicles they involve\, and explains convergence across learners by the correctness conditions of the practice rather than by innate channelling. Numerical and social cognition provide working examples. \nBio: My research is in interdisciplinary philosophy of mind and cognition. I work closely with cognitive scientists and I have published widely on extended\, embodied and distributed cognition\, neural plasticity\, symbolic cognition – particularly reading and mathematical cognition\, the cultural evolution of social cognition pragmatism and cognitive science and embodied narratives and the self. I am currently completing a new book on the enculturated mind. I have been Professor of Philosophy since 2018\, I was Head of department between 2018 and 2023. Between 2014 and 2018 I was an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University Sydney and between 2011 and 2014 I was a senior research fellow in the ARC centre of excellence in cognition and its disorders. I read for a BA in philosophy at the University of Ulster\, an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham and then a PhD in philosophy at King’s College London. I have taught philosophy at the University of Kent\, Birkbeck College Faculty of Continuing Education and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and then at the University of Wollongong.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/multiple-routes-to-enculturated-cognition-professor-richard-menary-macquarie-university/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260921T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260921T183000
DTSTAMP:20260917T045824Z
CREATED:20260917T045824Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260917T045824Z
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SUMMARY:Expanding the Reflex Beyond Nervous Systems: animal preparations\, tropism\, and the presumption of stimulus-response sufficiency - Matthew Sims - Macquarie University
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Contemporary biologists and philosophers often explain unicellular behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response mechanisms\, even where it appears to involve memory\, learning\, or context-sensitive evaluation. This talk traces one historical route by which exhaustive explanations in terms of reflex-like behaviour became presumptively available for organisms lacking nervous systems: the animal preparation experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reflex physiology. I reconstruct an inferential pattern\, the animal preparation model (APM)\, from Whytt and Hall’s decapitated preparations through Loeb’s extension of reflex explanation to cnidarians and non-neuronal organisms. Loeb treated the latter as a secondary comparison class\, licensing the conclusion that neuronal structures were dispensable for explaining similar animal behaviour. Jennings’s work on infusoria exposed the presumption underlying this move\, yet a residue of the APM’s logic outlived the experimental practice that generated it. I trace this presumption into contemporary treatments of slime mould navigation\, where organisms lacking nervous systems continue to attract a standing presumption of reflex sufficiency\, one that evidence of flexibility or history-dependence does not by itself defeat. The history of the reflex reveals that stimulus-response explanation is not a neutral methodological starting point\, but carries a historical residue that continues to shape explanations of behaviour. \nBio: Matthew Sims is a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University\, Sydney\, Australia\, and an affiliate of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research lies at the intersection of the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of cognitive science\, with a particular focus on memory and learning\, the evolution of cognition\, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century protozoology. He has conducted extensive research on the protist Physarum polycephalum\, an acellular slime mould\, which was the subject of his first monograph\, published by Cambridge University Press.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/expanding-the-reflex-beyond-nervous-systems-animal-preparations-tropism-and-the-presumption-of-stimulus-response-sufficiency-matthew-sims-macquarie-university/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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