HPS events in &
around St. Louis

• 28 Jan, 12 noon, Life Sciences 202, WU
  History of Science Brown Bag
  Robert Northcott (Philosophy, UMSL)
  “Rethinking genetic drift”
  AbstractGenetic drift features in many standard evolutionary explanations. But exactly how it should be defined, and how then it could be explanatory, are matters of considerable dispute. I approach the issue by importing recent work from the causal explanation literature. This generates a series of surprising results about just how much drift does—and does not—explain.
• 13 Feb , 3–5pm, SLU Humanities Building, Room 142
  SLU Philosophy Colloquium
  Alexander Bird (Philosophy, University of Bristol)
  TBA (see his book, his homepage)
• 27 Feb, 12–1:30pm, Life Sciences 202
  History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine Seminar Series
  Dan Steel (Philosophy, Michigan State University)
  “Science and Social Values: The Case of Uncertainty Factors”
  AbstractThere is an active discussion in the philosophy of science literature on the role that ethical and political values should play in assessing scientific evidence. One position is that scientists should take non-epistemic values into consideration when there are asymmetric social costs associated with distinct types of scientific error. For example, consider the process of selecting a safe exposure level for a hazardous chemical on the basis of studies on animal models. In such cases, it is commonly thought that setting the reference dose lower than necessary is better than not setting it low enough, and idea that is implemented in practice by means of uncertainty (safety) factors. In this talk, I consider the use of uncertainty factors from a Bayesian perspective and propose that they should be understood in terms of what is known as cognitive utilities.
• 28 Feb, 104 Wilson, Washington University
  SLAPSA Conference (see the program elsewhere on this page)
• 18 Mar, 12–1:30pm, Life Sciences 202
  History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine Seminar Series
  Douglas Allchin (Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science & Program in the History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota)
  “Socializing Epistemics: Resolving the Ox-Phos Debate”
  AbstractPaul Boyer shared a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on the mechanism of ATP synthase. His work, along with that of Peter Mitchell, was at the center of controversies among biochemists in the 1960s about energy production in the cell. Boyer’s work contained a variety of errors; eventually, with Mitchell, the chemiosmotic theory won out. But it was accepted by the various players for different reasons. The talk will sketch the epistemic structure of their various local responses, and what strategies for science they represent.
• 25 Mar, 12–1:30pm, Life Sciences 202
  History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine Seminar Series
  James Tabery (Philosophy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
  “The Genotype-Environment Interaction in the IQ Controversy”
  AbstractHow do we explain the gap in IQ scores between black and white populations in the US? In 1969, Arthur Jensen ignited the ‘IQ Controversy’ with his appeal to genetic differences as the best explanation. His most formidable critic, Richard Lewontin, attacked Jensen’s methodology. This debate has persisted in science and has now also infiltrated the history and philosophy of science. At the center of this debate is the concept of genotype-environment interaction (or G×E), which refers to situations wherein different genetic groups (such as black and white populations) respond quite differently to an array of environments (such as learning environments) for a particular trait (such as IQ). Lewontin (and the Lewontonians from the history and philosophy of science) employed G×E to attack Jensen’s conclusions, while Jensen (and the Jensenites from the history and philosophy of science) dismissed any appeals to G×E as confused. I show that there have actually been two competing concepts of G×E throughout the history of the nature-nurture debate: a biometric concept (or G×E-B) and a developmental concept (or G×E-D). Distinguishing between G×E-B and G×E-D explains why Lewontin and Jensen were largely talking past each other in the confines of the IQ Controversy, and why Lewontonians and Jensenites continue to talk past each other in the history and philosophy of science.
• 2 Apr, 4pm, Crow 204, WU
  Philosophy & Physics Colloquium
  John Norton (Center for Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh)
  “Philosophy and Einstein’s discovery of the theories of relativity”
• 15 Apr, 12–1:30pm, Life Sciences 202
  History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine Seminar Series
  Frederick Eberhardt (Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis)
  “Games with Nature”
  AbstractAs scientists interested in discovering nature’s secrets we are often faced with a choice of possible experiments we can perform. Sometimes we know in advance that several experiments will be necessary, but there might be more and less efficient sequences of experiments. In this talk I will use game theory to analyze strategies for causal structure search. The introduction of game theory to the problem of discovery provides a very general framework for the assessment of different search procedures and a principled way of modeling the effect of choices between different experiments.
• 22 Apr, 12–1:30pm, Life Sciences 202
  History & Philosophy of Science & Medicine Seminar Series
  Frederick Davis (History, Florida State University, Tallahassee)
  “Pesticides and Toxicology: A Century of Environmental Health”
• If you would like to add a St. Louis HPS event to this list, send the information (date, place, time, series, speaker, affiliation, title, and abstract, if there is one) to .