HiPhiS seminar "When biology asks why?"

Tuesday, June 13, 2017 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
IAE, Amphi Robert Reix, bât 29, campus Triolet.
When biology asks "why?": from the history of the "genetic program" metaphor to evo-devo.
Inter-university seminar in History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle "Causes, foundations, origins".
Lecture presented by Alexandre Peluffo, biologist and historian, PhD student at Institut Jacques Monod, CNRS, Université Paris Diderot.

Summary:

In biology, the question of "why? became scientific thanks to the work of Darwin. Previously, it had long been the prerogative of teleology, the theological study of final causes, Aristotle's fourth and ultimate cause. In the 1960s, the biologist Ernst Mayr theorized this paradigm shift around the metaphor of the "genetic program" and the opposition between "how" questions, which question how this program functions and is decoded, and "why " questions, which seek to explain how the program is written via its variation and transmission over generations. At the same time, Jacques Monod and François Jacob, who had just discovered transcription, proposed the same metaphor and drew the same conclusions. I'll come back to the history of this convergence, its importance for the question of causation in biology and its link with current work in Evo-Devo, a discipline that seeks to understand how and why morphological biodiversity has evolved.
(N.B. Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo, originally scheduled for this date, had to postpone her appearance for health reasons)
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