HiPhiS Seminar: “When Biology Asks ‘Why?’”

Tuesday, June 13, 2017, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
IAE, Robert Reix Lecture Hall, Building 29, Triolet Campus.
When biology asks “why?”: from the history of the “genetic program” metaphor to evo-devo.
Inter-university Seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle “Causes, Foundations, Origins.”
Lecture presented by Alexandre Peluffo, biologist and historian, doctoral student at the Jacques Monod Institute, CNRS, Paris Diderot University.

Abstract:

In biology, the question of “why?” became a scientific one thanks to Darwin’s work. Before that, it had long been the domain of teleology, the theological study of final causes—Aristotle’s fourth and ultimate cause. In the 1960s, biologist Ernst Mayr theorized this paradigm shift around the metaphor of the “genetic program” and the contrast between “how?” questions—which explore the functioning and decoding of this program—and “why?” questions—which seek to explain the program’s composition through its variation and transmission across 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 will return to the history of this convergence, its significance for the question of causation in biology, and its connection to 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 visit for health reasons)
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