The Qbio initiative at Institut Pasteur is organising a two-day symposium in Paris on December 12th and 13th 2022 which will cover the interplay between mechanics, evolution, morphogenesis and development. This symposium is meant to be an open platform for discussion between physicists, mathematicians and biologists on relevant biological questions, and to foster interactions between topics/systems which normally have few occasions to interact.
10h30-12h30, Salle des Actes, École Normale Supérieure
The other beginning of philosophy arrives through a rethinking of the very meaning of beginning. The beginning in this case involves those philosophical works and intuitions from out of which one begins. The political and ethical questions arose from within and from outside of the philosophical archives of the past that are also demanding a new sense for "the history of philosophy. The deepest pre-conceptions of metaphysics which informs the sciences are being evaluated from out of the stasis in which several of the scientific pursuits find themselves today. For these reasons, the meaning of beginning is nothing simple.
This webinar will be our eleventh meeting within the series of The Alphabet of Complexity webinars. The letter K (as in “kaleidoscope”) will guide us through the main questions of the day: What are the paradigms we live by? What are the implications of research which is genome-centred and how to compare it with the research based on the organism-oriented scientific paradigm? The lectures of three key speakers (Giuseppe Longo, Angelika Hilbeck, Maël Montévil) will be followed by a discussion on how these specific paradigms can inform our actions for the purity of seeds and against GMOs.
In this colloquium, we celebrate the 75th birthdays of Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto. We have chosen to show their distinct trajectories and then how they intersect while working on the foundations of theoretical knowledge with a biology focus. In this respect, both Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto maintain a close relationship with philosophy and philosophers. At the same time, both are also involved in “the life of the polis”, this is, addressing the repercussions of science in society and the environment, both as scientists and intellectuals.
Science in the Age of Experience is a reference event for science leaders dedicated to improving lives and accelerating progress towards a more sustainable future.
Disruptions are described in both the cases of biological organizations and human health int he scientific literature, but without a precise conceptualization of this notion yet. We have argued that disruptions are the loss of past novelties that contribute to an organization (first order disruptions) or of the ability to generate such novelties (second order disruptions). We focus on a specific case of disruption, the disruption of babies and toddler cognitive and psychologicological developpement by digital media, and the response that was developped with Bernard Stiegler and experimented in Saint-Denis (France), namely contributive research where care puts knowledge at the forefront.
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
Technology and sciences, notably biology, have entered a stasis whereby the nature of the answers provided are remarkably unchanging. For example, most of biological technoscientific research aims to fix problem by finding a molecule that would interact with an intended target. We argue that this stasis is the result of a decline in theoretical work, and notably a weak relationship with philosophy. Then theoretical shortcomings and contradiction are no longer overcome by renewed perspectives, instead outdated frameworks remain undead leading to inconsistent discourses. To overcome this stasis, we propose to introduce a bastardized epistemology, both in biology and technology, that would articulate both systemic and historical reasoning.
Seminar of the History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching Lab
History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching Lab, Universidade Federal da Bahia
Scholars used Aristotelian reasoning in combination with theology to understand living beings, leading to natural theology, where god was the guarantee of biological norms. Transformism, notably Darwin, provided an alternative to this view; however, this alternative had to be acknowledged by scientists when the model of science was classical mechanics. It followed that thinking about biological objects remained similar to physics thinking, where norms are laws, or at least invariants and symmetries. The recurring analogies with technological objects, recently computers, as viewed by engineers (and not users or anthropology) also contributed to this theoretical and epistemological bias and confusion. On the opposite, we can think about biological objects differently, on renewed theoretical bases, by starting from theoretical principles that are sound in this field. Then, instead of fast analogies, numerous new questions, methods, and reasoning have to be fleshed out.
