Laura Nuño de la Rosa’s (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) talk, “Interviews on evolvability: reconstructing and explaining the recent history of evolutionary biology”

When:
23/06/2020 @ 11:30 – 13:00
2020-06-23T11:30:00+02:00
2020-06-23T13:00:00+02:00

To participate, please contact: guglielmo.militello@ehu.eus

Abstract. In my presentation, I will present the results of a series of interviews to evolutionary biologists I have conducted throughout this academic year, in the frame of the project “Evolvability: a new and unifying concept in evolutionary biology”, which has taken place at the Center for Advanced Studies, Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters. These interviews cover many different topics on theoretical debates and interdisciplinary relationships in evolutionary biology, but in this talk, I will focus on some insights I believe can be gained on the recent history of evolutionary theory. In particular, I will reflect on different causal hypotheses that might explain the explosion of the interest, in the mid-1990s, in the internal capacities of biological systems to evolve. In order to do so, I will use several conceptual tools from evolutionary theory itself that, as I hope to show, can be fruitfully applied to the history of science.