Tag Archives: What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?

Evelyn Fox Keller: culture/biology at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver ScienceOnline’s latest event

I finally got the location for Evelyn Fox Keller’s upcoming April 4, 2013 visit to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. I had hoped to get an email interview with her but she didn’t have the time. I assume that visiting both the University of Alberta (April 2, 2013) and the University of Calgary (April 1, 2013) just prior to UBC is the cause for this lack of time. For interested parties, I have more details about Keller and the other visits in my Mar. 14, 2013 posting.

Without any more ado (from the Situating Science event page for Evelyn Fox Keller: What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?),

University of British Columbia
Date:
Thu., Apr. 4, 5:00 PM – , 6:30 PM

What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?
Evelyn Fox Keller, History and Philosophy of Science, MIT
April 4 2013 5pm (refreshments at 4:30)
Room 130, Liu Institute, 6476 NW Marine Drive [emphasis mine]

There are directions (bus, car, and more) for the Liu Institute here.

An April 9, 2013 meeting of the Vancouver ScienceOnline group (they seem to have changed their website location and possibly their name) features an event titled, Adding your science to the online community,

How do you respond to an online scientific misconception? At first I thought this was a bit of a weird topic to be discussing within the ScioVan [ScienceOnline Vancouver] community, but during a long night with Susan (Vickers) and Catherine (Anderson) we [including Anne Steino] kept coming up with new dilemmas revolving around online responses.

For example: What if your distant family member posts a scientific myth on facebook? Should you correct them, and if yes, should you do it on facebook for everyone to see or in a private email? It turns out, we often keep quiet for the sake of harmony, but are we selling out our own principles? As science communicators we pray at the altar of helping people understand science. However, when it comes to correcting friends and family, we often hesitate. Why do we not hold our nearest and dearest to the same standard as “the rest of the world”? Maybe there’s a lesson to learn here. Maybe our way of communicating science has a high likelihood of alienating the people we are trying to reach. And maybe we don’t realize this when it comes to strangers, because we are less concerned with their opinion of us. However, when it comes to people close to us we often hear a small voice in our head going “perhaps this is not going to make everyone thank me for the clarification but instead make them really annoyed.” Does that mean that our way of communicating is not working in general or is it only true in our inner circles? Would it be a good idea to always imagine that you were talking to a distant cousin before embarking on an online scientific discussion?

In common with many of this group’s previous events, the talk will take place on a Tuesday,

April 9, 2013 at 7 pm

Science World at TELUS World of Science
1455 Quebec Street, Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Z7

You can find maps and parking here.

Evelyn Fox Keller, Lee Smolin, or Kathleen M. Vogel may be speaking at a science event near you

More details are emerging about Evelyn Fox Keller’s April 2013 visit to western Canada (first mentioned in my Jan. 23, 2013 posting). Fox Keller is an eminent scholar as per this description, from my Oct. 29, 2012 posting about her talk in Halifax, Nova Scotia,

Before giving you details about where to go for a link [to her livestreamed Oct. 30, 2012 talk], here’s more about the talk and about Keller,

Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn irrevocably transformed our thinking about the sciences with the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For all his success, debate about the adequacy and applicability of his formulation persists to this day. Are there scientific revolutions in biology? Molecular genetics, for example, is currently undergoing a major transformation in its understanding of what genes are and of what role they play in an organism’s development and evolution. Is this a revolution? More specifically, is this a revolution of the sort that Kuhn had in mind? How is language used? What implications can we draw from this?

Dr. Keller is the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award and author of many influential works on science, society and modern biology such as: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983), Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (1992), The Century of the Gene (2000), Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines (2002) and The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (2010).

Keller Fox will be visiting the University of Calgary (Alberta) on April 1, the University of Alberta on April 2, and the University of British Columbia on April 4, 2013.  I’ve not found details about the University of Calgary visit but did find this for the University of Alberta visit (from the  Situating Science network node for the University of Alberta web page),

Tue., Apr. 2, 4:00 PM – , 6:00 PM

Dr. Keller visits U. Alberta as part of her travels as the Cluster Visiting Scholar.

Dr. Keller will speak at 4 pm in the Engineering and Technology Learning Centre, room 1-017d. There will be a reception directly after the talk.

PARADIGM SHIFTS AND REVOLUTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY BIOLOGY

Details about the visit to the University of  British Columbia are a little sparse, Situating Science network node for the University of British Columbia web page

Network Node:
University of British Columbia
Date:
Thu., Apr. 4, 5:00 PM – , 6:30 PM

What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?
Evelyn Fox Keller, History and Philosophy of Science, MIT
April 4 2013 5:00 – 6:30 pm, with reception to follow

Presented by Science and Society Series at Green College
Location: TBD

I did try to find more information about where and who might be allowed to attend her University of British Columbia (UBC) visit on the UBC site (Science and Technology Studies colloquium webpage, which lists her visit) and on their Green College site but no more details were available.

The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario (the other side of Canada) has announced, with full details, an April 3, 2013 talk by Lee Smolin. Smolin moved to Canada in 2000 to become a founding member of the Perimeter Institute as per the biographical information attached to this event announcement. From their Mar. 13, 2013 announcement,

Time Reborn(Live webcast)

Wednesday, April 3 @ 7:00 pm
Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas
Perimeter Institute, Waterloo

Lee Smolin
Perimeter Institute

What is time? Is our perception of time passing an illusion which hides a deeper, timeless reality? Or is it real, indeed, the most real aspect of our experience of the world? Einstein said that, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” and many contemporary theorists agree that time emerges from a more fundamental timeless quantum universe. But in recent cosmological speculation, this timeless picture of nature seems to have reached a dead end, populated by infinite numbers of imagined unobservable universes.

In this talk, Lee Smolin explains why he changed his mind about the nature of time and has embraced the view that time is real and everything else, including the laws of nature, evolves. In a world in which time is real, the future is open and there is an essential role for human agency and imagination in envisioning and shaping a good future. Read More

Win tickets to be part of the live audience at Perimeter Institute for Time Reborn.

Sign up to receive an email reminder to watch the live webcast of Time Reborn.

As a service to audience members,
Words Worth Books will be onsite at this event.

Thank you for your support!

There is no information about accessing the webcast in the announcement. I last mentioned Smolin (briefly) in a June 4, 2009 posting,

… a physicist at Canada’s Perimeter Institute, Lee Smolin who, based on his work with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian philospher, suggests that the timeless multiverse (beloved of physicists and science fiction writers) does not exist.

This last event with Kathleen Vogel takes place in Washington, DC. From the Mar. 13, 2013 Woodrow Wilson Center announcement,

Invitation from the Woodrow Wilson Center

and the Los Alamos National Laboratory

Book Discussion: Phantom Menace or Looming Danger?: A New Framework for Assessing Bioweapons Threats

Speaker: Kathleen M. Vogel, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Science & Technology Studies

Acting Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Cornell University

Date/Time: Friday, March 22, 2013, noon to 1:30 p.m.

Location: 5th Floor Conference Room

Woodrow Wilson Center in the Ronald Reagan Building,

1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW

(“Federal Triangle” stop on Blue/Orange Line)

Please RSVP (acceptances only) at iss@wilsoncenter.org

For directions see the map on the Center’s website at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Please bring a photo ID and allow additional time to pass through a security checkpoint.

This meeting is part of an ongoing series that provides a forum for policy specialists from Congress and the Executive, business, academia, and journalism to exchange information and share perspectives on current nonproliferation issues. Lunch will be served. Seating is limited.