This Monday, Feb 21 Maureen O'Malley will kick start this year's current project seminar series with the paper
"The Tree of Life: Hypothesis, Model or Heuristic?" As usual we will be in the philosophy common room at 1.00 Abstract: The tree of life (TOL) is under assault as an accurate and appropriate representation of the evolution of life forms. Molecular data have revealed the extent of processes such as lateral gene transfer (LGT) that cannot be represented as ever-branching patterns of speciation. Nevertheless, the popularity of the tree as an overarching symbol for evolutionary pattern and process persists — not only in metazoan phylogeny but also in all the disciplines that study evolution, including evolutionary microbiology. Some commentators have argued that at least in prokaryote phylogeny the TOL has to give way to newer and more inclusive representations. Others argue that tree concepts and methods can be modified to meet the challenges of dealing with non-tree-like processes. But amidst these debates, there has been little sustained discussion about what exactly the TOL is. Biologists and philosophers have contested the ontology of the TOL (whether it is a tree of genes, a tree of genomes, a tree of species, or a tree of cells), and many others have focused on evaluating different methodologies used to approach the tree, but the actual role of the TOL in scientific practice has had little attention. There are a several candidates for the role the TOL plays in evolutionary biology, and these include that of an axiom, a hypothesis or theory, a model or set of models of some sort, a metaphor, a ‘myth’ (or more bluntly, a mistake), or a heuristic. I want to examine a range of these possibilities with the particular aim of understanding why the TOL endures despite the evidence against it, and whether one of these descriptions of what the TOL is enables us to extract greater epistemic value from it. Dr. Kristie Miller University of Sydney Senior Research Fellow School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and The Centre for Time The University of Sydney Sydney Australia Room 411, A 18 [email protected] [email protected] Ph: 02 93569663 http://homepage.mac.com/centre.for.time/KristieMiller/Kristie/Home_Page.html _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 971 subscribers now served. To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
