Visiting Fellows

Current Visiting Fellows

Arnon Levy

Click here for Arnon Levy's profile.

Steven Orzack

Steven Orzack holds a PhD in Biology from Harvard University. He is a senior research scientist at the Fresh Pond Research Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. His research interests include demography, ecology, evolution, and the philosophy and history of biology. Current major projects focus on the dynamics and statics of human health and disease, the human sex ratio from conception to birth, the evolutionary dynamics of demographic stochasticity, and how resource transfers influence temporary or permanent interruption of reproduction (such as helpers at the nest and menopause).

While at the Centre, Steven will work on understanding the reasons for the increasing disjunction between philosophers of biology and biologists in regard to understanding adaptation and adaptationism. There are several reasons for this increase, including the fact that research in evolutionary biology is increasingly done by teams as opposed to individual investigators. In the former case, realized assumptions as to the power of natural selection may differ among team members and to this extent, normative lessons from current philosophical analysis of adaptationism may be of little relevance simply because they are framed around practice by an individual researcher, not by groups of researchers. A second reason is that when biologists assess the influence of natural selection on traits, there is an increasing tendency to use numerical tools (e.g., phylogenetic inference software) that have hidden and/or ambiguous implications as to the power of natural selection and so the implications of the results for understanding adaptationism go unexplored. A final reason is that the study of molecular evolution has increased substantially (so as to supplant many traditional areas of study in evolutionary biology) and insights from the debate over adaptationism are poorly integrated into current inferential practices in this area of research. The goal of his project is to describe a program of needed changes in cultural, philosophical, and scientific practices that could lead to improved interconnections, mutual influence, and potential service between biology and the philosophy of biology.

Nicolas Rasmussen

Nicolas Rasmussen holds higher degrees in Philosophy (MA, Chicago), History and Philosophy of Science (MPhil, Cantab), Biological Sciences (PhD, Stanford), and Public Health (MPH, Sydney). He has written extensively on the history of molecular biology, the history of drug company interactions with university-based clinical and preclinical researchers in the United States, the history of biological psychiatry, and the history of pharmaceuticals. He is author of Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940-1960 (Stanford, 1997), and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (NYU, 2008). He is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales.

While at the Centre, Nicolas Rasmussen will work on the interactions of academic life scientists and industry in the development of the first generation biotechnology (i.e. recombinant DNA) drugs. Although this is a much discussed - even legendary - era of entrepreneurship, as well as a period controversial for its purportedly damaging effects on the university as a social institution, scholarly attention from historians of science is lacking. Based on three years of ARC-funded research in legal archives to recover documentation of the corporate side of this scientific story, Nicolas intends to fill that gap with the first book describing what work the biologists did to produce five of the first ten recombinant drugs, under what sort of contractual relationships, and with what outcomes both for science and for medicine.

Mark Olson

Mark Olson holds a PhD in Evolutionary and Population Biology from Washington University, St. Louis. He is a professor at the Institute of Biology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he works on development and evolution in tropical trees. He also works on the use and conservation of economically important plants such as the Christmas poinsettia, ponytail palms, and the “miracle tree” Moringa oleifera.

While at the Centre, Mark will work on biological adaptation and development. Adaptation explains why the shapes and sizes of organisms fit their lifestyles so well. That organisms are adapted often seems self-evident, as in the design of a kangaroo leg, which seems ideal for bouncing, or shape of a whale’s body, which looks just right for swimming. Yet study of adaptation is complicated by many issues. One issue is how biologists think about not just the organismal shapes and sizes we observe but also the ones we don’t. To figure out what organisms can and can’t produce requires studies of development. While many biologists and philosophers have called for stronger links between studies of development and studies of adaptation, this link is still weak. It has remained weak largely because over the past forty years biologists have largely preferred to think about genes and their role in adaptation rather than the role of development in adaptation. While at the Centre, Mark will look at how biologists construct their inferences of adaptation, including how they think about development and their ideas about what makes an inference of adaptation “circular” or not.

Past Visiting Fellows

• Juha Saatsi, University of Leeds
• Albrecht Heefer, Universiteit Ghent
• Matthew Slater, Bucknell University
• Maria Kronfeldner, Universität Bielefeld
• Peter Menzies, Macquarie University
• Darrell Rowbottom, University of Oxford
• Brian L. Keeley, Pitzer College
• Ken Wharton, San Jose State University
• Arif Ahmed, Cambridge University
• Daniel Quesada, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
• Elliott Sober, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Richard Healey, University of Arizona
• Friedel Weinert, University of Bradford
• Lenny Moss, University of Exeter
• Gianluigi Oliveri, Università di Palermo
• Jeremy Butterfield, University of Cambridge
• Christopher Eliot, Hofstra University, New York
• Roman Frigg, London School of Economics
• Anjan Chakravartty, University of Toronto
• Larry Shapiro, University of Wisconsin
• Mariam Thalos, University of Utah
• Sven Dupre, University of Ghent
• Helen Regan, University of California, Riverside
• Roy Sorensen, Dartmouth College
• JC Beall, University of Connecticut, University of St Andrews
• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Harvard University
• Alexander Paseau, Oxford University