In March, 2018, core-team members Alan Love and Bill Wimsatt traveled to Vienna for the 36th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology (hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute). The theme of the workshop was "Hierarchy and Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences." Love's talk was titled "Manipulating levels of organization: Hierarchy and Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences." Not to be outdone, Wimsatt entitled his talk "Heuristics, and Robustness in Cultural Evolution: Finding Partial Organization in Causal Thickets."
Alan Love
Alan Love is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. His research focuses on a variety of conceptual issues in evolutionary and developmental biology with an emphasis on philosophical questions about conceptual change, explanatory pluralism, the structure of evolutionary theory, reductionism, the nature of historical science, and interdisciplinary epistemology.
e-mail: aclove@umn.edu
William C. Wimsatt
Bill Wimsatt is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, and emeritus professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked on functional organization and explanation, complexity, mathematical modeling, reductionism and emergence, levels of organization, robustness, the analysis of heuristics and biases in scientific problem-solving, generative entrenchment in adaptive evolution in biology, technology and culture, and works now primarily on cultural evolution.