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For the past several years, the
primary focus of my work has been on relationship of contemporary
research in evolutionary and developmental biology to long-standing
questions in the philosophy of biology. I have been working on this
topic both alone and with Massimo Pigliucci, a professor in the
departments of botany and of ecology and evolutionary biology at SUNY
Stony brook. Most recently, Prof. Pigliucci and I published Making
Sense of Evolution (Chicago University Press). In Making
Sense of Evolution, we argue for the importance of
finding definitions and uses of the key concepts in evolutionary
biology that cohere with each other and with contemporary biological
practice, and we present one such set. In
addition, we have co-authored several papers related to this project.
These include, for example, a short retrospective piece on the twenty
years of research since Gould and Lewontin's famous "Spandrels" paper,
has been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in
February of 2000 (abstract) and a
much
longer and more technical piece on the concept of a gene (or genes)
being 'for' a high-level phenotypic trait, was published in Biology
and Philosophy in March of 2001 (abstract).
We have presented papers relating some of this material to contemporary
attempts to understand human behavior as a part of a symposium titled
"Broad Theories and Human Behaviors" at the Philosophy of Science
Association's 2000 meeting, and presented another paper related to this
area "On the Concept of Biological Race and its Applicability to
Humans" at the 2002 meeting of the PSA; this has since
been published in Philosophy of Science.
I have also completed a number of papers directly related to the work
I've been doing with Prof. Pigliucci; see my CV for more details.
At this time, I am pursuing several lines of research related to these
issues. These include for example exploring the relationship
between
developmental and evolutionary biology, especially with respect to the
(possible) importance of non-genetic heritable variations in
developmental resources for evolutionary innovations and rethinking the
requirements of multicelluarilty given the importance of symbiosis in
biofilms.
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Finally, I am just starting to
work on projects related to a long-standing interest of mine, namely
the relationship between liberalism, democracy, and global development
issues. Can global development take place in ways that are not
'imperialist'? Should we care? What are the proper goals of
global development? What happens when democracy and liberal
ideals come into conflict? I don't have any real answers yet, but
I find the questions compelling... I've published a paper on a
related topic (restricting imports on the basis of the methods used in
their production) Public Affairs Quarterly
(November, 2001) (abstract) and I
look
forward to further work on this topic.
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