A free public lecture at The University of Queensland’s St Lucia campus on April 21 will focus on The Conceptual Impact of the Genomic Revolution.
UQ Federation Fellow in the Biohumanities Professor Paul Griffiths will deliver the lecture at 5.30 pm in the Innes Room of the UQ Union, Staff House Road.
It will be hosted by UQ’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS).
Professor Griffiths said in the “postgenomic” era, molecular biology faced every few months what in many disciplines would be regarded as a “scientific revolution”.
“This constitutes a fascinating and challenging case study of the role of conceptual change in science,” he said.
In this lecture, Professor Griffiths will focus on an online survey conducted in 2003 and 2004 in which biologists were asked to annotate conceptually challenging cases of genome transcription. The survey aimed to reveal the range of conceptions of the gene operative in contemporary bioscience.
Professor Griffiths said the study seemed to corroborate the widespread view among biology commentators that the textbook conception of the gene, the so-called “classical molecular gene”, was simply not up to the job of characterizing the full range of genomic elements that played some of the traditional roles assigned to the gene.
His lecture will discuss his hope that a broader appreciation of these novel ways of conceptualizing the genome and its role in the production of bodies and behaviour could transform the understanding of genetic research by the rest of the academy and perhaps eventually by the community at large.
Biography: Paul Griffiths is a philosopher of science focusing on the contemporary life sciences. He is the author of What Emotions Really Are (University of Chicago Press 1997), co-author with Kim Sterelny of the widely used textbook Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology (University of Chicago Press 1999).
Educated at Cambridge and the Australian National University, Professor Griffiths was Director of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney until 2000, when he joined the world-renowned Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined The University of Queensland in 2004 as Federation Fellow in the Biohumanities. He is also a Visiting Professor in the ESRC Center for Genomics in Society at the University of Exeter.
Media: For further information, contact Rebecca Ralph, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (telephone 07 3346 9764, fax 07 3365 7184, Email: admin.cccs@uq.edu.au).
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