Ellen
Clarke

Talks

Upcoming:

• 'Reproduction' at Metaphysics of Pregnancy workshop, March 23, University of Southampton.
• 'Rethinking reproduction' at ISHPSSB 2015, July 5-10, Montreal.

Selected Previous:

• 'On biological individuality', Moral Sciences Club, Jan 2015, Cambridge.
• 'On the subject of bacteriology', UCL STS, November 2015, London.
• 'How to count organisms', BSPS meeting, October 2014, LSE.
• 'Bacterial Individuality', Keynote at PBUK 2014, April 2014, Cambridge.
• 'The organism concept in biology' at Groups and Individuals conference, May 2012, Almora, India.

Work in progress

• Bacterial individuality - A paper which asks what turns on the question whether biofilms are organismal.
• Inheritance and cooperation - A review of different ways in which inheritance can be thought about, and the implications of different versions for our understanding of the evolution of cooperation.
• Adaptation, evolutionary transition and organismality - In this paper I argue that we can only arrive at a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary adaptation via a proper appreciation of the major transitions in evolution and the constraints that such events place on our notion of organismality.
• How to count organisms - A paper which explain how organism counts can go wrong and what to do to get the answer right.
• Individuality as a disposition - Here I explore the conceptual constraints that follow from treating organismality as a dispoitional capacity. In other words, what limitations do dispositional kinds have when it comes to supporting inferences and functioning in laws, compared to 'natural' kinds?
• Why mentalise? - I'm interested in explaining how and why humans have evolved to track each other's mental states.
• Transposon individuality - How, if at all, should we understand transposeable elements as constituting units of selection in their own right?
• Societal organismality - Are humans stalled partway through an evolutionary transition in individuality (Stearns 2007)? What are the similarities between human and biological solutions to policing, demarcation, and individuation problems? What policy/political theoretical lessons might we learn from articulating such similarities?
• The evolution of political differences - An evaluation of EP stories about the adaptive functions of different political ideologies.