CFP: Species in the Age of Discordance

Call for Abstracts

Species in the Age of Discordance

University of Utah Department of Philosophy Annual Conference Series

March 23rd – 25th 2017 Salt Lake City, Utah

The University of Utah Department of Philosophy cordially invites submissions of abstracts or prospecti (up to 1000 words) for paper and poster presentations at our upcoming conference “Species in the Age of Discordance”. Submissions should be prepared for blind review and uploaded at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sitaod2017. Please be sure to indicate whether your submission is for a paper or a poster. The submission deadline is Dec 1st, 2016.

Biological lineages move through time, space, and each other. As they do, they diversify, diverge, and grade away from and into one another. One result of this is genealogical discordance, i.e., the lineages of a biological entity may have different histories. We see this on numerous levels, from microbial networks, to holobionts, to population-level lineages.

The focus of this project is whether and how genealogical and other sorts of biological discordance impact our views on species. Other kinds of relevant discordance might include geographic discordance due to habitat fragmentation and human mediated dispersal of species in new environments, discordant government policies which affect populations that straddle or migrate across international borders, and discordant use of language or theoretical terms between researchers in different disciplines.

To promote a cross-disciplinary examination of this question, investigators from a variety of fields will participate in a series of interdisciplinary meetings. This includes researchers working on phylogenetics, microbiology, symbiosis, population genetics, taxonomy, philosophy, and history.

The Utah meeting is the first of three meetings on this topic.  Follow up sessions are tentatively planned for the 2017 Evolution Meeting (Portland, OR) and the 2017 ISHPSSB Meeting (Sao Paulo, Brazil). The Utah meeting will be a mix of invited and refereed papers and posters.

For a list of invited speakers, please visit our conference webpage: http://philosophy.utah.edu/conferences_workshops/species.php

For questions, please contact Dan Molter or Matt Haber.

*Thanks to the University of Utah Center for Latin American Studies, we have a limited amount