Sciences of the Origin Online Conference 2021

Sciences of the origin: the challenges of the selection effects and biases 

Online conference - June 3-4, 2021  

Institute of Philosophy, University of Belgrade - The Sciences of the Origin project 

https://sciorigin.weebly.com 

This conference will facilitate exchange of ideas between philosophers, scientists and other scholars working on the scientific quest for the origins of life, mind and the universe. To study the deep past scientifically, it is necessary to be methodologically omnivorous and to follow multiple lines of evidence. The conversation will aim at reflecting on how methodologies and ideas across disciplines are intertwined in these sciences, and how they respond to their common challenges: a pronounced under-determination of theories based on the indirect evidence of deep history, various selection effects and biases, inherent interdisciplinary approach, and a crucial assimilation of techniques from multiple disciplines. It will examine how exactly the selection effects and biases are battled through plurality of approaches and multiple strategies, and how the quest for objectivity is pursued via triangulation and confrontation of diverse perspectives rather than the imitation of the exact natural sciences and proposing of neutrality to these perspectives.

Submissions are welcome, but not restricted to, the following:

▪ Selection effects and biases in the sciences of the origin (cosmology, biology, paleontology, archeology…)
▪ Underdetermination and indirect evidence
▪ Cross-disciplinary experimental and observational techniques
▪ The limits and dangers of interdisciplinarity
▪ Examining older data to find new inroads in research
▪ Novel technologies helping to uncover the unseen past
▪ Origin of life in biology, its understanding and definition
▪ Metaphysical under-determination of the self in cognitive science
▪ Evolutionary sciences and human sociality
▪ Scientific and humanistic methodologies and ideas in search of origins
▪ (Dis)unity of sciences of the origins
▪ The quest of materiality, trace-based and evidential reasoning
▪ Integration of hard and social sciences
▪ Historical interaction between theological and cosmological ideas

Submissions: please send an abstract of up to 500 words suitably prepared for a blind review to [email protected] by May 1st, 2021. The potential speakers will be notified by May 15, 2021. No attendance or registration fees will be required to join the conference.

Scientific Committee: Adrian Currie (University of Exeter), Milan Ćirković (Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade/Oxford), Philip Goff (Durham University), Benedikt Paul Göcke (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Dušan Mihailović (University of Belgrade), Monika Milosavljević (University of Belgrade), Janko Nešić (University of Belgrade), Slobodan Perović (University of Belgrade),