Theoria et Historia Scientiarum - Life and ALife: Interactions between Natural and Synthetic Biology

Extended deadline: February 28, 2006

ARTIFICIAL LIFE (ALife)

ALife is an interdisciplinary field of research that aims at studying life or life-like processes through computational modelling techniques and the simulation of real or theoretically possible living systems or ecosystems. Neural networks, agents, or communities of agents are embedded in simulated environments, or embodied and embedded in real environments, where they are left to develop, interact, learn, reproduce, adapt and evolve. Alife scientists can use such models to test various hypotheses about the nature of life or cognition, or about complex process such as adaptation and learning. As a concequence, the field stands at the intersection of theoretical biology, computational biology and cognitive science. In this special edition of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, Life and Alife: Interactions Between Natural and Synthetic Biology, we propose to investigate foundational questions related to the interactions between (natural) biology and the synthetic-biological approach of Alife. Here is a (non exhaustive) sample of topics that can be addressed in this issue:

Epistemology of Alife

Does Alife tell us something about real biological systems or is it only informative about its own theories?
What is the epistemological status of Alife simulations: are they scientific theories or models, or simply (fun) formal systems?
Are simulations or artificial agents relevant in the context of justification or the context of discovery, or both? Are they deductive, inductive or abductive engines?

Biology and philosophy of biology

Can Alife help the life sciences address c
omplex issues such as the nature/existence of the Baldwin effect, the influence of development on evolutionary process, or the nature of adaptation? And how?
Can Alife help develop naturalistic accounts of cognition? Which stance (reductionist, emergentist, etc) is advocated by Alife research?

Invited Contributors

Pete Mandik,Philosophy Department, William Paterson University
Barbara Webb, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

DEADLINE AND CONTACT

February 28, 2006, is the final deadline for papers to be included in the issue on Alife. Please initially send us a brief outline of the projected paper. All questions and files (.RTF or .DOC) should be addressed to: bhv AT sympatico . ca

Edited by:

Ben Hardy
Institut Jean Nicod, Paris (France)
Laboratoire d’Analyse Cognitive de l’Information, Montréal. CAN.
http://benoithv.free.fr
bhv AT sympatico . ca

Pierre Poirier
Philosophy Department
Université du Québec at Montreal, CAN
Laboratoire d’Analyse Cognitive de l’Information, Montréal. CAN.
poirier . pierre AT uqam . ca

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

About THS

Theoria et Historia Scientiarum is an international scientific journal for interdisciplinary studies published by Nicolas Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. Topics of recent special issues have included:

Metaphor: A Multidisciplinary Approach
On Knowledge, Representations and Interpretations: From Quanta to Cultures
Analogy
Embodiment and Awareness: Perspectives from Phenomenology and Cognitive Science
Unconscious Perception and Communication: Psychoanalytic, Cognitive and Evolutionary Perspectives.

Guidelines

Submissions should be typed, double-spaced. Files should be submitted (as attachment) in a standard word-processing file or rich text format (.rtf). The file should include the following informations:

Title of Paper: Subtitle
Author's Name
Institutional Affiliation & Address
email address
Abstract: A short abstract of no more than 100 words should accompany the paper.

Footnote numbering should be consecutive superscript throughout the text.
References should be made in parentheses in text, as in the following example (Smith, 2001) or, if more than three co-authors, (Johnson et al., 1999).

Reference list should be collected alphabetically at the end of the paper according to the following style:

For books:

Author's last name, Initials. Date of publication. Title in Italics. City: Publisher.
Braddon-Mitchell, D., Jackson, F. 2000. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

For references in collections:

Author's last name, Initials. Date of publication. Title of paper or chapter. Editor's Intial, Last Name (ed). Title of Book in Italics (page numbers). City: Publisher.
Baars, B., McGovern, K. 1996. Cognitive view of consciousness. In M. Velmans (ed.) The Science of Consciousness: Psychological, Neuropsychological and Clinical Reviews (pp. 63-95). London: Routledge.

For journal articles:

Author's last name, Initials. Date of publication. Title of article. Title of Journal in Italics, Vol. number (Issue number): page numbers.
Harré, R. (2002). The memory machine. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 6 (1): 271-296.