Three Week Plan

We had a great organizational meeting last night at Mike's place. We made some preliminary decisions on the chapters we wish to read and who will lead those discussions.

The only day that everyone is available (of the 9 people that used the doodle poll) is Wednesday at 5 pm. This will be our meeting time for this term. Discussions will take place over the next 9 weeks (beginning January 23 and ending March 26).

The first three weeks of discussion have been scheduled as follows:

January 23 - Part I (chapters 1 and 2) will be lead by Michel
January 30 - Multiple working hypotheses (not a book chapter, but a relevant to our discussions) will be lead by Thomas C.
February 6 - Part VIII - Chapter 8 will be lead by Thomas H.

Interesting Papers

Here are some interesting papers that came out during the holiday season and recently:

King et al. 2011. A natural deletion of the HoxC cluster in Elasmobranch fishes. Science 334: 1517.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1517.short

Huldtgren et al. 2011. Fossilized nuclei and germination structures identify Ediacaran "animal embryos" as encysting protists. Science 334: 1696-1699.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1696.short

Hutchinson et al. 2011. From flat foot to fat foot: structure, ontogeny, function, and evolution in elephant "sixth toes." Science 334: 1699-1703.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1699.short

Libby et al. 2012. Tail-assisted pitch control in lizards, robots, and dinosaurs. Nature 481: 181-184.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7380/full/nature10710.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20120112

New Semester!

Welcome back! As you remember we are discussing the following book this term:

http://books.google.ca/books/about/Philosophy_of_Biology.html?id=MGkoAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

We need to start this term with an organizational meeting, which will occur next week. The following week we will begin reading the book.

Points of discussion:

1) Day of the week and time for our weekly meeting
2) Scheduling people to lead the weekly discussions (we will still appoint people to lead every discussion, this will encourage equal participation)

I have created a doodle poll for the organizational meeting. Please fill it out! If you do not, your availability cannot be taken into consideration.

http://www.doodle.com/f5ashzgsen7crh3c#table

As with last term, we will be updating the discussion group blog with interesting papers and hopefully responses to our weekly discussions.

If you would like to contribute, please create a blogspot account and I can add you to the list of contributors. As with last term, we are prohibiting negative comments or posts from the blog. Any posts that bash or belittle discussion group members, authors, or anyone else will be removed and the rights of the blogger will be revoked. This blog is fully public and linked from more than one site. Our professional reputations are at stake and we will not tolerate inappropriate use of the site.

Thanks! I look forward to seeing everyone this term.

2012!

Happy New Year! New posts coming soon!

My copy of The Philosophy of Biology by Rosenberg and Arp has arrived in Ottawa and I will pick it up this week!

I look forward to upcoming discussions.