Dinner with philosophers/historians of biology

I just returned from dinner with Dick Burian, his wife Ann, Bob Richardson and his wife Peggy DesAutels, Rob Skipper and his wife Karen, and fellow grad student Clement Loo. Burian is visiting speaker this week as a part of the Philosophy and Evolutionary Biology class nicknamed "Darwiniana." It was a lovely dinner at Aqua in Mt. Lookout. Sushi was fantastic and may I suggest the sake-tini (a martini with sake, cucumber, and vodka)? As always I get tips on what else I need to read. This time it was about philosophy of experiment, exploratory experiments and funding and the new experimentalists.

I forgot to blog about the previous dinners I attended with Mike Dietrich at JeanRo Bistro downtown and Roberta Millstein (earlier in the quarter) at Tinks in the gaslight district. They, too, were part of the Darwiniana course. I've had such great opportunities this quarter to meet and have extended conversations with such respected philosophers of biology.

Philosophers can have fun, too

I hosted a party last night for my fellow grad students. We haven't been socializing as much as we did last year. Perhaps we second-year students don't need the support we did last year. Perhaps we're busier in our second year. Some of us have been away weekends, so I know that has factored into it. I've felt bad that we haven't been around for the first-year students.

But anyway, I put together a party because we've been talking about it for a while. We had out the Wii and rocked out on Rock Band 2. And Ayca, Kaitlin and Iris brought dishes, so there was a ton of food. I had a good time. I hope everyone else did, too. There was the Wii for entertainment, or small groups talking about non-philosophy topics, and a group talking philosophy, so you could wander to fit your interests. It was also significant-other friendly, too, since it wasn't all philosophy all the time.

Dinner with Giere, Waters

As part of the University of Cincinnati Darwiniana speaker series (sponsored by Taft), I had dinner last night with Ron Giere and Ken Waters. Although much of the time was talking about non-philosophy topics or the history of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, it was a very enjoyable dinner. There was an interesting discussion about the use of visuals in science. Philosophers of science have not tackled that issue yet. Scientists use visuals (images of fluorescent proteins in tissues, graphs of data, functional MRI brain scans) to make their argument. Ken seems to think that the visuals are interpretations of data and not the data themselves. Certainly in fMRI, PIs (principal investigators) put up either summary images combining the effect of all subjects or hand-select an ideal image to serve as an exemplar of the activation pattern s/he is talking about, which supports the interpretation claim. Graphs are interpretations as well. But, photographs of gel electrophoresis seem to be the data that needs to be interpreted. I'm sure it will turn out that different fields have different evidentiary and interpretive standards. But it's an interesting question.