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2.1. Topics
I New Discoveries defining Complexity
Three main lectures are scheduled on this topic to focus on particular aspects of complexity, i.e. complexity and biological systems; complexity in climatology; complexity – an approach from epistemology and philosophy.
There are many ways of studying complexity. They generally all handle it by trying to understand the dynamic behaviour of complex systems that range from individual organisms to the largest economic, technical, social, and political systems. By confronting and allowing these approaches to interact, by exchanging views on different complex systems, we expect to gain new ideas and to try to answer such questions as : Which way did science work until now, how did it evolve, and how might it evolve in the future? How can big pictures emerge from a sea of data ?
II Origin and Migrations of Modern Humans
From the origin of the modern human being to today’s Society, what are the forces involved, from where and how did we arrive at the point where we are now ?
Palaeontology, anthropology, genetics and linguistics can contribute to our better understanding of our history. How can these different approaches cross-fertilize each other, what have they learnt and what can they learn from each other ?
Workshops
The aim of the workshops is to imagine how the principles of coordination and dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities can be integrated into everyday decisions and strategies. Participants from different horizons will take part in the discussions : leaders from politics, industry, science, and students, etc.
2.2. Speakers by topic
Gerald M. Edelman,
Director of the Neurosciences Institute; President of the Neurosciences Research Foundation; Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology, Scripps Research Institute.
Gerald M. Edelman is one of the world’s most famous neuroscientists. He is the father of «neural Darwinism», a multidisciplinary theory that combines insights about brain composition, connectivity, structure, function, and evolution. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, 1972.
Geoffrey West,
President and Distinguished Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Geoffrey West was a theoretical particle physicist and leader of the particle theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the mid-1990s, his focus shifted from particle to biological physics, studying the most complex of all systems: life. Since then, he has done major work at the confluence of biology and physics, including seminal work on biological scaling.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,
Founding Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; Professor at Potsdam and Oxford Universities; Distinguished Science Adviser of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UK.
John Schellnhuber, a world leader in the field of climatology, actively serves on many international panels for scientific strategy and policy advice regarding environmental and developmental issues. He has made remarkable contributions in the field of climatology, especially regarding the theory of complex non-linear systems and regional and global environmental analysis.
Ian Hacking,
Professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto ; Professeur au Collège de France.
Ian Hacking is certainly one of the world’s most prominent philosophers alive. He is a specialist in epistemology, in the philosophy of sciences and in the philosophy of languages. He is particularly interested in the different styles of scientific reasoning.
Jean-Pierre Changeux,
Professor, Collège de France; Professor & Chairman of the Department of Neurosciences, Pasteur Institute, Paris.
Jean-Pierre Changeux is considered one of the fathers of modern neurobiology. In an era of specialization, he is one of the rare scientists who has not only disregarded interdisciplinary boundaries, but in fact bridged them. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Balzan Prize 2001 and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, 1993.
Ofer Bar-Yosef,
Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Paleolithic Archaeology in the Peabody Museum, Harvard, USA.
Ofer Bar-Yosef is one of the world’s most renowned scientists in paleolithic archaeology. He has done major work, including the seminal discovery that the Qafzeh hominids were actually 80,000-100,000 years old. This major discovery will serve as a starting point for the discussion on human migration.
Bernard Victorri,
Director of Research, CNRS, Lattice Laboratory (Languages, Texts, Computer Processing, Cognition), France.
Bernard Victorri is an international authority in linguistics who has done very important work on modeling in the language sciences. He is the head of the “Languages, Language and Cognition” team at the Lattice Laboratory, CNRS.
Svante Pääbo,
Director, Department of Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Svante Pääbo is a pioneer and world leader in ancient DNA studies. He has done reference work on the analysis of DNA from archeological samples. He has focused his recent work on comparative genome evolution. He is the recipient of many academic prizes, including the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, 2005.
2.3. Syntheses of the discussion by topic
2.4. References - (pdf)
2.5. Articles in reviews
