Philosophy Speakers: “ENCODE and the Parthood Question”

Marie Kaiser is a philosopher of science with a strong interest in the philosophy of biology, the metaphysics of science, metaphilosophy, and science education. In 2012, she completed her PhD dissertation, “An Ontic Account of Explanatory Reduction in Biology” at the University of Cologne, Germany where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Group Causation and Explanation. In Fall 2016, she will assume a teaching appointment in the Department of Philosophy at Bielefeld University in Germany. She is the author of Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences (Springer) and co-author of Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History (Springer), “The Metaphysics of Constitutive Mechanistic Phenomena” (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science) and “Problems and Prospects of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Philosophy of Science” (International Studies Review), as well as many other journal articles and book chapters. About the talk Under which conditions is a molecule, such as a particular DNA sequence, a real part of the human genome? Does the human genome have joints of nature that allow for a unique partitioning into parts? In this talk, Kaiser provides an answer to these questions by analyzing the scientific practices of individuating genomic parts and by critically reconstructing the metaphysical assumptions that underlie these practices. My analysis focuses on the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) project which was planned as a follow-up to the Human Genome Project and which aims at interpreting the DNA sequence of the human genome by identifying all of its functional parts. For a metaphysician who tries to understand part-whole relations in the biological realm, the ENCODE Project constitutes an instructive case study because it is among the few cases in which biologists explicitly seek to individuate part-whole relations. Her central claim will be that there are two necessary conditions for a molecule to be a part of the human genome: first, it must have a causal-role function, that is, it must contribute to the capacity of the genome to provide information for the synthesis of proteins, and second, it must be an actual segment of the genome’s DNA sequence. This account of genomic parthood is an example of a metaphysics of biological practice because it analyzes the explanatory and investigative practices of the biological sciences to develop claims about what the world is ultimately like.
Location:
Social Sciences Tower Room 1253
Speaker:
Marie Kaiser
More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/philosophy-speakers-encode-and-parthood-question