Marine Biological Laboratory Summer Seminar

From Linnaeus to the Encyclopedia of Life: Tracking Diversity in the Natural World

May 19-26, 2010

Application Deadline: January 15th, 2010


The MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar is an intensive week with
annually varying topics designed for a group of no more than twenty-five
advanced graduate students, postdoctoral associates, younger scholars,
and established researchers in biology, history, philosophy, and the
social sciences.

This year’s meeting focuses on past and present attempts to understand
and order the natural world.  The 20th century saw a new kind of focus
on nature that was shaped by E. O. Wilson and his collaborators.  This
approach has a species-based focus, a concern with anthropogenically
induced extinctions, and an explicit policy agenda.  It has impacts not
only on how we think about conservation and preservation, but also on
how some groups of biologists think about their work.  Now, in the 21st
century there is a concerted effort to revolutionize the tools and
methods of studying biodiversity in community ecology, conservation
biology, ecosystem ecology, and taxonomy.  And Biodiversity is finally a
topic in the public consciousness: the United Nations has designated
2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity.

Our seminar aims to understand these developments in their historical
and conceptual contexts by studying the longer history of efforts to
collect, identify, sort, name, showcase, and otherwise organize the
natural world.  Our focus will begin in the 18th century, when the
practice of natural history took on its present form, and will explore
changes in the way the biological world and its contents were understood
in the 19th and 20th centuries.  How were expeditions funded?  What was
collected, and why?  How were natural history collections understood? 
What were the values and interests of the various people and
institutions involved?  How did scientific, political, religious, and
cultural understandings shape the way nature was studied?  How and why
did the units of interest and analysis shift over time?  In what ways
has the role of museums changed during the 20th century?

The examination of these questions will serve as a basis for
understanding contemporary efforts in biodiversity studies and the
taxonomic science that partly enabled it.  What does biodiversity mean
now?  How is it recognized, quantified, and valued?  What are the new
ways in which it is studied and cataloged, and what are the value and
policy implications of these methods?  As part of our look at
contemporary work, we will have a detailed introduction to projects
housed at the MBL and ASU that focus on biodiversity from several
angles.  These include LINNE, the Encyclopedia of Life, and the
e­-Typification Initiative.

These discussions will be led by invited biologists, historians,
philosophers, social scientists, and informaticians.  Readings will be
circulated in advance, as will a short primer on modern taxonomic
practice.  Our look at the foundations and future of diversity studies
will be approached from multiple scholarly angles for the purpose of
understanding various approaches to the biological world and their
relationships with policy.
 
For more information and application materials (applications due January 15), 
please see: http://cbs.asu.edu/mbl_seminar

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