[alife] THS - ALife

Benoit Hardy-Vallée benoithv at gmail.com
Fri Dec 9 07:26:08 PST 2005


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Special issue of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, Life and ALife:
Interactions Between Natural and Synthetic Biology
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ppcogsci/bhv/Alife

ALife is an interdisciplinary field of research that aims at studying  
life
or life-like processes through computational modelling techniques and  
the
simulation of real or theoretically possible living systems or  
ecosystems.
Neural networks, agents, or communities of agents are embedded in  
simulated
environments, or embodied and embedded in real environments, where  
they are
left to develop, interact, learn, reproduce, adapt and evolve. ALife
scientists can use such models to test various hypotheses about the  
nature
of life or cognition, or about complex process such as adaptation and
learning. As a consequence, the field stands at the intersection of
theoretical biology, computational biology and cognitive science. In  
this
special edition of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, "Life and
ALife: Interactions Between Natural and Synthetic Biology", we  
propose to
investigate foundational questions related to the interactions between
(natural) biology and the synthetic-biological approach of ALife.  
Here is a
(non exhaustive) sample of topics that can be addressed in this issue:

Epistemology of ALife
	•	Does ALife tell us something about real biological systems
or is
it only informative about its own theories?
	•	What is the epistemological status of ALife simulations: are
they scientific theories or models, or simply (fun) formal systems?
	•	Are simulations or artificial agents relevant in the context
of justification or the context of discovery, or both? Are they  
deductive,
inductive or abductive engines?

Biology and philosophy of biology
	•	Can ALife help the life sciences address complex issues such
as the nature/existence of the Baldwin effect, the influence of  
development
on evolutionary process, or the nature of adaptation? And how?
	•	Can ALife help develop naturalistic accounts of cognition?
Which  stance (reductionist, emergentist, etc.) is advocated by ALife
research?

Invited Contributors
	•	Pete Mandik, Philosophy Department, William Paterson
University
	•	Barbara Webb, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

DEADLINE AND CONTACT

January 28, 2006, is the final deadline for papers to be included in the
issue on ALife. Please initially send us a brief outline of the  
projected
paper. All questions and files (.RTF or .DOC) should be addressed to:
  bhv at sympatico.ca

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
all details are avalaible here: http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ppcogsci/
bhv/Alife/

Edited by:
Ben Hardy
Institut Jean Nicod, Paris (France)
Laboratoire d’Analyse Cognitive de l’Information, Montréal. CAN.
http://benoithv.free.fr
bhv at sympatico.ca

Pierre Poirier
Philosophy Department
Université du Québec at Montreal, CAN
Laboratoire d’Analyse Cognitive de l’Information, Montréal. CAN.
poirier.pierre at uqam.ca


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