Evolutionary Perspectives in the Social Sciences and Humanities

From
Date
SECOND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

University of British Columbia

Graduate Student Conference on Evolutionary Perspectives in the Social
Sciences and Humanities

October 3-5, 1997
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, B.C., Canada

DEADLINES
February 28:	deadline for abstracts
May 30: 	(or before) notification of acceptance

The purpose of this conference is to bring together graduate students from
a variety of disciplines working on issues related to evolution.  Graduate
students and interested faculty will find out the sorts of evolutionary
issues people in other disciplines are working on, and how they view
evolutionary issues and deal with puzzles raised by the use of
evolutionary models in non-biological contexts.

We envision a conference which will be of interest to a wide range of
disciplines, with papers which are accessible to an interdisciplinary
audience.  This conference may be of interest to people working in the
theoretical sciences, applied science, economics, commerce, anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, history, cultural studies, science studies,
religious studies, sociology, applied mathematics, computing science,
linguistics, English literature and others.


Keynote Speaker:  	Dr. David Hull (Northwestern), author of _Science
			as a Process_

Invited Speaker:  	Dr. Peter Danielson (UBC), editor of _Modelling
			Rationality, Morality and Evolution_


Possible topics (but not limited to these):

-historical attitudes in the humanities about Darwinian evolution
-evolutionary models of culture/cultural speciation
-new perspectives in sociobiology
-evolutionary psychology
-evolutionary models in science studies
-articles questioning the usefulness/viability of evolutionary models in
the social sciences and the humanities
-historical case studies of ways that evolutionary thinking has entered
into one or more humanistic and social scientific disciplines
-how changes in evolutionary theory have been reflected in social theory,
social policy, models of cultural change, etc.
-new historical viewpoints about social darwinism
-evolutionary linguistics
-"invisible hand" explanations in economics

We are open to any topic accessible to an interdisciplinary audience and
which relates theories of evolution in some way to the social sciences or
humanities.  If you're not sure whether your idea would be applicable,
send us a short note and we can tell you whether it would be worth writing
up the abstract and article summary.

Format of submissions:  Please submit (preferably by email) an abstract of
200-250 words, and a 3 page summary (roughly 750 words) of your proposed
paper.  Include your name, your institutional and departmental
affiliation, email address (or snail mail address if you don't have
email), and tentative paper title.  Plan a presentation or paper reading
of 20-30 minutes.  Proposals for panel discussions are also welcome.

Out-of-town graduate students are encouraged to secure their own funding,
but some travel funding may become available.  We will attempt to billet
as many people as possible on a first-come-first-served basis.

For anyone interested in acting as a referee, please contact us with a
short note about your research area.

This Conference is being sponsored by the UBC Faculty of Graduate
Studies, UBC
Philosophy and Zoology Departments, and Green College.

Submit abstracts and article summaries either to dawnvo@unixg.ubc.ca or
chrismac@ethics.ubc.ca

Conference Web-Page:
http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/~chrismac/evol/

Dawn Ogden	Chris MacDonald
Conference Co-Chairs

Phone:  604-822-3292
Fax:    604-822-4978
UBC Philosophy Department
1866 Main Mall, Buch E-370
Vancouver, B.C.
V6T 1Z1  Canada