Next IPBC talk by Grant Ramsey on 11 March 2026

[Phila M. Msimang]

Greetings, 

This is a notice for the next talk of the International Philosophy of Biology Circle (IPBC). We now have a Bluesky profile that you can follow here: https://bsky.app/profile/phil-bio-circle.bsky.social

Our next talk will be by Grant Ramsey (KU Leuven Belgium) Much ado about ‘n’othing. 

This talk will take place on Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 18h00 – 19h00 SAST (South African Standard Time / GMT +2 / UTC + 02:00). 

Please find the paper upon which the talk is based here, and see the abstract for the talk below: 

Much ado about ‘n’othing

This article argues that a core area of the philosophy of biology – the philosophy of fitness – has for decades rested on fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors. These errors have been leveraged to support the position in the philosophy of biology known as statisticalism, which holds that biological fitness does not cause evolution, but is merely a kind of statistical summary of evolutionary outcomes. This is opposed to causalism, which holds that fitness is based on (causally efficacious) probabilistic propensities, a position known as the propensity interpretation of fitness. The error I focus on is the idea that fitness depends on population size, n, and because population size is not a causal quantity, fitness cannot be causal. In this paper, I show that fitness is not dependent on n and therefore a central critique of the propensity interpretation of fitness is ill founded.

 

You can join the meeting using this hyperlink that I will send with every meeting reminder: Join the meeting now. 

Our schedule of talks for the next few months is as follows: 

11 March 2026:  Grant Ramsey (KU Leuven Belgium) Much ado about ‘n’othing. (See text here).

8 April 2026: Mazin Qumsiyeh (Palestine Museum of Natural History, Palestine) Why we must all challenge ecocide: case study from Palestine.

13 May 2026: Pınar Önal (Bilkent University, Türkiye). Repressors of Distinct Dynamics Multiply the Effect of a Single Morphogen.

[Event in Türkiye during Northern Summer break (29 June - 5 July), meeting break in August] 

16 September 2026: Lucas Matthews (Columbia University, USA) How the problem of locality turned into the problem of portability.  (See text here)

Please do send me an e-mail if you would like to propose to present your work on any topic in the philosophy of biology in our series. 

Best wishes,

 

Phila M. Msimang

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Office: +27 21 808 9938 | Department administrator: +27 21 808 2418

Co-ordinator of the International Philosophy of Biology Circle

Fellow of the South African Young Academy of Science

Secretary of the Azanian Philosophical Society

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