Erik Peterson, Assistant Professor – History of Science at the University of Alabama presents “Finding the Organism in Computational History of Biology”

Thursday October 25, 2018 at 4:25 in Druck 16

Reception at 4PM at the Druckenmiller Sills Lobby, under the large mural.

How do you see changes in a central concept of a science over time? Traditionally, historians of biology examine the texts of a few “greatest hits”—Darwin, Morgan, Pauling, Crick, Jacob & Monod, and so on—and infer the turning points. But what if we could survey those far from the centers of disciplinary notoriety?

Erik and his team applied computational text mining methods from Digital Humanities and Digital History to over 30,000 journal articles from 12 journals over the early and mid-20th century. Hoping to locate changes in the concept of “organism” over the decades, what the data showed regarding changing discourse in the life sciences, however, was more surprising.

Dr. Peterson has degrees in Biological Anthropology, History, and History and Philosophy of Science. His recent book, The Life Organic: the Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics (Pittsburgh, 2017), is more exciting than it sounds.