Bioinformatics Journal Club: (Computer) Science and society (2S)

392172 Dias Vieira Braga, Stoye Winter 2023/24 Monday 10:15-11:45 in U10-155

Short Description

This time our Journal Club will in fact be a “Research café” with the title “(Computer) Science and society”.


This course will happen as a round table, always underlined by ethical discussions, and has a mixture of three main topics:

education
biology
technology

In biology, for example, we thought of starting by revisiting some elementary questions such as:

Is the organism a mechanism (machine)?
Is the organism controlled by its parts?
What is the whole of life in an organism?
Are thoughts a product of the brain?

And…

Are we allowed to ask ourselves and answer these questions?

In general we thought of having an open space, in which everyone will have a chance to express opinions and listen. The goal is more to enlarge our scientific views and critical senses, but we may also find new answers and pathways to follow.


Some literature (books) for inspiration:

The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity (David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021)
Against method (Paul Feyerabend, 1975)
Farewell to Reason (Paul Feyerabend, 1987)
Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Robert Rosen, 1991)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962)
The Falling Sky - Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, 2013, originally published in French in 2010)
Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Ailton Krenak, 2019)

Schedule

Date Topic
09.10.2023 Organization of the class
16.10.2023 Farewell to Reason (Introduction)
Autobiographical Reminiscences of Robert Rosen
23.10.2023 Merchandise Love (The Falling Sky - Words of a Yanomami Shaman)
The humanity we think we are (Ideas to Postpone the End of the World)
30.10.2023 Connecting the ideas suggested so far
06.11.2023 Metamagical Themas (1st column) by Douglas Hofstadter
13.11.2023 Praeludium of Life Itself by Robert Rosen
20.11.2023 —– No meeting —–
27.11.2023 The Church-Pythagoras Thesis by Robert Rosen
04.12.2023 The Church-Pythagoras Thesis by Robert Rosen
11.12.2023 On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing
18.12.2023 On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing
Winter break
08.01.2024 An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory by Alonzo Church
15.01.2024 An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory by Alonzo Church
22.01.2024 What is Biology by Robert Rosen
29.01.2024 Chapter I (Prolegomena) of Life Itself by Robert Rosen