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

To get credit points, students must show proficiency in reading, discussing, and presenting scientific literature.

Our goal is to discuss epistemological limitations of the type of scientific activity where bioinformatics belongs to:

For a long time already, and in particular with the pushes in science given by the works of Galileo, Newton and Darwin, mainstream scientific acitivity assume as granted that 'reductionism' holds. This implies that it is assumed that any system (including living ones) are sums of parts and that the signals from the parts to the whole dominate evolution. This is illustrated, for example, in the fact that the causes of mutations or variations in organisms are invariably searched in the molecules, reflecting a generalized adoption of a 'machine metaphor' for organisms. However, this metaphor ignores or negates the auto-organization, the auto-fabrication and the auto-regeneration of organisms. Among others, the biomathematician Robert Rosen has brilliantly argued about the incompleteness and simplicity of the machine metaphor and their pernicious consequences to scientific activity.

By focusing on the parts - which is a very suitable approach for using computational resources - and neglecting the organization, scientific studies, including in bioinformatics, concentrate almost all ressources on generating and analyzing data. These are essentially anti-ecological processes that cannot be exempted from the huge crisis of the 'anthropocene', especially because it continuously feeds the expansion of this process, by extensively training students and research trainees to maintain and develop further layers of the already huge technological infrastructure. Each of these layers consumes and delays the regeneration of our already depleted planet.

We will read and discuss scientific work that can illuminate the points described above. The specific works/articles are selected after discussions with the attendees.

Some literature (books) for inspiration:

Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Robert Rosen, 1991)

Against method (Paul Feyerabend, 1975)

Farewell to Reason (Paul Feyerabend, 1987)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962)

The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity (David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021)

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)