On Friday, May 31, at 1800, James G. Lennox will be giving a free talk.The talk will be followed by a Q&A. No registration or payment is required to attend this talk.
The talk will be at Blindern, Vilhelm Bjerknes hus: Auditorium 4 (Moltke Moes vei 35). This is the same building, but a different room, from where the conference will take place.
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The Inductive Origins of Darwin's Origin
It is an unfortunate fact that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is typically discussed either as a speculative leap of genius or as the inevitable product of various sorts of religious, political, scientific and philosophical influences on him. In this lecture I will present Darwin's discoveries in a very different light, as the product of Darwin constantly asking questions and pursuing long and complex chain of inductive reasoning in which his ability to
integrate apparently unrelated abstractions —“large classes of facts” as he sometimes refers to them in
On the Origin of Species—plays the key role. To explore these aspects of Darwin's research I rely on the large mass of unpublished notes, notebooks and correspondence (now available online) for it is here that one sees Darwin's uncommon powers of inductive reasoning at work.
