Participants

Benjamin Bembé was born in 1972 in Munich, Germany. He studied biology and geography in Munich. His doctoral thesis he wrote 2000-2004 on the Zoological State Collection Munich on Orchid Bees of South America. From 2002-2018 he worked as an highschool teacher in the subjects of biology and geography. Since 2018 he is working as a researcher in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Morphology, Witten/Herdecke University. Special interests are the systematics and organization of insects, features of human evolution and cultural products, and issues of didactics in biology teaching. Numerous trips took him to countries in South and Central America, to Namibia, Borneo and to Egypt.

Leonardo Bich is a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ Researcher at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain. He obtained a PhD in Anthropology and Epistemology of Complex Systems from the University of Bergamo. He worked at the CNRS & University of Bordeaux, at the Biology of Cognition Lab of the Universidad de Chile and, as a visiting fellow, at the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh. His research is focused on theoretical and epistemological issues related to biological organisation, autonomy, and control and on their implications for investigations in Origins of Life, Synthetic and Systems Biology, and Theoretical Biology.

Pierrick is a philosopher of biology at Macquarie University, in Australia, with a background in evolutionary biology and ecology. Pierrick works mainly on conceptual issues related to evolutionary theory, the concept of biological individuality, and major transitions in evolution. He also has interests in the philosophy of causation and cognitive science.
Pierrick has recently published a short book at Cambridge University Press in which he explores the status of units and levels of selection in evolutionary theory. He proposes a suite of criteria to distinguish genuine from arbitrary or conventional units and levels of selection.

Dr Clarke is a Lecturer at the University of Leeds in the UK, and Director of the Leeds Centre for History and Philosophy of Science. Before being appointed at Leeds in 2017, she held postdocs at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Vienna. She finished her PhD at Bristol under the supervision of Samir Okasha.

She specialises in Philosophy of Biology, especially evolutionary theory. Much of her published work concerns unitisation problems in biology: Situations where it is difficult to agree on the nature and boundaries of the main actors or concepts in a theory or model. One example is the organism – an important unit in all branches of biology, but one which lacks a common definition. My work explores this unit in the context of evolutionary optimality models and major transitions. I am also interested in how units are picked out in ecology and in conservation, and what difference changes of definition make to things like biodiversity measures. She also maintains interests in Philosophy of Race, and Sex and Gender. She is currently writing a book called ‘The Units of Life: Kinds of individuals in Biology’.

Guilhem Doulcier is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on major evolutionary transitions.

Katrin Hammerschmidt is a group leader at the Institute of Microbiology at Kiel University in Germany. Before, she held positions as postdoctoral fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study in Auckland, at the University of Sheffield, UK, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. Katrin is an evolutionary biologist and interested in the origin of the hierarchical structure of life. Exemplary, she investigates the evolutionary transition to multicellularity and the evolution of symbiosis. In her work, she combines the approach of experimental evolution with phenotypic and genomic analyses. Through the integration of evolutionary principles in microbiology she recently started projects in translational evolutionary research and science education. She values interdisciplinary collaborations, in particular with a diverse range of biologists, bioinformaticians, science educators, theoreticians and philosophers of biology.

Susanna Kümmell, a paleontologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (University Witten/Herdecke, Germany), studied geology/paleontology and Waldorf education and is working about the evolution of synapsids from the Permian to the End of the Cretaceous. A special focus are the evolution of synapsid manus and pes, anatomical trends and the animal's locomotion. This approach is taken as a basis to study evolutionary patterns of heterochrony, probable processes of plasticity and trends in autonomy during the Permian and Mesozoic.

Alvaro Moreno Bergareche is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Born in Donostia-San Sebastián, he is a specialist in the areas of Philosophy of Science & Philosophy of Biology, Artificial Life, Complex Systems and Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Professor Moreno has been the principal investigator in many funded projects (funding institutions include: Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, Basque Government, University of the Basque Country), and participated to several others, including European research networks. He has also participated as Review Expert in the evaluation of proposals submitted to the European Commission for funding and/or review of projects being funded by the Commission). He has organized many international conferences and workshops on the relation between Artificial Life and AI, philosophy of biology and cognitive science, and complex systems at large. He has been member of the organizational and/or program committee of more than 20 international conferences, and he is since many years regular member of the program committee of the Artificial Life conferences (ALIFE) and the European Conferences on Artificial Life (ECAL). He has organized a Doctorate Program on Complex Systems, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and has supervised many PhD theses, most of them obtaining the highest marks. He is also co-founder of the Spanish Network of Cognitive Sciences (http://retecog.net) and has been actively involved in the dissemination of science, and he led the project for the creation of the Museum of Science in San Sebastian (Spain) (www.miramon.org). His work has received a growing international recognition, which is confirmed by the invitations he regularly receives to give lectures in different countries, and the numerous national and international awards he received.bHe has developed, together with numerous collaborators and students, both local and international, a distinctive interdisciplinary research line on Biological Autonomy, which bridges philosophy and science and has obtained significant international projection. This achievement is reflected in the creation of the IAS–Research Centre for Life, Mind & Society (http://www.ias-research.net), which has become a reference in Europe in its domain.