Evolution at the Edges of Life: Origins, Artificial Systems, and the Conceptual Limits of Evolutionary Theory

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biology has shed an impressive light upon the various phenomena of life. The unity of the living, the diversity of organisms, the history of living species, the exquisite adaptations of living creatures, and various other aspects of life are all explained, or at least better understood, through a reference to evolution by natural selection. However, researchers very early on realized that this theory had the potential of answering many questions outside the proper domain of biology. Aspects of human cultures and history, the diversity of languages, aspects of economic change, human psychology, and many other phenomena have been investigated using the concepts of mutation, natural selection, and inheritance, and by applying evolutionary models and devising evolutionary explanations. 

This conference is the closing conference of a research project titled The Explanatory Scope of Generalized Darwinism: Towards Criteria for Evolutionary Explanations Outside Biology (GenDar) that is jointly funded by ANR and DFG, is led by Thomas Reydon (Hannover) and Philippe Huneman (Paris) and is carried out collaboratively by researchers at Leibniz University Hannover and the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS / Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). The project is devoted to a philosophical assessment of evolutionary accounts of non-biological phenomena.

This international meeting will focus on evolution at the “edges of life”, i.e., chemical evolution at the origin of life and evolution in artificial systems, and will examine theoretical accounts in these domains that rely on Darwinian ideas in order to make sense of phenomena that are neither biological nor cultural or social. Speakers will address chemical phenomena involved in the origin of life, the physics of the living, and the fecundity of Darwinian concepts with respect to computational algorithms and robotics. Speakers include biologists, chemists, physicists, computer scientists and philosophers of science, who will discuss the uses of evolutionary frameworks, the varieties of Darwinian conceptions, as well as general issues raised by the ambition of expanding evolutionary thinking outside biology.