May 23 – 27, 2011
Johannes Jaeger, Patricia Shaw, Stephan Harding, Phil Franses, Julie Richardson & Stuart Kauffman (by videolink)
The late Brian Goodwin’s influence on biology, and science in general, was profound and has yet to be fully understood by the scientific establishment. He challenged the neo-Darwinist reductionism which saw organisms simply as carriers of selfish genes, and instead emphasised the importance of their self-organising power, complexity and creativity – the whole as much greater than the sum of its parts. This led him to develop at Schumacher College our unique MSc in Holistic Science. It explores a “science of qualities” which aims to help our culture shift its emphasis away from control and towards participation with nature, by healing the split between facts and values and quantities and qualities.
This course brings together Brian’s students, friends and collaborators to discuss the influence his thinking has had in the sciences, social sciences and the wider world of those working for a more humane and sustainable society. It will feature presentations, discussions, and plenty of the participatory, creative and celebratory activities for which Brian was known and loved.
This course will be relevant for those who have already enjoyed Brian’s work as well as those who are new to concepts such as ‘a science of qualities’ and want to explore these exciting aspects of science through the Brian’s vision and how it has been taken forward.
Johannes Jaeger is an evolutionary and developmental biologist, and an alumnus of the Schumacher MSc in Holistic Science. He was trained as a geneticist at the Biocenter in Basel, received his PhD from Stony Brook University in New York, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, and is now a group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG; www.crg.cat) in Barcelona. He and his research team are trying to understand how complex multi-cellular organisms develop from egg to adult, and how this affects the course of evolution. Insights from this (and related) research are currently crystallising into a new and extended evolutionary theory, which shifts emphasis away from genes to the level of biological systems and organisms. Hopefully, this shift will provide an important contribution to a more holistic (and wholesome) view of humanity’s place in the universe.
Patricia Shaw will take up Brian’s phrase ‘a science of qualities’ and ask how his work has influenced approaches to inquiring into the realm of human activity and our civic life in particular. She will explore how his concerns continually challenge existing ways of thinking about a whole raft of practices from policy formulation to project management to performance measurement. What practical alternatives does his work invite that involve consensual recognition of the patterns that connect?
Stuart Kauffman will explain why he found Brian’s approach to biology so important. Brian was the first in the world to try to build a mathematical model of the entire set of thousands of genes in the human genome. Although this model was wrong in detail, it was profoundly right in spirit and established him as a visionary theoretical biologist as a young man. Since Darwin, virtually all biologists have thought that natural selection is the sole source of order in biology. Brian disagreed. In the tradition of D’Arcy Thompson, Brian showed in case after case that part of the order in biology could come from what he called “fields”. Stuart and Brian published two papers together which built on this work, and he will discuss how this approach is being developed in current complexity science research.
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Phil Franses, Stephan Harding and Julie Richardson will reflect on the direction of Brian’s work at the College, why Brian felt it necessary to look beyond traditional education methods, (despite having had such a huge impact in the mainstream) and his vision of Holistic Science as a necessary healing journey.
Johannes Jaeger has an MSc in Holistic Science from Schumacher College. His work with Brian greatly influenced the direction of his future PhD research. He is now Group Leader of the Research Unit in Systems Biology at Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG) in Barcelona.
Patricia Shaw is a Visiting Professor at The Business School, Hertfordshire University and a Guest Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she supervises doctoral students taking an innovative complexity based approach to their studies of corporate and public life. She has three decades of experience as a consultant to many companies and public sector institutions throughout Europe, encouraging pioneering approaches to leadership, management and organisation development. Originally a physicist herself, she facilitated Brian’s first course at Schumacher when he was a scholar-in-residence and went on to collaborate with him on a number of occasions. She is author of ‘Changing Conversations in Organisations: a complexity approach to change’.
Stuart Kauffman studied medicine and then moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he became Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. He rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997 and where he continues to be an external professor. From 2004 to 2009 Kauffman held a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and Physics and Astronomy. He was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. In January 2009, he became a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing. In January 2010, he joined the University of Vermont faculty where he is continuing his work with UVM’s Complex Systems Center.
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Brian Goodwin studied biology at McGill University and emigrated to Britain under a Rhodes scholarship to study mathematics at Oxford. He obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh where he carried out research in embryology under the biologist Conrad Waddington. He taught mathematics at Oxford University and later at Sussex University until 1983, when he became a professor of biology at the Open University.
In 1994, he published his most popular book, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: the Evolution of Complexity. Brian’s work was in the tradition of Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose 1917 book On Growth and Form inspired a new “structuralist” biology to explore the notion that organisms are irreducible wholes that give rise to structures that cannot be understood on the basis of genes alone. After teaching on a course at Schumacher College in 1995, Brian worked with the College to develop its pioneering MSc in Holistic Science, and remained on staff there until shortly before his death in July 2009.
£750
All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
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