ANCESTRY: EVIDENCE, INFERENCE, AND IDENTITY
January 22 - January 24
The aim of this virtual conference is to bring together anthropologists, biologists, historians, and philosophers of science to address the concept of ancestry in relation to scientific inferences about the evolutionary history of humans. In the past 50 years, ancestry and the inference thereof have become molecularized, automated, and commodified. This shift has profound implications. The history and philosophy of molecular systematics raises important questions about the epistemic priority of competing sources of evidence, the scope and limitations of computational phylogenetics, the challenges of representing relationships among taxa in both the past and present, the social epistemological dimensions of big data acquisition and analysis, and the possibility of specific legitimate and responsible role(s) for political values in postgenomic inference. Participants in this workshop are invited to explore how such practices both inform and interact with both phylogenetic and popular notions of identity.
Keynote Speakers
Rob DeSalle (American Museum of Natural History and the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics)
Matt Haber (Philosophy Department, University of Utah)
Edna Suárez-Díaz (Science and Technology Studies, National University of Mexico)
Registration
The conference will be held as a Zoom webinar and registration is required. Please register here.
Program
(View/Download abstracts)
Friday, Jan 22
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Rob DeSalle (American Museum of Natural History) Race Displaced by Ancestry? |
| 1:30 – 2:00 | Carlos Andrés Barragán and James Griesemer (UC Davis) The Re-situation of Genomic Data and Metadata: Human Admixture as Algorithm-and-modeling Practices |
| 2:00 – 2:30 | Amadeo Estrada (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) The Last Common Ancestor: a New Approach to its Reconstruction |
| 2:30 – 3:00 | Kostas Kampourakis and Brian Donovan (University of Geneva and BSCS) DNA Ancestry Tests and Inferences About Ethnicity: The Problem of Psychological Essentialism |
| 3:00 – 4:00 | Reception |
Saturday, Jan 23
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Edna Suárez-Díaz (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Disease, Human Variation and Evolution: Towards a Global Historical Perspective (1950s-1960s) |
| 1:30 – 2:00 | Michael Diamond-Hunter (London School of Economics) The Pitfalls and Concerns with Deleting and Replacing the Concept of “Race” in Human Genetics |
| 2:00 – 2:30 | Aaron Novick (University of Washington) ‘Sequence Homology’: A Case of Conceptual Deviance |
| 2:30 – 3:00 | Rafael Ventura (University of Pennsylvania) Reliability Models |
| 3:00 – 4:00 | Reception |
Sunday, Jan 24
| 12:00 – 1:00 | Matt Haber (University of Utah) Evidence, Inference, and Identity in Phylogenetics: Productive Disruptions in Conceptual and Methodological Commitments |
| 1:30 – 2:00 | Celso Neto (Dalhousie University) The Metaphysics of Race Meets Inductive Risk: Challenging the New Biological Race Realism |
| This talk has been canceled.
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| 2:30 – 3:00 | Reception |
| 3:00 – 4:00 | Reception |
Organizing Committee
Michael R. Dietrich (History and Philosophy of Science)
Marina R. DiMarco (History and Philosophy of Science)
Jeffrey H. Schwartz (Anthropology)
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Michael Dietrich mrd98@pitt.edu
*About Lynn Fellman- Artist for Science
Lynn Fellman is an independent artist and Senior Fulbright Scholar writing and drawing about the beauty and value of genomic science. The National Science Foundation, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, universities, and scientific organizations have supported her work.
Fusing digital tools and traditional media, she weaves illustrated narratives with explanations of scientific research. View her animated videos, helix prints, and DNA portraits at FellmanStudio.com.
Her current project, “We Want Our Genome Story,” is an illustrated book about a person named Artist on a journey to understand her genome. See a preview at LynnFellman.com.