The J. James Woods Lectures on the Sciences and Mathematics presents genome expert John Dupré, November 10 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room.
Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.
In his talk, From the Mendelian Gene to the Dynamic Genome, Dupré will briefly sketch the history of the gene concept from the heyday of Mendelian genetics in the early 20th century through the landmark discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 through the Human Genome Project to the contemporary concept of the genome. He will explain how current understanding of genomes has displaced or marginalized traditional and still widely held interpretations of genes as the causes of particular features of organisms, and he will show how increasingly dynamic understandings of the genome are undermining and supplanting still popular ideas of the genome as a blueprint or a program.
Dupré has held posts at Oxford, Stanford, and Birkbeck College, London. His publications include The Disorder of Things (Harvard 1993), Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford 2001), Humans and Other Animals (Oxford 2002), and Processes of Life (Oxford 2012). He is a former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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