 Welcome back for our afternoon session, and up next we have Charles Wolff. Charles Wolff is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse, Jean Jaurès, and an associate member of the Sarton Center for History and Science at University. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism, a historical philosophical introduction. La philosophie de la biologie, in histoire de vitalisme, and lire le materialisme, and has edited or co-edited volumes on monsters, brains, empiricism, biology, and vitalism, including currently with Donna Jaloubenou, the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, and with J. Simons, the History and Philosophy of Materialism. His co-editor of the book series, History, Philosophy, and Theory of the Life Sciences, published by Springer. Well, hi everyone, and it's a pleasure to be here. And thanks to Chris for his invitation, and it's a pleasure, even in this form, to be participating in work in homage to David Dupuis, whose work I've been reading approximately since I came to Boston to do a PhD, in the late 90s, and I was hugely obsessed with that book, Darwinism Evolving, for one thing. I could mention other papers, but very attached to my copy of that book. And today I'm going to talk about vitalism and the emergence of biology, focused on the 18th century as a story, and why do I have this waxed self-portrait of this interesting figure, Anna Maria Mandolini, just because she was the great wax anatomist of the time. She had a chair at the University of Bologna in wax anatomy, Rebecca Mesparga wrote a book about this, and it just occurred to me this captures, roughly he captures the problem of what does it mean to model life, what does it mean to capture something about life in a scientific form, which of course is the, I don't know, the central paradox of vitalism, the governing paradox challenge of vitalism and perhaps of biology. So core issues, basic issues in thinking about vitalism. As a rough roadmap, as some people would say, when we encounter the term in the history of medicine, it means, so you know I just lettered them, but it means something like the opposite of mechanistic approaches to life. And the question is well opposite how, and in the name of what? I'll get back to that. In contrast, if we were having a meeting of early modern philosophy scholars, it would be a very different conversation, because they repeatedly used the word vitalism in a way that took me a few years to even accept, because it seems strange, where it strongly seems to mean a vision of matter as conscious, and mind it or sent it. So it's more of a focus on mind. In that sense, it's a little bit of a misnomer. And there's a lot of scholarship which uses it in a way I find sloppy. Notice I didn't name any names that you can do. People will call Aristotle a vitalist, and I accept Sofia Connell's view of the work. It's certainly not the target of this comment. People call Harvey a vitalist because of a few throwaway sentences in Harvey. I don't know if it's the law or Hume or Smith vitalists because of these very, very loose definitions of work. And in contemporary theory, sort of in the humanities, there's a lot of vitalist language, which seems to be kind of refusal of boundaries between life and non-life, nature and culture, mind, matter, all of which is potentially quite interesting. It seems to me that these kinds of either loose usage or speculative usages lose, or lose sight of a core issue, which to me, and this is both a historical suggestion and a conceptual suggestion, I think vitalism makes more sense as a term if we use it strictly to describe theories. And that's not just one theory, but a family or set of theories in which the key distinction is living versus non-living. Theories that are motivated by answering the question, what's the difference between living matter and non-living matter? In today's talk, I focused specifically on so-called Mopoli vitalism, which is to say the doctrine associated with Mopoli faculty of medicine. The heyday of this doctrine, and to some extent the heyday of that faculty, was the 18th, 19th centuries. And for a time, I mean, it was a very old faculty, some of the oldest in Europe. For a time, it was the chief rival of the Paris medical faculty. And they play out, and sociologists of science have studied this, and it's interesting. Mopoli versus Paris plays out a kind of holistic, organicist, anti-reductionist program on the Mopoli side, versus a more clinically focused experimental interventionist program on the Paris side. And it's true that some of this is rhetorical, or the public relations, operations of both medical schools that seek to brand themselves even in that time and associate themselves with the doctrine, but it really does mean something. And I'm not going to say more today about Mopoli versus Paris, but there is a strong sense that this school has a doctrine. And of course, that doctrine evolves over the 100, 150 years of its life, and that's its own story. Again, in the question of what we're talking about when we talk about vitalism, I want to mention that people suffer from very strong misconceptions, very influential misconceptions. And here's an example from an influential secondary source, Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. I've written about this elsewhere, but it's a convenient one-sentence definition that Wellman offers. Her definition of materialism is a little restrictive, a little limited. It doesn't apply to some of the very interesting materialists. That's not my story today. It's also a very misleading definition of vitalism because, as I'll want to say, Montcourier vitalism in all its diversity, the different actors, different theorists, almost never, you know, never would be a little strong, but almost never resort to some kind of irreducible, supernatural, mysterious life force. And they're quite critical, as I'll be saying. They're quite critical of invocations of the soul, of animistic approaches in medicine. So here's some more background information. I've mentioned some of this. It's also important, the third point here, that the word vitalism appears first in the context of this school. I mean, relatively late, actually used by the 1770s in texts that very few people have noticed, but it's more prominently used by the 1790s by the dean of their faculty, but he's using the term to describe the sort of 50 years of work. It's a sort of retrospective branding. And interestingly, at first, there's a sort of hesitation between the word vitalism and the word sensibilist or sensibility because what they consider vitalist medicine as is a doctrine that has organic sensibility or sensitivity as a kind of core property. And I put a list of some key names. The name that I find, the figure that I find the most interesting, original, thorough, is one of the least known because a lot of his writing is medical entries in Diderot and D'Arnaud-Bales, and it's taken a long while for anyone to notice they're buying it. They were signed with a little letter M and it took, well, it took 150 years or more for people to notice who that actually was. And indeed, there's no picture that I find of him. The picture is a better known figure, as you see, like Bordeaux and Bates. There's just pictures. As I mentioned at the outset, this is chiefly an 18th century phenomenon. Meaning the form of vitalism that I'm interested in here. The Montpellier School, as it extends into the 19th century, becomes increasingly ideological. And if I can use demarcation language, moves further and further away from kind of robust scientific practice into ideology. And indeed, in the 19th century, starts to argue spiritualistically or supernaturally or metaphysically about the status of the vital principle. That's a story I'm interested in that I've started to write about. It's not so well known outside of some French scholars, but I won't say more about that today. And as a doctrine, vitalism emerges in a context of tension. I mean, this is little simplified, but I think it's true and a lot of figures at the time spoke that way. So it has a degree of purchase on how they view the situation. Tension between animism and mechanism. So animism in the sense when you encounter that term in the history of medicine, it means explanations that appeal to the soul. It means other things elsewhere. And most prominently, the German professor in physician style. And on the other hand, so you know, vitalism, you might say, wants to triangulate animism mechanism and, you know, to find a third way. And mechanism, I don't think I need to clarify that term, but it's the project to study the body as if it were a machine or mechanistically. And there are many variants of mechanism. One of the points I want to stress today is that the interesting dimensions of monthly vitalism are not as hostile to mechanism as kind of comfortable scholarship might tell us. And my parenthesis there, which might seem a little mysterious is because the tensions between a mechanistic explanation of life and more organismic just to use that word. And the tensions that play out time and time again in the the century after my story. And Philippine man and I co authored a paper a few years ago exactly about man machine and embodiment as a sort of problem from the early modern period through to put them out. So, you know, vitalism emerges in that kind of theoretical tension. And specifically there's also an important earlier debate that takes place in the early years of the 1700s, and it gets republished as a collection 1720 to debate between style and the famous And it's a debate on organism, and it's an early use of the term organism it's arguably the first systematic or rather technical usage of the word. Interestingly, so both of these authors agree that organisms should be distinguished for mechanisms, which now associates organism with soul, the kind of soul as the controller or the hegemonic entity, whereas liveness has a more complexity argument you know organisms are not like machines, because of their type of complexity. And I suspect it's hard to show this historically but what will be the vitalist approach to organism via the metaphor of the base form, which I'll talk about. So TBD stands for to be discussed. That model is more like the complexity live medicine model. It's not interested in questions we would find very typical which is to say, where is the cell, or for there to be organism there must be self consciousness or center. Very rare. There are very few moments of interest in that question in the vitalist writings. Yeah, I'll just say something quickly about this sort of set of distinctions. What I really, the only thing I really should say today for purposes of my talk is that one can also explore a distinction between a more medically focused vitalism and a more ethnically or embryologically focused vitalism. And the late and regretted John Gallo insisted on this distinction to me a number of years ago. It can bear fruit as a distinction and I put a wonderful quote from Pongyem, where he clearly is identifying vitalism with the latter with a more embryological focus. And by that's that kind of vitalist is interested in growth and development in the mechanisms of in the forces involved there. Whereas the medical vitalist is more interested in structure and organization, in the sense of, how does this type of organization function and how is it different from other types of organization. And I will come back to the distinction I've suggested in some of my earlier papers on topic between substance and function as types of vitalism will come back to that. So, when I said that the vitalists challenge animism. Here is something. Here is something that would be what they challenge, which is to say, here is style, using the concept of soul to explain life, the functioning of the body the way the body stays itself, tries to ward off disease and so forth. And they will be critical of this kind of answer, and they will favor the answer or the concept of structure in dealing with possible bad reputation of vitalism and earlier work. I suggested that the kind of structure focused vitalism of the multiple school is a functional vitalism, whereas a substance focused vitalism matches what people usually mean when they say, this is the silly view, this is the irrational view. This is the overly metaphysical view. And the question of whether or not vitalism is a metaphysics, or has to be a metaphysics, something I've gotten interested in in recent years, but I won't have time to go into that much today. Suffice it to say that there's an easy way of telling the story to say, look, there's a science friendly form of vitalism, and there's more metaphysical vitalism, and I've begun to feel like that distinction might not be watertight. So what is functional vitalism? And what is this metaphor? What does it do? Well, multi vitalism takes as its key concept, the animal economy. This is a technical term of the notably the 17th and 18th centuries. And in vitalist usage, it very much is, and I know it's dangerous to talk about predecessor concepts and precursors and whatnot, but the animal economy is very much an organism concept. And I know I mentioned that the word organism had been used in the early 1700s by blindness and stuff. That doesn't mean it went into widespread usage. It took a century for the term to actually sort of stabilize and enter discourse. Now, animal economy is expressed in some key texts of these authors by a metaphor, by the metaphor of the beast form. You may find that intuitively obvious. The beast form seems like a giant organism, but it's composed of individual organisms, all of which serve kind of collective purpose. And that's what interests or that's one of the big things that interests the vitalists in their reflection on animal economy. So two quotes to that effect. Here, one of the prominent authors of this school says that in seeking to understand the nature of the living body, the relation between parts involved, he finds this metaphor and he does use the language of metaphor in this passage elsewhere. He finds the beast form metaphor to be helpful. You know, to run along in my slides. And here is menu, I mentioned earlier, the less known but fascinating figure. And here he refers to some prominent figures of the period who use the metaphor, and the phrase that I left in italics at the end, which I translated as connection of actions. He's interested in the way the actions of individual organs in the body are sympathetically or synergistically coherently linked. Now, since I'm trying to be, you know, punctual and efficient. I've mentioned that there's this focus on structure. And so here's something that I find really fascinating, namely, card carrying vitalist text, which happily uses some mechanistic language, as you can see in the first couple of lines of this quotation, things, etc. It is a criticism or perhaps one might say a critique of early modern 17th century scientific revolution type mechanism. But instead of saying this is not what life is or this is not what the soul is notice the last sentence of my excerpt. I'm just complaining that what's lost, lost sight of is organic structure, the source of the main properties of the human body. And this is something that you know if I had a bit more time I want to spend more time on because organic structure in relation to machine or mechanism. That story can be played out in different ways the relation between those notions can be played out in different ways. I would suggest that the animal economy in its vitalist usage is more like a complexification of mechanical models rather than coming absolute opposite. It doesn't invoke fully sort of ontologically other entities or forces. Well, and I'll just mention this quickly. Vitalists are not the only ones seeking to articulate a sophisticated mechanism or host mechanism approach to organism focusing on structure. Very prominent figure of the period who's very much in competition. In some respects, in which you might say he went competition, but there's a lot of professional competition between him and more for the school. And the both he is more keen to invoke the paternity of people like war have in a sort of, again, loose or pluralistic mechanistic framework. And then the vitalists and how or start to follow or quibble over what is the core vital property. And he has a very beautifully argued a very experimentally nourish distinction between irritability and sensibility. The Montpourier vitalists who in some ways do seem more metaphysically colored want a kind of monism of sensibility, they want sensibility or sensitivity to be the core property of life. I'll skip this it's an interesting quote from Haller where you can see what I've called elsewhere the sort of Newtonian analogy working and the vitalists also make a lot of use of Newtonian analogies. In their attempt to articulate well what will become a life science. So as I said a minute ago, these projects or programs can be seen, you know, it depends how one tells the story. There is a sense in which they can be seen as gradually increasing expansions and answers of mechanism. And of course someone might say well, there comes a point when you're no longer in. You know, it ain't hands us anymore to work. And you should know has written a lot of things on this topic, and I borrowed from him the notion of expanded mechanism and I gave a bit more content to it, my work. So again some quotations trying to keep an eye on the time. Here is yet another text by menu where, again, lots of mechanistic language, you know, human machine the springs the tension center. But within the space of 10 lines, and if you go to the end, you see the parts that I vitalize first this very chemical language no action without reaction. So that's chemical properties being built into the machine. So that's again an enhanced picture of the body machine. And from this continued continuous antagonism of actions life and health result. You know he's moving to what we might call top level properties, which are difficult for the mechanism to specify admittedly. So here's a similar passage from a different text of menu and where there's mechanistic language but in the end he seems to be interested in, you know, the spring but it's a bit of a metaphor at that point. The mechanistic function by which we have life health sickness and death. In the following triangulation earlier, you can see in texts like these. So on the one hand, vitalists say, can you please stop endlessly repeating the mechanistic language, because it's something of the past, and not as well known these types of animism, where they sort of want to be sarcastic they'll say well, how do you explain disease. How do you explain how the body fights off disease by invoking the soul it's a poor concept or it's a poor explanation. With regard to whether vitalism is or isn't a metaphysics metaphysics and vital force. What people do in the same different part of the same passage I was quoting earlier from his main work has this very I think very elegant approach because he recognizes that it's difficult to specify the nature of this so called force. He mentions style. And instead of saying style is wrong and I know what life is or I know how life works. He says we need to go to the level of metaphor and style would never accept saying oh well we have to go via metaphor to understand life. So that kind of heuristic distance is very characteristic very distinctive in some of the vitalist authors. I think Peter hands riles book on this topic makes much out of this, what he calls mediation. So wrapping up my big claims my basic claims here today are one that it's, it's a functional rather than a substantive vitalism. So based on what organism or animal economy is that focus doesn't appeal, you know that way of addressing organism or animal. Doesn't appeal to foundational principles or forces or cells, but to something like organization more systemic concept. I didn't talk about that that I find striking is that it's more materialism friendly than is usually recognized say more about that discussion possibly. And this focus on structure, which again one might see as a systemic concept. Why should we care about my distinctions, my typologies might have to say well, not all vitalism is is X some of it is why. Well, I remind you that you have these kinds of one definitions like the first or a little more subtle and a paper that some of you I think know very well. This is a great paper by Scott Gilbert and so it's a circle where they're looking for a word to capture non reductionist approaches and current biology writing, and they say well shall we call them vitalism. They say well no let's not call them vitalism because, you know, vitalism is burdened with metaphysical baggage you might say, and then they say well let's call it organism. So from the point of view of the mechanist. That's a bit of a funny rabbit out of a hat operation is or rather three card Monty is vitalism is presented is too mysterious. Let's call the good theory organism some people would say organism is better. I think I would say that most of the interesting forms of vitalism seem to match what's called organism rather than the. The weirder view and one could quibble about the scholarship or rather one quibble about how dreeches and telly keys or Bergson's and all the dog or blooming baths visa sensualis are even being used here. I'm not going to do that today. I'm ending with this slide which is simply to say. One of the things that I wanted to discuss is the extent to which there's a convergence for an overlap or a synergy word I've already used. Between the vitalist project and its language and its concepts, and what we might call the constitution of biology, which tends to be presented as a very Germanic emergence of biology, but at the very least, an interesting historical congruence in the last 20, 30 years of the 18th century, the early years of the 19th century. Between these different offers in different contexts that are calling for a kind of individuated science or autonomous science, whether in terms of new rules and concepts or specific entities. Including in multi vitalism takes us well beyond the parameter or parameters of so called medicine, it takes us into something more physiological, more like general biology. And in other some of my work and in some co edited work. I'm really interested in places in the vitalist texts, where you see them seeking to focus, seeking to sort of turn the focus on a unified science of life. And then my last little bullet point there, one could ask what happens if we integrate my story into a kind of mainstream history, is it even possible. In some sense not. The organism animal economy be swarm focus or ideas also bear a lot of resemblance, but in a sort of vague intuitive way which makes me uncomfortable, very strict way. A lot of resemblance to some of the obsessions in 20th and 21st century theory biology. What does one do with that. That's a question. So hoping that this was of interest. Thank you for your time and your attention. Thank you Charles. And now we have Phil Sloan who will help with the q amp a. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you very much Charles I think we've done an enormous amount of work in taking a vitalism from being a term of abuse to actually showing some of the rich and and important dimensions of all of this and I think you've made a very good point we do have some questions from the audience I'm going to start with here. This is from Bettina burring and the argument the question is how do these concepts relate to emergent properties in the brain. Thank you. Thanks Phil, of course. I did a broad because you know which concepts and all that but there's the word emergence in your question and indeed people often want there to be a strong connection between vitalism and emergence or emergentism. I think one is trying to also be the historian of science or the historian philosopher of science because it's not clear to what extent there's really strong emergentist language in these texts, other than. I mean, indeed, the B swarm is presented as having collective properties, which are. Not that they're not present in the parts, because the parts are often described by these authors as themselves little lives, so the parts are not little mechanistic parts, which once put into some super complex interaction have amazing unpredictable higher level properties like some virgins of emergentism. So that's one conundrum, you know to what extent is it useful to model the stuff with emergentist language. The other is the issue of mine, since you mentioned, you know, brain. Consciousness to the brain like you know life is to whatever we want the basic thing to be the body or the structure that sub is the word subtens subserves life. Well, I mean, maybe but I'll just say something very very basic about this I'll say it's striking how little these authors are interested in the problem of the mind, which to us seems like an obvious. Interconnection between what is life what is mine so inactivism embodied cognition critiques of artificial intelligence. There's, there's lots of work in the last 2040 50 years that insists on a kind of interconnection between life and mind. It's not so present in the text that I was discussing. And the other thing I'd say is I'll simply refer you to David Chalmers David Chalmers has a paper I don't remember right now in the reference. He has a sort of minor paper where he briefly explores whether the question of consciousness as some kind of special irreducible thing is a vitalistic concept or not. And if that reference really interests you and you can't find it right to me and I'll I'll track it down. We see we have no other questions right now do any of the panelists would like to raise some questions. Let's please do raise your use the raise hand function if you would. I think is about struggling a little bit with the raise. Yeah, sorry, I couldn't figure out the raise hand, which is embarrassing but. Thank you Charles this is like a super interesting and helpful talk and I just, I have a kind of pretty broad conceptual question I think which is whether there's you have anything to say about, I guess the milieu in general as a concept, as it interacts with the history of vitalism but more specifically when you're talking about defining vitalism via a kind of functional and complexity not not the same complexity as emergence but a different kind of complexity is that is it important at all to this is a genuine question I don't know the answer to distinguish between internal complexity of the organism and versus or in relation to complexity of some relationship between organism and environment and is that important to the figures you study. Well, thanks Isabelle, and, you know, milieu and vitalism is something that is articulated by an author you know well by come yet. It's not really articulated. You know if I was going to try and do. It's not exactly potted history but sort of spontaneous history and say well, you really do need one really does need to move in whether it's post Darwin post Lamar post something. Move into the 19th century for questions about what is an organism and how does it work to be seriously inscribed in some kind of organism environment relation. That said, is there anything like a developmental system in these authors well, but just because the wanton and Susan or Yama and others tried to model something like those relationships sort of constitutive relationships between inner and outer organism environment. For one thing there's not much developmentalist talk in the text I was discussing, and I think I mentioned, since this was a recorded talk, I think I mentioned this question of vitalism based on the mystery of the egg, you know the vitalism is this kind of philosophical or metaphysical contemplation of growth versus the more medical kind of vitalism, which is interested in a system in doing justice to the nature of interconnections in a system. You know, in a sense, people who are fans of Aristotle like David will sort of recognize those questions like why is a hand no longer and when it's severed from the body you know that that kind of interest in system. So, simple answer, not a lot of milieu, minor historical fact which is interesting though, Menuré, the hero of my story, Menuré's late works because he didn't publish a lot of his own work for much of his life, but late in life he published public health so hygiene and public health kind of works. So, somewhere in the mind of perhaps the cleverest multiple vitalists, there was environmentalist or environment focused concerns, due to come up a few decades later in his work. That's the answer for now. We have another question that's come up from for break us to had a Alexandre now read it out. Okay, fascinating talk Charles. Thank you, could you elaborate a little bit more about how you do think this enriched historiography of Montpellier vitalism could intersect with the historiography of organisms plural in the early 20th century biology. Well, thank you, Alejandro. That's a classic case where a really interesting and generous question is really hard to answer whereas a more hostile question would be easier to answer. Because my answer is something like, yes, I'm really interested in that it's a challenge to do well. And I keep trying in a very, very partial, you know, parcelized way and some of my papers, and I don't think anyone has properly engaged with that. I mean, people who are interested in early 20th century organism these days some of the people I know well friends colleagues who are interested in that have a strong theoretical biology focus or influence. And when they have that focus or influence. They're sort of in the search for all the incarnations of the good model. You can call it organization call it system called organism, etc. And they are interested in all the nuances of the good model. And I tend to say okay but the history is messier. So you know I'm not going to deliver if you want a sort of proto systems biology from mid to late 18th century friends. I'll sort of say well I'm not really going to give you what you want. I don't mean you Alejandro I mean that that person that hypothetical person. That's just the comment on the difficulty that doesn't mean as I said it's not a really really good question and answer possible answers would have to include problems like the role of mathematics which changes drastically in between A and Z in that story. It would have to include to be as Chung's beautiful work on inner outer relations, and how those, you know the sort of modeling of inner outer relations changes. It would possibly have to include and I've taken a stab at that to changes in the organism concept, because when the more pretty vitalists are arguing against mechanism on the one hand and animism on the other. It makes for a very different discursive landscape, then the Cambridge theoretical biology club and whoever they're arguing for against and as is well known thanks to Eric Peterson notably that group is not in fact monolithic either. And all of them beat on vitalism. Maybe that's superfluous because then I could sort of magically say oh here's a distinction between substantival and functional vitalism, what you guys are defending this functional vital vitalism and what you're attacking substantive vitalism. I'm not sure that my distinction magically does away with all issues. So sorry messy answer very very interesting question. Let's be in touch, because I'd like to do more on that. Yeah, do we have some further questions from the panelists here. We have a few minutes I think I don't have any other than the chat. So, Charles, I think some of the answers to the question just pose may lie in a group of relatively unknown. There are a lot of Kantian philosophers, like Bruno Bauch and Otto Liebman, who are working very specifically with the implications of Kant's third critique, and with and with the Kantian account of the organism, and and are also trying to make these with a number of with with the works of say Oscar Hertzby, in which there is some and which the account of the organism because of experimental evidence in terms of development is constantly this really starting to give some empirical heft to some of these conceptual discussions in which you have on the one side a clear reaction against vulgar vitalism and a clear dissatisfaction with with Kant's mechanism and materialist stance. It's a very complicated story because it's very not very well known at all and I myself and just getting into this discussion so we also might want to have a discussion about that because some of the, some of the connections that you might be with would be in this group, which is also corresponding with Driesh as well, and is using his work as a kind of sounding board for their their their project. I've had to to actually go ahead, Charles, please. No, I was just going to say I would love it, Chris, if you could put that down, put a version of that down on paper. I was going to say, I'll get to you with the other abstract I also owe you so. I've had a pair of questions come in from Dan Nicholson, I'll read the answer questions sparked by your talk, first with regards to your terminology logical preliminaries and the problems you raise regarding the sloppy and context dependent usage of the term vitalism. I think similar might be marked to be making about the term mechanism or perhaps we should say, mechanism. Also, also of organicism clarifying these is also necessary. If part of your project is to contrast vitalism with these disc doctrines. Now he's got another section but let me let me give you that one and then we'll go to the second part of this question. Okay, I mean, there are long questions I really like them and they don't. I think the time might be a little limited swell. I will also get back to Dan, either in parallel or, you know, in the discussion part of this workshop but um, yeah, I mean the fact that all of these terms have some degree of context dependency, I can only read to vitalism is a bit particular is to say something obvious. It's used in such pejorative ways, and it's used. It's also used when it's used positively in this incredibly undetermined way including as I mentioned in the beginning of my talk, in a lot of ways that have literally nothing to do with life, or organic life, or the question of the boundary or the difference between the living and the non living which are what I would modestly say need to be criteria in any historical context, those criteria should be present for us to call something vitalist. The question of whether Aristotle is a vitalist or not, is it is its own sort of fun debate to have. The mechanism, it's dangerous since I'm disobeying my own methodological strictures but there is a sense in which some critiques of mechanism really do recur. Of course, something like Neo mechanism post, you know, 1990s 2000s, completely muddles the issue because they use the word in a genuinely other new way, but your paper on mechanical and organic issues. I think is certainly can be understood as a kind of critique that has a history that one can find earlier instances of whether in the early 20th century, or before. And when you say in one of the one of these questions. Am I thinking of your work or not well, I was thinking of the San Sebastian group, several of whom are our mutual friends. And Mateo Mocio and the way in which history for them is material to help true theory be vindicated. And I think when I may have disagreed in a friendly way in the past about how history functions, but I guess that will have to be will have to do a workshop of our own to thrash that one out. But I'll copy these questions of yours. Thank you. I have to call time because we have to move on to Betty Smokov, this is talk. So thank you Charles thank you so much Charles you bet very good. Betty Smokov, this is professor in the history of science in the Department of biology, and in the Department of History at the University of Florida. Her interests include the history philosophy and sociology of the modern biological sciences, and the history of migration, ethnicity and race in the United States, the special focus on the history of modern evolutionary biology, botany genetics and systematics and anthropology. She's written extensively on the history of the evolutionary synthesis, and is the author of unifying biology. Her synthesis and evolutionary biology Princeton University Press, along with many articles, chapters reviews and other publications. It is an honor to be here today in celebration of the life and work of David de Pew. He has been an inspiration to many of us, especially those of us keen on interdisciplinary work. I recently had to describe David's disciplinary affiliations, and found myself in a tough spot. He's a philosopher, a rhetorician, a historian, and someone with a keen sense of political engagement. I think his ability to see the utility and value of various approaches part of his intellectual style. And I think this is undergirded by a generous attitude towards the work of others. He has come to approaches and has encouraged younger scholars in their interest. Indeed, at meetings, it is common to see I'm talking to younger people and always interested in what they're doing. I have here, for example, a photograph of David taken at the International Society for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology meetings in Montpellier, France. And that I think captures David's easygoing style and his proximity to younger scholars. This is at the Fame Botanical Garden with Yuri Witteven, a historian and philosopher who specializes in mathematics during the period of the evolutionary synthesis, and Angeliki Lefcadito, who is a historian keen on the history of anthropology and race. And both are scholarly areas of inquiry to which David has contributed hugely. Here are two other photographs with people that I would describe as the synthesis industry, historians, philosophers, sociologists, like the late Jean Guyon and Dick Burien and Ann McNabb, who were and are close colleagues and friends. What I'd like to do today is to give a talk that I think brings together some of David's interests and builds on work he has done. Builds on work that he has done on the evolutionary synthesis on rhetoric and the history of biological anthropology and evolutionary biology. I'm going to highlight historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches that also draw attention to language. It matters, especially so in understanding the historical event of the evolutionary synthesis. And let us recall too that David is at the University of Iowa, which is home to a writing program that is internationally renowned. I'd like to start with the work historicize featured in the title of my talk. And to some, it might appear like jargon, a kind of thing common in the humanities associated, for example, with literary theorists like Frederick Jameson, and as well known slogan always historicize. I argue that there is nothing jargon asked or fashionable to those of us in history, or in evolutionary biology, which is after all a historical science. Does a fossil have much meaning without a sense of where it is found, not just in what kind of environment, but in what kind of temporal sequence or context of what came before, and what comes afterwards. There are four ideas beliefs practices, and even scientific theories. This gets me to my next word context and contextualize, which adds to the cultural social or political to the historical, as well as the word present is the tendency to project the past, or to interpret the past in light of the present. The final point, built on these concepts that I want to stress comes from the history and philosophy of science, and that is that science itself is historically rooted and culturally embedded. Next, I want to sort through some of the language of the synthesis and draw some useful distinctions in terminology. We have, for example, the modern synthesis, which comes out of the title of Julian Huxley's book of 1942 titled evolution, the modern synthesis, and this term is an actor's category or term. Then we have the term evolutionary synthesis, which refers to the historical event that took place approximately between 1920 to 1950, though the chronological beginning and end points do vary a bit, but it is primarily a mid century event. The term comes from Ernst Meyer and William B Provine's edited collection based on a 1974 conference, and it appeared in 1980 titled the evolutionary synthesis perspectives on the unification of biology. So the evolutionary synthesis is the historians terminology referring to the historical event. Finally, we have the genetic term, the generic term neo Darwinism, which usually refers to the fusion of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, with no really precise chronological timeline. It is an ism, sometimes referring to a belief system, not unlike an ideology. This is used most commonly by practicing scientists, though Ernst Meyer repeatedly called for more care in its use, since it was first coined by George Romanus to refer to Darwinism without lomarchism, since Darwin himself, let us recall, adhered to the inheritance of acquired characters. Some more terms that I think are very important, yet are rarely discussed to draw some important distinctions. The synthetic theory of evolution. This refers to the theory that emerged during the period of the evolutionary synthesis, but that often gets used for contemporary theory to evolutionary biology. This refers to the scientific discipline that emerged during the period of the evolutionary synthesis, where discipline refers to both a community, meaning a social space that opens up, as well as epistemic beliefs, practices, methods, accompanying textbooks, rituals and commemorations, etc. Finally, we have the synthesis, which is a kind of abbreviation, shorthand, to refer to a constellation of some of the above, and sometimes all of the above. I would like to underscore the importance of these distinctions and the fact that they are just not made as much as they should be. Indeed, I believe that one reason a great deal of confusion still surrounds the synthesis, what it is, what happened, its significance, and whether or not it holds sway is due to the confusion and terminology. The second reason for the confusion that I want to especially focus on here today, as my title indicates, is the lack of historicists as well as contextualist thinking, often in tandem with or as a consequence of the imprecise use of language. This is crucial at the moment, since many of us in the history and philosophy of science are grappling with some of the more recent calls for what has been named an expanded synthesis, an extended synthesis, or at times even an overhaul of the synthesis. As some say, we have entered the third wave of evolution in the age of genomics. This matters, because most of the arguments made by advocates of reform or outright overhaul reveal a misunderstanding of the past, at times as distortion of the past. And in some cases, arguments are actually made that are wholly a historical, though they make reference to the past as a kind of convenient caricature, embodying a kind of straw theory that is then knocked down. And here in my talk today, I really want to focus on evolutionary theory, especially in the next part of my talk, though I will be making distinctions in my own language. I provide here a list of some of the literature that challenges the synthesis in the last 15 or so years, nearly all of which grounds in some view of the history of the synthetic theory, and which often blurs the distinction between the historical past, the historical event with the theory as it existed in the context of the evolutionary synthesis, or as it exists now. And I know you probably can't read all of them, but this is just a sampler to convince you that a lot is happening and has happened in the last 15 years. But let me also point out that we have actually seen something like this before, at least to those of us alive in the 1980s, like David DePue, who wrote about it. Let's recall the first iteration of the challenges to the synthesis stemming from a paleobiology, the critique of the adaptationist program, and what went down in the 1980s. So here's a sampler of the talks and the titles of the talks, the articles and the edited collections and at times entire books. Here's just the sampler is a new and general theory of evolution emerging is a new evolutionary synthesis necessary. The evolutionary synthesis is only part right, where right is spelled with a w as in Sewell right. And then the response is, but not right enough. And this is a reply to the former title. Beyond neo Darwinism, the challenge of macro evolution to the synthetic theory of evolution. Beyond neo Darwinism and the expansion of evolutionary theory, beyond neo Darwinism and introduction to the new evolutionary paradigm. Evolutionary theory, the unfinished synthesis evolutionary theory at a crossroads, the new biology and philosophy of science, and this one was edited by one David DePue and Bruce Weber. The evolutionary disynthesis, the synthetic theory strikes back the triumph of the evolutionary synthesis and finally Darwinism stays on puncture. And that's just a sampler of some of the titles that dominated academic headlines in the 1980s. And I have to say this is only a brief list from the Oxford bibliography entry that I was assigned on the modern synthesis a couple of years ago. And I call this body of literature, you know the challenges to the synthesis one, the crash goes the synthesis body of literature, because I was a graduate student at the time and had to read all of it. And I have to say, I'm not sure that anything actually crashed, because it appears to have remained sufficiently intact for the next generation of challenges, and now traveling under the banner of once again the expanded synthesis, or the extended synthesis and here's the list back again to the, the check the current challenges to the synthesis. And all of the current literature, and it really is exploding it's almost exponential in its growth. There is a question of whether or not what later becomes the SET, or the standard evolutionary theory SET is used as a kind of acronym, whether or not it exerted a constraining restrictive, or an exclusionary hegemonic role. For example, X or Y got left out was marginalized in some kind of way, doing damage to the progress of science, where X or Y can be a field an area of inquiry a sub discipline, often dominated by an individual. And again, the progress of evolutionary science gets hindered, hampered, stalled, it's a bunch of funny studies, who are keeping everything back, that's the kind of message and coding that is often conveyed in kind of the foundational literature within this group of the challenges to the synthesis. But if we look at the historical record, there's little in the way of a monolithic or standard theory that actually appeared in the 1930s, or the 1940s, or even the late 1950s, during the period of the Darwin Centennial, when there was a massive kind of rethinking and celebration of evolution, because of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the origin, and the 150th birth year of Charles Darwin's birth. And this was when some, like Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the hardening of the synthesis, or argued for the hardening of the synthesis, the rise of a new orthodoxy of the synthetic theory around a selectionist call. And as we recall, Gould was actually part he was one of the leaders of challenge one in the 1980s. And along with this, along with this kind of the rise of the new orthodoxy the hardening of the synthesis, he did another thing, which is to resurrect the figure of Richard Goldsmith, now reinvented as a kind of heroic heretic fighting the new orthodoxy. And let us recall that it was Stephen Jay Gould who pushed Yale University Press to reissue Goldsmith's 1940 book, the 19, the material basis of evolution. What we do see coming out of the period of 1930 to 1950 and again approximately is a loose consensus that Darwinian selection theory combined with Mendelian genetics within a populational view could explain the origins of biological diversity. It took the concerted efforts of a cluster of theorists, and these this image comes right out of Doug Fatuma's textbook history. The title of the textbook is evolutionary biology. It took the concerted efforts of a cluster of theorists working in tandem alongside or with experimentalist and field practitioners to build a kind of consensus around a small number of elements. And these are one, that natural selection is the primary mechanism of evolutionary change to that it operated on the level of small individual differences, making evolution a slow gradual process. Three, that the same process that operated at lower levels, for example, beneath the species also accounted for higher order phenomena. In other words, there was a continuum between micro evolution and macro evolution. These elements of the theory were hardly new, revolutionary or conceptually profound, nor were they even agreed upon by all the individuals keen to align themselves with the new science of evolutionary biology. And Richard Goldschmidt, again, is probably one of the best known of the dissidents of this period. You know, he was part of evolutionary biology, but he didn't agree with many of the tenants. Indeed, as historian of science will provide summarized it in 1988, what the evolutionary synthesis achieve was actually eliminative. It rid evolutionary theory of the many alternatives to natural selection. And it narrowed the domains of inquiry that also enabled a conversation between a number of areas that previously were not in communication with each other. And hence, he renamed it the evolutionary synthesis as the evolutionary constriction. It's not exactly pleasing to the ear, but the point is well taken the kind of narrowing that happened. This loose consensus enabled a community of researchers, a discipline, if you will, to come together around common problems and evolution, and who thus redefined themselves as evolutionary biologists. The term evolutionary biologist gains currency right at this historical moment. And here we see the photographic image of the foundational document for the first international society for the study of evolution, and it's the society for the study of evolution in 1946. This was followed immediately thereafter by the celebrated Princeton meeting of 1947, when geneticist Herman J Muller in a well known essay announced the convergence of biological disciplines that saw the emergence of a new synthetic science and new synthetic kind or type of evolutionists that appeared. Though they may not appear to diverse to us today, and of course this is an understatement, they're training their backgrounds their research methods, organismic systems if they had any at all because some were mathematicians they were status statisticians. If they had any kind of commitments that they shared I mean they came from really different biological backgrounds. They also disagreed on a number of points, but ultimately they shared the belief that there was a unified science of evolution that could unify biology within a unified theory of knowledge. At least I would say rhetorically speaking that there was an argument to be made for unification and moving forwards towards that. And in the big picture of the evolutionary synthesis as best embodied by people like Julian Huxley, the first director general of UNESCO in 1946. The reason that the S is due to his and Joseph Needham's intervention. It was part of a secular liberal and progressive world view. Disciplines that appeared to be left out, like anthropology, were in fact already being integrated well by 1950 anthropologists weren't actually part of the society for the study of evolution. They were having to do with race, the biological basis of which was denounced by anti races associated with the Boas school of American anthropology and increasingly by individuals like this man, the adosius Dubjanski, one of the key players in the evolutionary synthesis and he was an evolutionary He formed a collaboration with anthropologists like Ashley Montague in the early 1940s and then Sherwood Washburn to replace race as a biological reality with the concept of gene pool. The first of the meetings held in Cold Spring Harbor in 1950. And here I have the edited collection that came out of it, brought together 129 individuals from both anthropology and evolutionary biology. And here are some photographs so you can see some of the groupings between geneticists and anthropologists in various configurations. And all of this, if you want to know more about it actually forms the backbone of John Jackson's and David Depew's recent book Darwinism, democracy and race. And this publication was also true, though perhaps less successful or visible, because there were no grand public meetings on the scale of anthropology for developmental biology, as calls were made to integrate it within evolutionary biology with only a few years of the Princeton individuals like John Tyler Bonner in 1952 and Conrad Waddington in 1953. Indeed, that process of synthesis was ongoing, as calls for more integrative studies took place. And as it was recognized by the historical figures themselves. It's not as though the evolutionary synthesis or the synthetic theory whatever emerged out of that stopped it was not frozen, or lifted out of its context, and it's, it's temporal frame. Some mathematical population geneticists like JBS holding recognized an ongoing process of development in the theory, which needed to continue to incorporate areas like developmental biology, the idea that there was any deliberate hegemonic exclusion is just not supported by historical evidence. And if anything, let us also recall that embryologists of a preceding generation did not favor the study of evolution, because it appeared to lack rigor, it was not sufficiently experimental. It was lesser known by proponents of the extended synthesis, who point to hegemonic exclusion, and who happened to come primarily from zoological backgrounds is that by 1959, right around the time of the Darwin Centennial plant evolutionary biologists, like George Ledger Stebbins, recognized the importance of the gene to character transformation. And this he thought was the next great step in evolutionary biology. I've talked about the quiet moments of integration, when new methods or techniques or insights are incorporated from other disciplines or other kinds of intellectual spaces, and are used to solve, or even to reframe persistent problems. But we seem to place an emphasis on conflict on controversies and friction, so that individuals like Ernst Meyer and George Gaylord Simpson, who were often museum workers with a knack of defending territory and remember you know they were working on mechanisms of species, species definitions, they were systematists, and Gaylord Simpson was a paleontologist, while Ledger Stebbins was an evolutionary geneticist, moving into morphogenics and developmental genetics by about 1958 59. He worked in the area until the mid 1970s, and was in contact with people like Waddington, with whom he collaborated in various organizations in institutional settings in the early 1980s developmental biology was just was actually being integrated or at least an integration was being attempted, while the Darwin Centennial of 1959 was already underway. So let me just quickly try to wrap it up to say that when it comes to the sec the so called standard evolutionary theory, what is needed is careful close examination of the past in historicist and contextualist terms. It actually gives us a far more nuanced and complex series of happenings that defy easy characterization into any one standard narrative with a standard evolutionary theory. The actual points of agreement in the 1940s were minimal, and involves so many diverse tools methods research traditions, organismic system different levels of analysis, and different some disciplines that were supposedly left out, but were in fact already being integrated at the same time as the supposed startling of the synthesis in 1959. Let me here show you here, some of the panels that comprise only a small group of participants at the 1959 Darwin Centennial, and it included something like 2,500 registrants, just to give you a sense of the attempt at integration, which is ongoing. Here we have panel two. Here we have panel three man as an organism. And here we have panel five and there were five of these panels some do not have photographs but just to give you a flavor of the disparate number of people that the areas that were coming together within this celebratory atmosphere. And it really does depend hugely on who you are looking at, and who you are tracing, and the area that you have studied that you are examining. If you focus only on Meyer and Simpson in systematics or paleontology, you may see exclusion controversy, and perhaps even some orthodoxy. If you focus on Dubzinski and his area of evolutionary genetics, you get a different picture. And if you focus on Stevens, you get another picture still one of quiet integration that incorporated morphogenesis development with evolution and molecular biology at a much earlier period of time. So to close, what we need is a more historicist and contextualist understanding of the 1930s and 40s, and we need to go beyond into the 1960s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s to appreciate the ongoing processual nature of integration. And to recognize that what counts as the synthetic theory, its central tenets and first principles might appear to vary depending on field experimental system methodology, the generation of the scientists, or even individual preference, then, as well as now. There is a historicity to the theory itself, as well as varying contexts of the theory. And it might actually be more useful to speak of multiple evolutionary theories to take a pluralistic view that work then and continues to work now. Instead of thinking in terms of some kind of monolithic standard, essentialize evolutionary theory, and it does have abundant rich instantiations, it still provides rich resources for further investigation and retains a large measure of its explanatory power. So, thank you. A final image of David Dubu taken at a conference on the evolutionary synthesis in Paris, France in 2011. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Betty. We already have questions from the audience as I'm moderating this question and through the session. So first question is from Stuart Newman. He says, and I'm going to read this out. This is what Brian, Brian Charles worth, one of the senior figures of population biology, wrote in his review in science science magazine of Gerhardt and Kirschner's book in 2005. This is the quote from the review. Until we have a predictive theory of developmental genetics, our understanding of the molecular basis of development. However, fascinating and important in revealing the hidden history of what has happened in evolution sheds little light on what the creation is potentially available for use of selection. This seems to me like a hegemonic, like a hegemonic move. So, Betty your response. I love the question. I love the question because I think it makes my point beautifully that what you're seeing is a confusion between what Charles worth is saying in 2005 and what the 1930s and 40s entailed. So, you know what Stuart has done is to show exactly what I think is happening, which is you know what Charles worth is like second generation. And you know what I met what I'm saying in this paper and what I've been saying increasingly is that we need to study the 1960s, the 1970s, in particular, because I think what happens at that time is that there is a generation that comes in. It becomes kind of, I think it's a generational hardening. I don't know precisely what happens in the 1970s, but I can tell you, when I got to evolution. As an undergraduate. It was cast in stone. The definition of evolution, a relative change in gene frequencies. I want to see the, I want to see somebody do a project or study on eel Wilson and boss or little textbook that use very, very heavily, all through the 1970s. And I think something happens in the 70s something's happens that's generational. But my point is that when people talk about the evolutionary synthesis. And when they talk about the 1930s, the 40s that they locate that, you know, that's different from 2005. I'm a historian so what I try to do is to focus on the past. And what I'm seeing is that there's a kind of again there's this, I don't conflation confusion, where people aren't thinking about the past I mean, you know if you're a scientist you're not immersed in the texts of the 1930s. I don't expect that. But I think if people just exert a little bit more care with the language and with the history. We're all going to end up in a much better place. I'm not denying that that is that sounds like hegemonic exclusion. Okay, that what Charles with is saying in 2005 does not does not have anything to do with 1930 to 1950, or 1959. I'm fascinated by these disputes that I see. And again, my other point was that we tend to focus on this kind of the rhetoric of conflict, and we don't look at all the people who are just quietly doing the work. And comes back to Philip Hanninger's original question that he posed after Philippe Heunemann's talk I thought that was right on the mark and that's what I've answered. If you focus on Meyer and if you focus on Simpson in the 1960s, you're going to be seeing boundary work I don't see them as gatekeepers that's not. I don't like the term boundary work because that's what they're doing. They're negotiating the boundaries of what will be evolutionary biology, and you know Meyer wants to list biology from complete reduction to physics and chemistry. It's something like physics and chemistry it's rigorous, but it's its own autonomous science. So, I mean I don't know if that answers Stuart's question. Stuart is writing back saying that he quote understands the historical distinction, but he thinks that the the lines have hardened in the last in the last decade. I mean that you know Stuart I'm, I'm following it. And I mean, as you know the literature coming out is immense. I can tell you that there was a superb session that very few people attended at the Ishka Bible meeting on theoretical population genetics. And these were critics and I attended that workshop and I found it fascinating you know Arlen Stolfitz. It was it was a really really good discussion, I thought, and we came down to, you know I left that that session and I said there's there's generationally there's something that happens in the 1970s with people who come out of that period. Okay, so we have another question I see your hand up David we have another question from Benjamin Feldman, which is a more general discussion of. This is his question now how do you think the paradigm shift notion this is the coonium notion. Yeah, has contributed to people erroneously claiming opposition to new ideas and evolutionary theory, perhaps more generally. I, I'm not sure what I don't know what a paradigm shift is I don't know what a paradigm is. I come out of that school you know I had to read Margaret masterman's essay, how many different definitions are there of paradigm in Thomas coons work. I mean it's certainly tempting just to you know to kind of go there is the extended synthesis, a kind of paradigm shift somebody gave a paper on that recently, but you know I just don't find that helpful. Because I don't see I see process I do see moments, I see pivotal moments and I see process, but I don't see any some huge transformative event or break. And I think the key question here too is how what historical actors are you looking at so some of my work really focuses on Charles has this focus to on on individuals who are not necessarily known but have quite clear formulations of a number of key topics that. Anyway, so David you had you had a question comment, and then we have. I want to thank Betty. Time so efficient. I want to thank Betty for this really good talk because it's one of those things that kind of provokes me, even though she was kind enough not to push the point to kind of self criticism like some old revolutionary being tried at one of Stalin's kangaroo courts. I, and john knows this john Jackson, the philosopher in me does want to use conceptual distinctions to sort of agree with some of these exclusions. I think anybody who's reading my work should realize that that's a by what Betty's please like kind of a failing. I think, for instance, that neo Darwinism can be all these things, just like Charles said, can be used as terms of abuse and they actually enter into history that way. Neo Darwinism, basically I think of as accepting vice monism right which I guess is the other way is saying, excluding lamar chism right. And then I think that goes on for a long time. And I think that the thing that emerges in the old missionary synthesis, both before and after the 40s, but more after is this notion of the creativity of natural selection. And it's not just a limited. So you can find in the period of post vice monism, plenty of eliminationists and they can be criticized. I know people like Stuart would criticize them, because then you can, you can put 19th century post Ben Sirian nature of red and tooth and claws stuff onto them. And then, having done so you can reject the whole tradition and start over again. And I do think that that is a dynamic that your history has to actually incorporate the other one is. Well that was the key one. For instance that the question then about who's in and out of the synthesis which floats around the Meyer, Provine volume and the and the archival material that backs it up. Is that, you know, there was a big effort to say, Well, some people just aren't creative enough. Mueller. So let's throw him out. Why, because he's on the opposite side of the Janesky with respect to the issue of balancing selection. And so when you notice that in that Mueller is not included, right. That's weird. It's, I know, and, you know, I, I, I see Mueller, I see Mueller and Princeton. It's like what happens to Mueller. So I'm just saying that part that I'm, I tend to take sides. I'm, I have to admit, I'm sorry. And but in them, but I guess what I'm saying here is that in any of the histories of the kind you want, you've got to, you have to, that's what you mean by boundary work, I think you have to give an account of these attempted exclusions. Right. So Phil, I do see your hand up, but I actually would like to go to the audience. Why don't we use the ones on the chat. Okay. Right. So because so Richard Burriam has what he calls a huge question, a huge question. So I'm quoting him now. So I have a huge question, but the one of the answers to which would be helpful and important to the entire discussion of this wonderful symposium. Thank you. And one of the context that has received very little mention in both Philips and Betty's presentations is the change is that of the changes in mathematical and physical tools and techniques both over time and across disciplines and this is also the work of Jean-Baptiste Goodwall. Richard doesn't say that. He says I'd be interested to hear how either of these speakers address the extent and importance of these changes in understanding conceptual, theoretical and social changes that took place in our understanding of the evolutionary understanding of the evolutionary synthesis. The tools and methods development. Well, Dick, I mean, that was, that was what will provide did beautifully with the civil right biography and I build on that. And I've written about, you know, the mathematicians, but that's not my primary area I wanted to get at discipline. And to see the, you know, the kind of the big picture to get at the event as an event in what Bill Kimmler that question that Bill Kimmler posed earlier. But I think the mathematics is actually I mean that dominated the 1980s. We didn't have anything in the way of plants. As you know, there wasn't very much on plants or organisms and the synthesis. So I would not say it's done I would not say we're done I think there's work that remains, but I do think people like that have, you know, that's right biography is just, it's monumental. And then there's, you know, Jean guy, Jean guy owned it's such a wonderful job with, you know, the big narrative view, and looking at all kinds of other aspects so I would not say that the mathematics or the tools, or the techniques. I mean at one point in unifying biology I said you know I I locate people and I say, Some of them are working at their desk. Some of them are working in the field. Some of them are working in their in the lab. They're working in these different scientific environments which is a way of saying there are theorists, the mathematicians, there are the empiricists. They work with wild populations and then there's people who do evolutionary work in the lab. This is a heterogeneous group of people. So I don't know if I've answered your question but I'm sort of surprised to see somebody asking about mathematics, because we've had so much work in that area. I need to cut this conversation off because it really is fascinating but we are due for a break. And so I have to call time, and we will see everyone back in about 30 minutes at four o'clock. Thank you very much.