Emily M. Lund

Recent Actions

• Commented on Question Submission 11
  As I am reading about the attempted reduction of biology to chemistry and physics, I see a clear parallel in a discussion I just had in a conservation biology course. The buzz word in conservation is "biodiversity" and we read...
• Commented on Question Submission 7
  I think a homespun proverb may be in order: "In epistemic darkness, the precision of laser doesn't disprove the utility of a bare light bulb."...
• Commented on Question Submission 7
  The difference between the "traditional, theory-centric" epistemology and Waters' new "practice"-based epistemology seems to hinge on what it means to have explanatory power. Waters' representation shrinks the explanatory scope of scientific theories, but couldn't the old paradigm remain intact with...
• Commented on Question Submission 6
  I don't think agricultural entities are restricted to actions like expansion or transference; they are truly reproducers. At a certain size (just like with conventional biological organisms) the nutrients cannot be dispersed efficiently, so a gamete (in the form of...
• Commented on Question Submission 6
  I would argue that you cannot have a truly (r)evolutionary understanding of biological entities without taking all "individuals" seriously, across all scales. The attempt to identify a single evolutionary unit is an ill-advised endeavor from my perspective. It is our...
• Commented on Question Submission 6
  For the last week, I've been thinking about agricultural communities as Griesemerian reproducers. The following concepts are especially intriguing when applied to the agricultural organism: material overlap, alternating generations, inheritance of developmental capacities (especially in cases of genetic modification) and...
• Commented on Question Submission 5
  I've been thinking a lot about ontological commitments: how they express themselves through action and how those actions can be track and interpreted. I'm very interested in how ontological commitments about species effect conservation efforts. An ontological commitment to the...
• Commented on Question Submission 4
  It's important to note that the foreground-background distinction is not always clear in cross-section images; it requires some auxiliary knowledge or assumption....
• Commented on Question Submission 4
  I am starting to conceive of scientific understanding as an infinitely dimensional fabric. In this infinitely dimensional space, scientists track patterns in individual threads. This activity is Griesemer's "process tracking". Individual threads are plotted through time and space to create...
• Commented on Question Submission 4
  I found Greisemer's approach to the history of science incredibly insightful and appealing. The running analogy between the development of science and the development of species illustrated the dynamic, interconnected nature of reality and effectively unified social and material scientific...
• Commented on Question Submission 3
  I am preoccupied with the debate over "American" vs. R.A. Fisherian interpretations of Mendel's work. Wimsatt is an outspoken proponent of the former. When did these continental generalizations take hold? And was Professor Wimsatt's education informed by them, thus giving...
• Commented on Question Submission 2
  I was troubled by one thing Professor Wimsatt said last week; "assume true-breeding is observable." It was proposed that you can tell if an individual is true-breeding for a particular trait after the F2 generation. That can't prove for certain...
• Commented on Question Submission 1
  I think the best we could hope for is exponential progression toward cosmic understanding, with absolute reason being the limit we continue to approach but can never attain. And that is the best case scenario......
• Commented on Question Submission 1
  Perhaps "continuum" should not be considered as a linear structure, but more a cyclical or coherent concept.* At some point when we reduce phenomena down to the lowest level it jumps to the highest level of phenomena. It shifts from...
• Commented on Question Submission 1
  This line of thought also brings up the distinction between an entity (a material being that is potential observable) and a force, which is in essence unobservable except through its material effects. So how can we distinguish an entity from...
• Commented on Question Submission 1
  If phenomenological theories are restricted to observable causal mechanisms and reductive theories seek to explain the underlying, unobservable forces that direct all observable phenomena, then we must more clearly define what is means to be "observable". Innovation and technology have...
• Commented on Trial Run
  Mendel...