Traditionally, knowledge is separated from activity and passed down from teacher to student as disembodied information. For John Dewey, this tradition reinforces the false dichotomy between knowing and doing. A dichotomy that is socially destructive, and philosophically erroneous. I largely agree with the above. The best experiences I’ve had of learning was through self-guided discovery of wanting to solve a problem. This is, for example, one of the best ways to learn to program, or…

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“The logic of animal conflict” — a 1973 paper by Maynard Smith and Price — is usually taken as the starting for evolutionary game theory. And as far as I am an evolutionary game theorists, it influences my thinking. Most recently, this thinking has led me to the conclusion that there are two difference conceptions of evolutionary games possible: reductive vs. effective. However, I don’t think that this would have come as much of a…

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Last month, I blogged about abstraction and lamented that abstract models are lacking in biology. Here, I want to return to this. What isn’t lacking in biology — and what I also work on — is simulation and heuristic models. These can seem abstract in the colloquial sense but are not very abstract for a computer scientist. They are usually more idealizations than abstractions. And even if all I care about is abstract models —…

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There is a lot of advice written out there for aspiring science writers and bloggers. And as someone who writes science and about science, I read through this at times. The most common trend I see in this advice is to make your writing personal and to tell a story, with all the drama and plot-twists of a good page-turner. This is solid advise for good writing, one that we shouldn’t restrict to writing about…

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At the start of this month, one of my favourite blogs — Dynamic Ecology — pointed me to a great interview with Michela Massimi. She has recently won the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for the philosophy of science, and to celebrate Philip Ball interviewed her for Quanta. I recommend reading the whole interview, but for this post, I will focus on just one aspect. Ball asked Massimi how she defends philosophy of science against dismissive…

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Today is Alan Turing’s birthday. He would have turned 106. It has been too long since I last wrote about him on TheEGG. Today, I want to provide an overview of some of his most important work based on my and other’s answers on this old cstheory question. This will build slightly on a post I wrote two years ago for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, but it will share a lot of text in common.…

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Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on how abstract is not the opposite of empirical. In that post, I distinguished between the colloquial meaning of abstract and the ‘true’ meaning used by computer scientists. For me, abstraction is defined by multiple realizability. An abstract object can have many implementations. The concrete objects that implement an abstraction might differ from each other in various — potentially drastic — ways but if the implementations are ‘correct’…

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There is a network at Oxford know as QBIOX that aims to connect researchers in the quantitative biosciences. They try to foster collaborations across the university and organize symposia where people from various departments can share their quantitative approaches to biology. Today was my second or third time attending, and I wanted to share a brief overview of the three talks by Philip Maini, Edward Morrissey, and Heather Harrington. In the process, we’ll get to…

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Last week, Jacob Scott was at a meeting to celebrate the establishment of the Center for Evolutionary Therapy at Moffitt, and he presented our work on measuring the effective games that non-small cell lung cancer plays (see this preprint for the latest draft). From the audience, David Basanta summarized it in a tweet as “trying to make our game theory models less abstract”. But I actually saw our work as doing the opposite (and so…

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