Abstract: Simpson’s paradox  is a counterintuitive phenomenon that occurs when conclusions are drawn from individual sets of data, and yet the opposite conclusion can be drawn if the data sets are all added together. This indicates a way, in particular, in which patterns could evolve under Darwinian natural selection which run strongly against “adaptationist” expectations.  In a similar way, business “inefficiencies” could be unexpectedly resilient even in an ideally “free market.” A toy model, similar to Conway’s “Game of Life” will be demonstrated for competing populations of “rats” and “lemmings.” This talk will be of wide interest to all disciplines, especially: engineers, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, economists & philosophers etc.

Resume: Prof. John Bigelow was born in Montreal, Canada, and received his BA from University of Canterbury, New Zealand; MA from Simon Fraser University, Canada;  and from PhD Cambridge University, England. From 1973-1978 he taught at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, where he carried out research in possible worlds semantics (straying from modal logics into the semantics of probability). At
La Trobe University 1978-1990 he shifted his research largely towards metaphysics, and developed a teaching strength in the history and philosophy of science. In 1990 he took up a chair in Philosophy at Monash University where, despite administration, he has tried to sustain teaching in the history and philosophy of science, research in semantics, metaphysics and epistemology, and a new interest in “decoding” Plato's Timaeus.  Broadly speaking, he is an Australian materialist and a scientific realist. He is the author of The Reality of Number (Oxford Univ. Press) and a book with Robert Pargetter called Science and Necessity (Cambridge Univ. Press).
 
 
 

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