The arts, languages, and philosophy department will kickoff the 2019-2020 speaker series at 5 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in the Meramec-Gasconade Room of the Havener Center. Polo Camacho, an instructor and Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Kansas, will present a lecture titled “The Central Dogma Is Empirically Inadequate…No Matter How We Slice It.”

Abstract: The Central Dogma of molecular biology, which is heralded in biology as an important element of contemporary biological theory, has received much critical attention since its formulation by Francis Crick in 1958. Despite the vast criticism, there is much about the Dogma that has not been said. There is a tendency to gloss over the many readings of the Central Dogma defended in the philosophical and biological literature. This oversight makes it difficult to see what the overall upshot of these discussions should be taken to be. My aim is to fix this. First, I examine five logically distinct interpretations of the Central Dogma and make explicit why each of these interpretations fail. I conclude that the Central Dogma is empirically inadequate no matter how we slice it.

All lectures in the series will be held on the S&T campus and are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the arts, languages, and philosophy department at 573-341-4869 or alp@mst.edu.