Philosophical and Scientific Foundations of Complex Adaptive Systems  

• the nature of emergence, especially robust multi-level emergence
• the nature of evolution, life, and mind
  • articulation and defense of the adaptationist program
  • the relationship between organisms and their environment
  • the nature of life
  • the status of the concept of life
  • the nature of intelligence
  • the connection between life and mind
• the nature of teleology, function, purpose
• artificial life: evolutionary dynamics
  • quantifying emergent macro-variables
    • evolutionary activity
    • diversity
    • complexity
  • models of neutral evolution (exact and numerical results)
  • models of open-ended evolution
  • analysis of data from real-world evolving systems
    • fossil record
    • internet
    • social systems
• artificial economics

Brief Professional Biography

Mark Bedau received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. He taught at Dartmouth College for a number of years where he worked on problems in the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of psychology, and computational logic. He is now Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Systems Science Ph.D. program at Portland State University. His current research interests focus on the conceptual and quantatitive foundations of living and evolving systems. He is currently writing a book for MIT Press on how artificial life can clarify the conceptual foundations of evolution, life, and mind.