Starting on Thursday, the University of Missouri-St. Louis is hosting a conference on “consilience.”
The three-day conference will explore the interface between biology, the social sciences, and the humanities.
UMSL evolutionary ecologist Patty Parker says she and the other conference organizers sought out speakers from a range of academic fields.
“Six people representing biology, six people representing humanities, six people representing social sciences, so we have these 18 major speakers, and three of them, one representing each of those disciplines, will speak in each half-day.”
The conference keynote speaker, ecologist Edward O. Wilson, pioneered the field of sociobiology, which examines the evolutionary basis of social behavior.