Charles Pence @pence@scholar.social
- Personal
- https://charlespence.net
Philosopher and historian of biology: the past and future of chance in evolution & science in a digital world • PI, Pence Lab, UCLouvain • 🇺🇲➡️🇧🇪 • Co-editor, _Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology_
Joined Mar 2020
Very French to get mad at "présentiel" for being a loan-word from the English "presential," a word that is literally unknown to my phone's spell checker and which Wiktionary reports was last used in this sense in the 16thC
Random history of science nerd moment from my vacation: The small town of Saint-Hubert is the birthplace of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, best known popularly for engravings of roses. But (!) also corresponded/collaborated with De Candolle, illustrated for Humboldt, and others!
His brother, Henri-Joseph, went for animals instead of plants, and illustrated Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's famous book on fish. Both worked for the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. #histsci #florespondence
Also, *man,* serious impostor-syndrome-triggering honor to be on this list of fellow contributors to the series:
First book project now feeling significantly more concrete! Watch this space for a two-weeks-free PDF download link that I'll post here soon.
But he doesn't! He goes out and builds a massive physiology experiment to try to test his hypothesis that the silt is clogging up their filtering apparatus. Here's a bunch of crabs living in jars, with different degrees of silt, etc... (Imagine daily feeding time!) 6/
But by the late '90s, Weldon realizes that – as the sound is silting up – one feature of them is changing *very* rapidly. What's weird about this is his response. A guy who just argued that this is only a statistical problem should just go get more stats, right? 5/
These little guys are all over Plymouth Sound. And in the early-mid '90s, Weldon and Pearson are convinced that just collecting a lot of statistical data about them is enough to demonstrate the action of natural selection. 4/
In this paper, I get about as close as I'm comfortable doing to Whiggish history. In short: Weldon is grappling with something *very* similar to a contemporary debate over causation in natural selection between 1893 and 1906. It's all about these crabs, Carcinus mænas. 3/
This is all about WFR Weldon (1860–1906), British invertebrate zoologist and one of the pioneer theorists of mathematical biology, developing with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson the first mathematical approaches to natural selection. (also: Western movie stock character) 2/
Belgium really going the extra mile to shit on our first vacation in fifteen months
New custom WASD Cherry Blue mechanical keyboard just got in for the home office. 
my new sporting event is just watching these two Teams bots fight over this student
You can even wind up with a pretty decent looking output if you invest some time into the Beamer customization:
academic jobs
Honestly, I expected a bloodbath, but holy crap. This is brutal.
deep learning (lol)
My research, as categorized by Microsoft Academic.
Highlights: I do not work in decision theory. I am also now an expert in "Framing (construction)."
(My uncle is *actually* an expert framer, he's going to think this is *hilarious.*)
So my wife found and backed on Kickstarter this 2-4 player board game of the Origin of Species as a present and I cannot waaaait to get home from work and try it out.
- Personal
- https://charlespence.net
Philosopher and historian of biology: the past and future of chance in evolution & science in a digital world • PI, Pence Lab, UCLouvain • 🇺🇲➡️🇧🇪 • Co-editor, _Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology_
Joined Mar 2020
