Bio
Marco Casali is a philosopher of science with a background in biology. In 2014, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences with a thesis on the functionality of the C-terminal tail of the HIV virus. In 2016, he obtained a master’s degree in philosophy of science with a dissertation titled The last frontiers of essentialism. The need to rethink natural kinds.
In June 2022, Marco Casali presented his doctoral dissertation titled Chance Underlying Evolution. Stochastic Explanation in Cellular and Molecular Biology under the supervision of Francesca Merlin (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, IHPST and CNRS) and Philippe Huneman (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
Before joining CEFISES as an FSR postdoc, Marco Casali was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Paris Cité, at the biological lab, Labex Who Am I? with a project on stochasticity in gene expression.
Marco Casali’s personal website: https://marcomarcellocasali.weebly.com/
Marco’s project
Marco Casali’s current FSR postdoc project at CEFISES focuses on biological possibility and stochasticity. Ijäs and Koskinen writes that “biological possibility per se has received relatively little explicit treatment in contemporary philosophy of biology” (Ijäs and Koskinen 2021, p. 2). Dennett provided a first definition of genetic possibility in 1995, which was criticized for its abstract nature and being difficult to apply in biological practice (Zinser 2007). In his PhD dissertation, Zinser (2006) argues that biologists write about possibilities in three ways: 1) in terms of impossibility (e.g. “trees cannot be higher than a certain extent”); 2) in terms of hypothetical biological spaces (e.g. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape); 3) in terms of metaphor (e.g. Stephen Jay Gould’s famous thought experiment of “replaying life’s tape”). But by analysing biological practice, there is at least one other transversal way in which biologists talk about possibility, namely through the notion of stochasticity. Marco Casali will attempt to provide a clarified definition of biological possibility by comparing stochastic development with contingent evolution, where discussion of possibility in general (and in terms of contingency in particular) is already underway.