The proposed meeting, "Evolution: Foundations, Fundamentals, and Disease" will be held between December 7 and December 10 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology will include three main themes: (I) Re-examining the Foundations of Evolution, (II) modeling evolution using the concepts of physics, and (III) The Role of Evolution in Biological Disease. The primary approach in the first two sections will be to use ideas from physics of complex systems to develop a complementary to biology understanding of evolution, while the second part will focus on disease evolution. The participants will address fundamental issues of the evolution of disease from both theoretical and experimental perspective. This is a perfect time to re-examine the foundations of evolution and its consequences. Humanity is now in the midst of a new flu pandemic and Asia, and Hong Kong in particular, has been at the epicenter of pandemics in the past. These pandemics are terrifying and at the same time a lesson on how little we understand about evolution dynamics. While there have been many, many meetings devoted to evolution, because of the 150th Anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species, and the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, most of these meetings have been intensely biological in nature. In contrast this meeting does not aim to praise Darwin but rather critically look at the foundations of evolution and the connection between evolution and disease progression from a physics perspective. The meeting will bring together physicists and biologists to discuss basic the questions of evolution from the point of view of physics and will be an excellent forum for interdisciplinary research. In addition it will bring senior as well as junior scientists from different countries and will not only contribute to the education of the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers, but also to international cooperation in science.
On 8 December through 10 December 2009 a remarkable Workshop was held at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. This Workshop’s mission was to examine the foundations and consequences of evolution, with a critical eye towards what is wrong, right and incomplete with the theory of evolution 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species and explore the impact of evolution in the propagation of disease, in particular cancer. The emphasis was on the approach of physics: the development of general principles, quantitative analysis, and development of testable hypothesis. This was a truly multi-disciplinary Workshop to establish a dialogue between the centers of excellence in medicine, biology, chemistry and physics in Hong Kong concerning both the foundations of evolution, and the role that evolution plays in the progression of disease, from the present swine flu pandemic to cancer. There where three main themes to this workshop: (I) Re-examining the Foundations of Evolution, (II) modeling evolution using the concepts of physics, and (III) The Role of Evolution in Biological Disease. The primary approach in the first two sections was taking ideas from condensed matter physics of complex systems, and in the second part focus on disease evolution. We addressed fundamental issues of the evolution of disease from a theoretical and experimental perspective.
