Current Projects
Formal Darwinism
The Formal Darwinism project is a collaboration between two fellows of St John’s, biologist Alan Grafen and mathematician Charles Batty, and two mathematical post-doctoral research associates Richard Gratwick and Paul Crewe.
Grand theories in physics are usually expressed in mathematics. Newton's mechanics and Einstein's theory of special relativity are essentially equations. Words are needed only to interpret the terms. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has obstinately remained in words since 1859. Of course, there are many mathematical models that show natural selection at work, but they are all examples. None claims to capture Darwin's central argument in its entirety. In its grandest conception, this project aims to do just that, and even to include all the valid additions to the theory, namely sexual selection, the merging of Darwinism and Mendelism, inclusive fitness and evolutionary game theory.
The core argument is that the mechanical processes of inheritance and reproduction, today represented by equations of motion of gene frequency change, can give rise through natural selection to the appearance of design, today represented by the mathematics of optimisation. The formal approach is therefore to construct links between equations of motion and optimisation programs. The project has been substantially begun, and most of the ingredients identified. But the main work remains to be done of constructing a single over-arching model of the optimising tendency of natural selection, and that is the work proposed in this project.
This project is in many ways a mathematical, formal version of the argument of The Selfish Gene. There, Dawkins articulates in words a unifying structure for all the central adaptive theories used by evolutionary biologists, and grounds that unifying structure in a fully logical framework. A mathematical version will provide more precision, and answer a class of objections.
Eye Movements in Literary Reading
Psychologist Professor Kate Nation and literary scholars Dr Karin Kukkonen and Dr Emily Troscianko are exploring the cognitive processes that people engage in as they read literary texts. During reading, the eyes move in a series of pauses and jumps known as fixations and saccades. Using an eye tracker, it is possible to record the positions of the eyes on a millisecond by millisecond basis, thereby giving an extremely detailed record of the reader’s progress through a sentence. The amount of time a reader fixates a word reflects how easy or difficult that word is to process, and a number of different eye movement measures can be used to infer different levels of language processing. Although much has been learned about the cognitive processes that underpin language comprehension from eye movement studies of reading, experimenters use simple and specially constructed texts, typically comprising only a sentence or two; to our knowledge, no study has used real literary texts. This is unfortunate as complex literary devices, such as narrative perspective or the attribution of intentions to characters, and the ways in which readers cope with them during the reading process, can be fully elucidated only if they are analysed within real fictional texts. Drawing on our complementary interdisciplinary expertise, we will assess the utility of eye-tracking in the study of literary devices that are characteristic of both Modernist literature and the popular crime/thriller genre. We will explore ways of applying the scientific paradigm of eye-tracking to the complexity of actual literary texts. Our studies will increase the scientific understanding of how authentic literary texts are read, as well as demonstrate to literary scholars the value of complementing theoretical claims about literary devices and their effects with empirical testing and refinement of these claims. Thus, our project on ‘Eye Movements in Literary Reading’ will take steps towards a truly interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and the ways it engages our eyes and minds.
Masculinity, Protest and Politics: Understanding Inter-group Relations During a Period of Economic Austerity
From Easter 2012, a one year pump-priming project to explore the extent to which rising rates of unemployment among young men, especially those from minority communities, may or may not lead to group boundary consolidation and inter-group conflict will be directed by Professor Linda McDowell. It is noticeable that the urban unrest riots in the UK in 2011 were interpreted by most commentators, whether from the right or left of the political spectrum, as criminal action rather than as part of political discontent. The aim of this research is to assess the implications of unemployment for different forms of political protest in localities which were affected by riots in August 2011. As well as interviewing young men involved in the riots we plan to also talk to those who were not: quiescence is too seldom investigated. Abby Hardgrove, currently working on youth in Liberia, will join the Centre as a Research Associate in Trinity Term.
The Balzan Project
Directed by Professor Terence Cave, the primary aim of the project is to explore the value of literature itself as an object of knowledge, and more specifically the cognitive value of literature in relation to other kinds of discourse. The project will seek to encourage specialised individual research programmes that fall within this perspective, in particular research that illuminates or foregrounds the place of literary study in the interdisciplinary spectrum. It will also organise workshops and discussion groups in which those interdisciplinary issues will be collectively explored and debated with the cooperation of colleagues from non-literary disciplines. The twin themes of knowledge and cognition will provide a focus for discussions: the word "cognitive" is used differently in different disciplines, but it nevertheless signals a set of common concerns.
Find out more in our Balzan Project section.
