After completing work for an MA at UCLA, I went on the road for two years, having a number of adventures that, though highly intellectual nature, have no place in an academic biography. I then worked as a Physical Scientist for the Geothermal Service of the Earth Sciences Branch of the Department of Energy Mines and Resources of the Canadian Government in Ottawa for two years, again on permafrost studies, this time in the High Arctic. I found that much of my spare time was taken up by Philosophy, and entered the Philosophy of Science program at the University of Western Ontario in 1976. I received a PhD in Philosophy of Science in 1984. My dissertation was Revolutionary Progress in Science: The Problem of Semantic Comparability. I argued that incommensurability was real, but that it was a pragmatic rather than semantic problem, and could be resolved by carefully unpacking divergent tacit assumptions involved in the application of disparate paradigms, using the areas of disagreement or conflict as the key. My interest in the topic was motivated at least in part by the gulf between the "two solitudes" of Canadian Francophones and Anglophones.
My first full time teaching was at the University of British
Columbia
(1991-92), where I met a group of biologists around D.R. Brooks, who
had
recent proposed with E.O. Wiley a novel approach to biology based in
information
theory and nonequilibrium dynamics, now called the Unified Theory of
Biology.
My involvement with this group was somewhat accidental, but it led to
me
giving them tutorials on information theory, and soon became my major
focus
of research. I have continued in close association with an expanded
group
called the Ames Group (after Ames, Iowa, where the first meeting was
held)
since then. I spent the next two years at the University of Calgary,
where
I finished my dissertation, and returned for a further two years as a
University
Research Fellow. I then went to Rice University, followed by a year at
Indiana University. The Main event this year that I remember was when I
discovered that the Jordan River had its source in the basement of the
house I was living in, flooding and permanently damaging many of my
books.
I then received a Canada Research Fellowship, and
returned
to the University of Calgary. Dissatisfied with the way I was being
treated
at Calgary and with the parochial nature of the Department, I left my
fellowship
despite my affection for the city, and went to the University of
Melbourne
in 1991, where I was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in my second
year.
Despite this, my appointment was not renewed, and I joined Cliff
Hooker's
Complexly Organised Adaptive Systems Group at the University of
Newcastle
in 1995, where I stayed until 2001. I had a deep respect for Cliff from
long-standing
interaction beginning in my post-graduate years, and our intellectual
views
had converged significantly. Our collaboration has been intellectually
very fruitful, and it has allowed me to pursue my interests in the
foundations
of information theory, dynamical systems and biological theory.
Our jointly supervised PhD student, Scott Muller, recently published
his PhD thesis on Asymmetry: The
Foundation of Information with Springer. Following my time in
Newcastle, I spent most of 2002 at the Konrad
Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg,
Austria, where I did research into autonomy in dyanamical systems. In
January 2003, I took up a post at the University of Natal, in Durban,
South Africa, where I am currently teaching a variety of courses. Wayne
Christensen, another PhD student of Cliff's, followed me to the KLI,
and then to Durban, but, lamentably, has returned to Australia.