Sahotra Sarkar

Who is Sahotra Sarkar?

Sahotra Sarkar is a philosopher of science and conservation biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. He is one of the founders of systematic conservation planning within conservation biology, promoting the use of multi-criteria decision analysis and supervising the creation of the ConsNet decision support system. In this context he has advocated participatory environmental planning and strongly criticized the imposition of authoritarian and discriminatory environmental policies on local residents. His laboratory also works on a suite of neglected tropical diseases including Chagas disease, dengue, leishmaniasis, and tick-borne diseases.

In the philosophy of biology Sarkar is known for his work on reductionism and criticism of hereditarian thinking in biology as well as the use of informational concepts in molecular biology. In the philosophy of physics Sarkar is known for controversially defending the conventionalism of simultaneity in special relativity and suggesting a stochastic modification of quantum dynamics. Earlier in his career he worked in mathematical population genetics where, in collaboration with Wing Ma and Guido Sandri, he was responsible for the standard recursion relation to compute the Luria-Delbruck distribution in bacterial genetics.