Sahotra Sarkar (born 1962) is an Indian-American professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the philosophy of biology.

Education and career

Sarkar is originally from India where he lived in Darjeeling until 1975. He earned a BA from Columbia University, where he won a Van Amringe Mathematical Prize, and a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago where he worked with William C. Wimsatt. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1996–1997), the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology (1993–1994), and the Edelstein Centre for the Philosophy of Science (1992). He was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1997–1998, 2002–2003) and taught at Montreal's McGill University before moving to Texas.

Philosophical and scientific work

Sarkar 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 (or diseases of poverty) 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 (with John Stachel) 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–Delbrück distribution in bacterial genetics. Sarkar is also a noted critic of creationism and intelligent design and played an important role in combating attempts to introduce creationism into high school curricula in Texas.

Allegations of sexual misconduct

In 2017, Sahotra Sarkar was suspended for a semester after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with students. Although he denied some of the allegations, he admitted to discussing the possibility of one student posing for nude photographs for money. In November 2019, a group of students interrupted a class Sarkar was teaching in order to protest his continued presence at the university.

Books