https://www.kelledhein.com/home daily 1.0 2026-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/a354eafb-f4f2-4a83-8783-6f7ddf3dba44/52663118746_321f833a2e_k.jpg Home - Hello, I’m Kelle A philosopher and historian of science who specializes in the history and philosophy of biology and complex systems science. I am an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Complex Adaptive Systems. I am also a consulting bioethicist at the Native BioData Consortium. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/6dc5673b-4f3b-4c37-a342-ba553fe86def/espresso+yourself+february+8th+flyer.jpg Home - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/e1ee5bc5-28ac-4927-9ac2-a814df6f3b5b/CAS+494_598+Poster+10.23.2025+copy.png Home - Foundational Papers in Complexity CAS 494/598, Spring 2026, Tempe Campus Complex systems science is a powerful young discipline that discovers patterns and processes common to physical, biological, social, and technological systems. The intellectual roots of complexity science are as diverse as the phenomena it investigates. Class will discuss papers from The Santa Fe Institute’s Foundational Papers in Complexity volumes. A surprising number of scientists who authored essays in these volumes work at Arizona State University, and at least three of these authors have agreed to come to class in Spring 2026 to discuss their essay with us. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1788c0c2-bb7a-409f-affe-a0bb178c415e/CAS+302+Poster.png Home - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.kelledhein.com/contact daily 0.75 2025-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/f3bacb5a-6f06-4d61-9893-d6529d60faf3/Foosball+Champion.jpg Contact - Make it stand out For a few glorious weeks in the summer of 2024, I was the Santa Fe Institute Foosball Champion. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1600567964895-RHCKQUAA2SOZR2LG3ZTG/Ant+Carving+.jpg Contact Practicing wood carving— an ant decorated with Peirce’s triadic theory of signs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/172435ae-6d96-4e41-9db3-8c7f7c68fb87/Santa+Fe+Ski+2024+copy.jpeg Contact - Make it stand out Skiing in Santa Fe (Photo by Yuanzhao Zhang) https://www.kelledhein.com/publications daily 0.75 2026-03-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/5d087b55-2d39-4c93-aa88-6f45e4daf20d/eyedazzler-navajo-blanket-02-342331-1024.jpg Publications - “Sovereignty in the Digital Age: Indigenous Perspectives on Health Data and Emerging Technologies”  Hurst, Sammantha, Kelle Dhein, Joseph Yracheta, Timothy Mackey. (2026). SSM- Qualitative Research in Health. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/d762cf29-2a50-4eda-a7cc-868e505e78dd/tdr+logo+screenshot.png Publications - “A Tribal Data Repository to Advance Indigenous Health and Sovereignty.” Matthew Z. Anderson, Krystal S. Tsosie, Charee L. Peters, Susan Brown Trinidad, Ann McCartney, Soledad Fernandez, Kali J. Dale, Sakiah Perez Rivera, Claire Banta, Oindrila Bhattacharyya, Justin Billy, Rob Brennan, Ruben Cu:k Ba’ak, Kelle Dhein, Rebecca Dickinson, Guthrie Ducheneaux, Ashlynn Gerth, Karina Hernandez-Hernandez, Dana S. Howard, Efthimios Parasidis, Neena A. Thomas, Joseph M. Yracheta. (2025). Nature Genetics. We present the first federally funded Tribal data repository — the Data for Indigenous Implementations, Interventions, and Innovations Tribal Data Repository. This repository takes a revolutionary approach to data management by building space for researchers to engage with data from Indigenous groups under rigorous Tribal Nation governance and by prioritizing community data-sharing interests. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/84f277d4-a829-4d6f-9f08-c1dd6a10cbfb/Guest+Lecture+Modeling+Class.jpg Publications - “Response to Wehner et al. (2023)” Dhein. (2025). Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Wehner et al. (2023) object to the connections I draw between their research and Lorenzian instinct in my paper on the history of the cognitive map debate in insects. Here, I respond to their critiques. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/9a5a3935-a2a4-41fd-9c3f-c4c7f4282d6a/website+instinct+picture.jpg Publications - “In Defense of Instinct Concepts” Dhein. (2024). In Life and Mind: Theoretical and Applied Issues in Contemporary Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70847-3_12 In the 20th century, the distinction between instinct and learning motivated international debates that reshaped the disciplinary landscape of animal behavior studies. When the dust settled, a new consensus emerged: the development of behavioral traits involves complex interactions between organism, genetic inheritance, and experience with the environment. This insight has spurred some philosophers and scientists to eschew instinct versus learning dichotomies—and instinct concepts in particular—on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I reassess influential 20th century arguments against instinct concepts and instinct vs. learning dichotomies to show that these arguments have limited scope. Then, I use historical case studies to demonstrate the combinatorial flexibility of instinct and learning concepts. Although instinct and learning are often framed as mutually exclusive opposites, scientists continue to combine them in causal physiological accounts of behavior. I conclude by suggesting that instinct concepts help scientists achieve their epistemic aims because of the way they facilitate abductive inferences. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/81f0fd4c-6183-464b-994c-a010371d2b37/Screenshot+2024-04-03+at+8.05.46+PM.png Publications - “Environmental Constraints and Development of Solutions: The Evolution of Arizona State University’s Prison Biology Education Program” Hart, Steven G., Emily A. Webb, Kelle Dhein, Amalia M. Handler, Cassandra M. Barrett, and Tsafrir S. Mor (2024). In STEM Education in US Prisons. Brill Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004688643_007 Motivated by the notion that education is a basic human right that should not be denied even to the incarcerated and inspired by research demonstrating how educational opportunities to inmates carry short and long-term societal dividends, Arizona State University students and faculty launched the Prison Biology Education Program (PBEP) in 2014. The core of PBEP is a biology course taught in an Arizona state prison. Its aim is to introduce the inmate-students to some of the major avenues of biological research, its conceptual fabric, its experimental basis, prevailing theories and outstanding controversies, while offering inmate-students an intellectually constructive classroom environment and providing them opportunities to become curators of their own learning through research projects. A secondary aim of PBEP is to provide socially-motivated university graduate and upper-division undergraduate students with an opportunity to engage with an interdisciplinary group in curriculum design and teaching using a collaborative model. In this chapter, we will present our program’s cumulative experience in two distinctly different prison units – supermax (custody level 5) and close (custody level 3) yards. Specific challenges associated with these particular teaching environments will be discussed in conjunction with innovative solutions that we developed intermixing traditional lecturing, modern active-learning, and hands-on activities as our program evolved. We will also outline our methods for conducting class laboratory experiments, a cornerstone of traditional biological education, in classrooms with unique security considerations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/117bd37d-3fb0-4f8f-8dfc-b6cc7a1aeae7/PSA+2022+%281%29.jpg Publications - “Multiscale Modeling in Neuroethology: The Significance of the Mesoscale” Bursten, Julia R.S. and Kelle Dhein. (2023). Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2023.12 Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We aid this effort by highlighting a novel role for mesoscale models: functioning as a focal point, and explanation, for disagreement between researchers who otherwise share theoretical commitments. We present a case study in multiscale modeling of insect behavior to illustrate, arguing that the cognitive map debate in neuroethology research is best understood as a mesoscale disagreement. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1689781435502-I6N3A4LQJ5KGBO7TXKXP/image-asset.jpeg Publications - “The Cognitive Map Debate in Insects: A Historical Perspective on What Is at Stake” Dhein. (2023). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.12.008 Though well established in mammals, the cognitive map hypothesis has engendered a decades-long, ongoing debate in insect navigation studies involving many of the field's most prominent researchers. In this paper, I situate the debate within the broader context of 20th century animal behavior research and argue that the debate persists because competing research groups are guided by different constellations of epistemic aims, theoretical commitments, preferred animal subjects, and investigative practices. The expanded history of the cognitive map provided in this paper shows that more is at stake in the cognitive map debate than the truth value of propositions characterizing insect cognition. What is at stake is the future direction of an extraordinarily productive tradition of insect navigation research stretching back to Karl von Frisch. Disciplinary labels like ethology, comparative psychology, and behaviorism became less relevant at the turn of the 21st century, but as I show, the different ways of knowing animals associated with these disciplines continue to motivate debates about animal cognition. This examination of scientific disagreement surrounding the cognitive map hypothesis also has significant consequences for philosophers' use of cognitive map research as a case study. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1596078539690-WLXXW1D4VISELBXQETCS/Screen+Shot+2020-01-28+at+11.48.21+AM.png Publications - “From Karl von Frisch to Neuroethology: A Methodological Perspective on the Frischean Tradition’s Expansion into Neuroethology” Dhein. (2022). Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Special Issue on Historicizing Ethology https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202200003 This paper examines a tradition of eusocial insect research stemming from the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. As I show in this paper, one of the most enduring features of the Frischean tradition has been an experimental methodology developed by Frisch in the early 1910s. By tracing this methodology's use through Frisch's student, Martin Lindauer, and two of Lindauer's students, Rüdiger Wehner and Randolf Menzel, this paper illuminates a surprising aspect of ethology's development during the last half of the 20th century. Namely, it sheds light on how the Frischean tradition, a tradition that had a complicated relationship with ethology since the discipline's formation in the 1930s, produced scientists who became leading figures in neuroethology, the most prominent contemporary field of behavioral research to retain the label of “ethology.” Some of the features that distinguished Frisch's training method from the program of classical ethology and the work of his contemporaries later helped his academic descendants adapt the method to the neuroethological program. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1596077975241-19IJFIBOBH1TFFSCSTFX/Karl_von_Frisch_-_Atelier_Veritas%2C_c._1926.jpg Publications - “Karl von Frisch and the Discipline of Ethology” Dhein. (2021). Journal of the History of Biology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09660-7 In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch— jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the 20th century. Von Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, “What is von Frisch’s relationship to the discipline of ethology?” To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to von Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and Tinbergen’s 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between von Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how von Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1689782133807-2EE81OYUJ67W3AKBYCNB/image-asset.jpeg Publications - “What Makes Neurophysiology Meaningful? Semantic Content in Insect Navigation Research” Dhein. (2020). Biology & Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09768-w In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic content in the process of animal behavior research. https://www.kelledhein.com/pagecv daily 0.75 2025-11-16 https://www.kelledhein.com/teaching daily 0.75 2026-01-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1788c0c2-bb7a-409f-affe-a0bb178c415e/CAS+302+Poster.png Teaching - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/c520aeaf-c82b-4216-bd46-1f597e46039a/Foundational+Papers+in+Complexity+Picture.webp Teaching - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/2107f280-be63-4634-ad7a-8355efbbac2f/100+Years+of+Experiments+Screen+Shot.jpg https://www.kelledhein.com/research-1 daily 0.75 2023-12-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/c49245cb-8032-47c3-b2aa-8e447af64b32/Figure+for+EPE+Proposal+%283%29.jpg Research - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.kelledhein.com/service-and-outreach daily 0.75 2025-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/292c2a65-5c50-45b2-ad1e-500ad0a65276/upss.png Service and Outreach https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1597112741513-YTD7Y3UAJOQRSE8FZTHQ/Prison%2BBiology%2BBook%2BBinding.jpg Service and Outreach https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f1f8e5a9143b60b52da74a7/1597113685689-GJWNVJXU0RZAJ2BD57RB/image-asset.jpeg Service and Outreach - Ask a Biologist I volunteered for Arizona State University’s online Ask a Biologist program, where I answered pre K-12 students’ questions about biology, especially when those questions have philosophical or historical slants. For instance, one of my favorite questions came from a tenth grader: “In biology, are there questions that can’t be answered?” https://www.kelledhein.com/new-page daily 0.75 2024-09-06 https://www.kelledhein.com/about-1 daily 0.75 2026-03-05 https://www.kelledhein.com/home-1 daily 0.75 2025-06-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cec313d79e46600019959fb/1559154840855-HGPV37P63PDTX3G5SGD9/image-asset.jpeg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cec313d79e46600019959fb/1559250423957-ZJ0CYEGWSA9Y6AUP3PGD/image-asset.jpeg Home I believe that in a world of modern maladies caused by work and lifestyle, food is often the best medicine. I teach my clients how to make small dietary changes that stack up big gains over time. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cec313d79e46600019959fb/1559165146340-DCON2SWINPURX5M1DA8I/image-asset.jpeg Home - “Colette’s method is incredible. I completely changed my eating habits, but never felt like I was missing out on anything.”