Richard Boyle and Timothy Lenton, part of the “Chance versus Purpose in the Evolution of Biospheres” project, published “The evolution of biogeochemical recycling by persistence-based selection” in Nature. The authors “use a simple stochastic model to demonstrate how persistence selection of the form invoked by “It’s-the-song-not-the-singer” can stabilize a generic nutrient recycling loop, despite its dependence upon genotypes with relatively low organism-level fitness.” The article is Open Access.
Ramray Bhat, part of Stuart Newman’s “Cellular agency in multicellular development and cancer” Purpose Project, recently co-authored the Open Access article “Extracellular matrix as a driver for intratumoral heterogeneity” in Physical Biology.
Matteo Mossio and Gaëlle Pontarotti co-wrote “Conserving Functions across Generations: Heredity in Light of Biological Organization” in the March 2022 issue of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. They write that, “The central outcome of the organizational perspective consists in extending the scope of heredity beyond the genetic domain without merging it with the broad category of cross-generation stability.” Both authors are members of the "Open-ended evolution and organizational closure" and the "An organizational account of ecological functions and its implications to ecological research and environmental ethics" projects.
Charlie Cornwallis, part of the “Evolution and organismal goal-directedness” project, co-authored “Immunity and lifespan: answering long-standing questions with comparative genomics” in Trends in Genetics. The authors “highlight how recent improvements in whole genome assemblies open the door to immunogenomic comparative analyses that enable the coevolution of longevity and specific immune traits to be disentangled.”
Vidyanand Nanjundiah, part of the “Cellular agency in multicellular development and cancer” project, recently co-authored “Revisiting N.I. Vavilov’s “The Law of Homologous Series in Variation”” published in Biological Theory.