Phil Donoghue, PI of the Chance versus purpose in the evolution of biospheres project, is one of the authors of "Increasing morphological disparity and decreasing optimality for jaw speed and strength during the radiation of jawed vertebrates" in Science Advances. The authors "quantified the variety of form in the earliest jaws in the fossil record from which we generated a theoretical morphospace that we then tested for functional optimality."
Authors James DiFrisco, Günter P. Wagner and Alan C. Love’s article “Reframing research on evolutionary novelty and co-option: Character identity mechanisms versus deep homology” was recently published in Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology. All are part of the Agency, Directionality & Function project. In the article, the authors “argue that research on evolutionary novelty and the closely associated phenomenon of co-option can be reframed fruitfully” in several ways.
Hugh Desmond, a member of the “Agency and Agential Explanation in the Evolutionary Sciences” project, recently co-authored “The integrated information theory of agency” in Cambridge University Press’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The authors propose that “measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness.”
“The arithmetic mean of what? A Cautionary Tale about the Use of the Geometric Mean as a Measure of Fitness” is an Open Access article in Biology & Philosophy by “Transitions in individuality: from ecology to teleonomy” project PI Pierrick Bourrat and Peter Takacs. Their project is part of the “Evolutionary Origins and Transitions of Agency” cluster of projects.
Emilie Snell-Rood, PI of the “A conceptual framework of ‘function’ in biology and bio-inspired design” project, contributed to the Open Access article “Convergent evolution of a blood-red nectar pigment in vertebrate-pollinated flowers” in Plant Biology in January 2022. The findings “join a growing list of examples of distinct biochemical and molecular mechanisms underlying evolutionary convergence and provide a fascinating system for testing how interactions across species drive the evolution of novel pigments in an understudied context.”
