Two members of the “Chance versus purpose in the evolution of biospheres” project, Richard Boyle and Timothy Lenton, recently published “The evolution of biogeochemical recycling by persistence-based selection” in Communications Earth & Environment. “We present an evolutionary trajectory plausibly representative of aspects of Precambrian biogeochemical cycles, involving persistence-based selection for recycling via fluctuations in abiotic boundary conditions and strong genetic drift. We illustrate how self-perpetuating life-environment correlation patterns, as opposed to specific state-values, may help empirically distinguish “It’s-the-song-not-the-singer” from conventional Earth-system feedbacks.”
Published in Biology and Philosophy, author Armin Schulz, coordinator of the Modeling Agency Formally cluster of projects, says that the article "draws on a variety of considerations from biology, anthropology, psychology, and economics to argue that at the heart of this human-animal divergence is the particular socio-cultural-technological environment in which humans evolved. Naturalistic philosophy in action!”
Leonardo Bich, a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ Researcher at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, and contributor to three Agency, Directionality and Function projects, co-authored "Control Mechanisms: Explaining the Integration and Versatility of Biological Organisms" in the journal Adaptive Behavior. “We develop an account of control by examining several extensively studied control mechanisms operative in the bacterium E. coli. On our analysis, what distinguishes a control mechanism from other mechanisms is that it relies on measuring one or more variables, which results in setting constraints in the control mechanism that determine its action on flexible constraints in other mechanisms."
The Mistakes in Living Systems team, consisting of David Oderberg (PI), Jonathan Hill (CI), Ingo Bojak (CI), and Jon Gibbins (CI), part of the ‘(Re)Conceptualizing Function and Goal-Directedness’ cluster, recently published an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology, entitled: ‘Mistake-Making: A Theoretical Framework for Generating Research Questions in Biology, with Illustrative Application to Blood Clotting’. The article is open access and available online here.
Ben Allen, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Emmanuel College, and PI of the “Natural selection for collective purpose” project, recently co-authored “Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“We uncover a surprising result, that directionality can actually facilitate cooperation. We study this effect theoretically and also in empirical social networks. We suggest several practical implications, including how to modify the directions of social interactions to promote cooperation.”
