Extended evolutionary synthesis needs to include the social sciences

by Joe Brewer

It is an intellectual riddle—why is it that the biological and social sciences are divided into so many separate fields? If there was a “new synthesis” for evolutionary biology almost a hundred years ago, how did it manage to exclude (or get excluded by) the burgeoning fields of research that study the social behaviors of

Getting into the weeds: Individual plasticity and adaptive variation

by Sonia E Sultan

Starting with Watson and Crick, genes have been defined as stretches of the DNA molecule that contain developmental instructions for particular traits; evolutionary biologists consider genotypic variations to be the source of the differences among individual organisms that result in natural selection. Yet this elegantly simple view of adaptive evolution overlooks the fact that environmental

The holobiont as a unit of selection

by Scott F Gilbert and colleagues

In our recent paper published in Biological Theory, we present compelling evidence that the holobiont is a unit of evolutionary selection, and we propose a new mathematical model to help us understand its evolution. But first, what is a holobiont? A holobiont is a large organism (a “macrobiont,” such as an animal, fungus, or plant)