by Sir Patrick Bateson
In my latest book, Behaviour, Development and Evolution, I take a systems biology approach to understanding the evolution and development of behavior. Themes that run though the book are the adaptive processes that result in the appearance of design in nature; the active role of the organism in development and evolution; and an emphasis on whole
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by Kevin N Laland
Scientists like to define their terms. They believe that it is imperative to pin down key concepts so as to remove ambiguity as to what they mean, and how they are bounded. Definitions, it is argued, facilitate clear thinking and consensual analysis across scientific communities. Philosophers of science, on the other hand, who prize clear
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by Melinda A Zeder
Archaeology has a long history of looking to evolutionary biology for ways to explain the initial domestication of plants and animals. To date, most have been firmly grounded in traditional neo-Darwinian principles. These characterize domestication as an adaptive response to declining resource availability in which human goal-directed behavior plays little if any role. Recently, many
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by Richard A Watson
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for why biological organisms seem so well designed to live on our planet. This process is typically described as ‘unintelligent’ – based on random variations with no direction. But despite its success, some oppose this theory because they don’t believe living things can evolve in increments. Something as complex as the
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by Katrina J Falkenberg
‘The evolution of inclusive heredity through the genomic interactions of symbionts’ is one of five research projects under the third theme, Inclusive Inheritance, of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis research program. Michael Wade and Armin Moczek (both at Indiana University), are using theoretical models and experiments in dung beetles to investigate how the evolution of symbiotic
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by Katrina J Falkenberg
‘The origins of organismal complexity’ is one of six research projects under the second theme, Evolutionary Innovations, in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis research program. Charlie Cornwallis and Per Lundberg, together with Karin Rengefors and Lars-Anders Hansson (all at Lund University), are investigating the origins of multicellularity. The emergence of multicellularity, that is, single cells
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by David Sloan Wilson & Tobias Uller
This View of Life (TVOL) is featuring a series of articles on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, based on a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation awarded to our team of scientists headed by Kevin Laland (St Andrews University) and Tobias Uller (Lund University). This interview with Tobias begins to introduce the empirical side of
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by Massimo Pigliucci
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” So wrote physicist Max Planck, in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, (1949, pp. 33–34). That’s a bit drastic, perhaps,
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by Armin P Moczek
Evolutionary biology is a very vibrant and highly successful discipline. Since its reformulation during the modern synthesis it has successfully tackled many major questions and developed into a sophisticated, powerful framework. But it is important to emphasize that there are foundational questions in evolutionary biology, questions that have motivated evolutionary biology from its inception, that
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by Kevin N Laland & Andrew Whiten
In November, a colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled The Extension of Biology through Culture, celebrated a coming of age of animal social learning research. The meeting, co-organised by ourselves, Marcus Feldman and Francisco Ayala, was a striking testament to how far the study of animal culture has come in recent decades and
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