StuFest- Celebrating Stuart Kauffman’s 80th Birthday
…for free”, providing an additional mechanism, besides natural selection, to obtain the complexity we see in biological organisms. This view was most explicitly and elaborately expressed in his now-classic book…
read moreAdaptive trends and parallel evolution generated by niche construction
…nest building in birds and fishes, and web building in spiders, making predictions about expected selective responses to this niche-constructing activity, and testing these predictions using comparative phylogenetic methods. …
read morePlasticity and adaptive radiation in Anolis lizards
…through comparative gene expression analysis in long bone growth zones. Publications Developmental plasticity in reptiles: Insights from temperature‐dependent gene expression in wall lizard embryos. [download PDF] Feiner N, Rago…
read moreIntelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought
…good building blocks (for example triangles) it’s easy to find a combination of steps (folds) that solves the problem by incremental improvement (each fold covers more picture). But with bad…
read moreStructural inheritance: The parent as a developmental template
…fascinating examples of structural inheritance occurring in protists (single-celled eukaryotes). From the mid-1900’s researchers have been manually disrupting structural elements of these tiny yet complex organisms with extremely interesting results….
read moreMacro-evolutionary dynamics of niche construction
…social structures [download PDF] Brush ER, Krakauer DC, Flack JC. 2018. Sci Adv 4(1):e1603311. Control of finite critical behaviour in a small-scale social system. [download PDF] Daniels BC, Krakauer…
read moreWho’s afraid of the Extended Synthesis?
…supporters of the EES, since he has just dismissed the approach as incoherent. He oddly claims that: “The problems discussed above have no common thread, and they apply widely in…
read moreAn experimental test of plasticity-led evolution
…EES expectation) best account for evolutionary change in salt- and freshwater populations. Publications Replicated evolutionary inhibition of a complex ancestral behaviour in an adaptive radiation. [download PDF] Foster SA,…
read moreDefining niche construction
…they can and do help scientists to communicate. Does that mean that scientists are wasting their time searching for definitions? No. Definitions fulfill an important function by guiding research programs.…
read moreProcess and Pattern in Innovations from Cells to Societies Theme Issue
…to this theme issue are the latest conceptual, theoretical and experimental developments, addressing how ecology, environment, ontogeny and evolution are central to understanding the complexity of the processes underlying innovations….
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