How nature solves problems through computation
by Joshua Sokol Quanta Magazine, 6 July 2017 Reproduced as ‘The countless computers embedded in nature’ in The Atlantic, 11 July 2017…
read moreStuFest- Celebrating Stuart Kauffman’s 80th Birthday
This year we celebrate Stuart Kauffman’s 80th birthday. Kauffman was one of the early proponents of the view that the complexity we see in biological systems is not necessarily a…
read moreEvolution Driven by Organismal Behavior
…dead-ends, and eventually organism extinction2. Mismatches are commonly observed between form (morpho-), behavior (etho-) and habitat (eco-). To illustrate, the panda is an example of both an etho-ecological mismatch and…
read moreResearch projects
…role of developmental plasticity in innovation and diversification of Onthophagus beetlesInfo 6. Evolution and ontogeny of complex group adaptationInfo 7. The origins of organismal complexityInfo 8. Plasticity and house building…
read moreDr Heikki Helanterä
…and brood communicate their presence to each other, and how kin competition and chemical signaling in nests affects reproductive allocation decisions, gene expression and competitive interactions such as cannibalism again…
read moreAn unconventional place for unconventional science
…a focus on the development and evolution of biological and cultural complexity. Housed in a beautiful baroque building in the medieval town of Klosterneuburg, it offers a place to think…
read moreWorkshop report: Developmental Biases in Evolution
…quite uniformly, color combination variation appears to have a clear bias. Somehow the butterflies are not able to develop certain eyespot color combinations (i.e. one spot more gold and the…
read moreProf Jessica Flack
…Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flack received her PhD from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and…
read moreTimeline of evolutionary theory
…giant floods. ‹› 1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) proposes that while simple forms of life were spontaneously generated, they were driven up a ladder of complexity over time. Use…
read moreDr Maria Dornelas
…disciplines of community ecology, macroecology and biogeography. She tends to work on intermediate spatio-temporal scales (that is communities and networks of communities over time-scales of years to tens of years)….
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