Niche construction

“Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections“, edited by Tobias Uller and Kevin Laland, has just been released through the MIT Press. One of the major publications from the EES project, it is a tightly-integrated array of essays from biologists and philosophers on the causal structure of evolution. You can read the preview on Google Books and order the book through major outlets such as Amazon, Powell’s, etc.

In the next few blog posts, we will explore some of the major themes presented in the book, such as developmental bias & plasticity, niche construction, major transitions in individuality, etc. Today, we interviewed Tobias Uller, lead co-editor, about the book and its backstory. We also asked him to suggest various ways to approach the book.

In October 2014, Nature magazine published “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?”, an exchange in back-to-back articles between advocates of an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ and more traditionally minded researchers. The exchange provoked considerable discussion across many academic fields, which continues to this day. Recently, on Twitter, a question was raised concerning the origin of this piece. Who initiated this "debate?" Was there an actual dialogue between the sides prior to publication? 

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 consequence of natural selection alone, but could result just as well from spontaneous self-organization.
 

A new study in Evolution Letters suggests that transposable elements are important for both developmental processes and evolutionary diversification in snakes and lizards. Author Dr Nathalie Feiner explains her findings in our latest blog.

Last week, 200 delegates took part in the Evolution Evolving conference at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK. The conference was one of its kind – bringing together senior and junior academics from many different fields to encourage discussions across empirical and theoretical biology, philosophy and history of science, computer science, and anthropology. The atmosphere buzzed with enthusiasm and excitement. The title of the meeting – Evolution Evolving – captures that the evolutionary process itself evolves over time, an idea encapsulated in the concept of ‘evolvability’, which was one focus of the meeting. But it also highlights that evolutionary biology itself evolves, as it implements insights and tools from many other sciences, as well as the philosophy of science.