Keyword: evolution

Michael Barnett, Lena Meister and Paul B. Rainey provide evidence of a selective mechanism acting on bacteria that increases their evolvability.  Abstract: Can the capacity to evolve be selected by natural selection for greater ability to evolve? Barnett et al. designed experiments in which lineages of bacteria cycled between two selective environments (see the Perspective by […]

New Monograph on Bergson’s Contemporary Relevance to Our Understanding of Evolution – Published by PUF. From the publisher’s website: “The eye is made to see,” “only the best adapted survive,” “evolution is progress.” These familiar statements liken nature’s work to that of an engineer, shaping living matter with specific goals in mind: designing a visual […]

No field showcases the virtues of philosophy of biology more effectively than evolutionary science (although I recently learned from Gregory Rupik, 2024, that this observation is not necessarily a virtue). As a graduate student and would-be evolutionist in London in the late 1980s, I was introduced to the pioneering writings of David Hull on evolutionary […]

In this paper, published open access in Human Development, Denis Walsh addresses Piaget’s theory of equilibration and its significance in overcoming the Modern Synthesis, as an object theory, for an agent theory of evolution. Abstract: Piaget’s Behaviour and Evolution (1976) sought to reconcile the view that organismal adaptiveness – in the form of equilibration – could contribute […]

This new paper advances the provocative thesis that we should revise the central dogma of molecular biology in the direction of a biology of cognition, based on a regime of self-reference that is operational already at the level of the cell. Paper available here. Abstract: Crick’s Central Dogma has been a foundational aspect of 20th […]

If you look up the characteristics of life in any standard Biology textbook, you’ll likely find some list like this: reproduction, heredity, cellular organization, growth and development, response to stimuli, adaptation through evolution, homeostasis, and metabolism. What you won’t find is agency. The fact that living organisms can do things is arguably the most important […]