James DiFrisco, coordinator of the “(Re)Conceptualizing Function and Goal-Directedness” cluster of projects, is one of the editors of a new book in the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. Daniel S. Brooks and William C. Wimsatt are co-editors. The book, titled “Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences,” examines “the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It approaches levels of organization - roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity - in terms of its roles in scientific reasoning as a dynamic, open-ended idea capable of performing multiple overlapping functions in distinct empirical settings.”
The postdoctoral fellow will be directly linked to the project coordinated by Professor Charbel El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil) and will work under the supervision of Professor Nei Nunes-Neto (Federal University of Grande Dourados, Brazil), linked to his research group at UFGD. The project covers the areas of Epistemology of Science, Ethics and Theoretical and Applied Ecology.
Deadline: March 5, 2022
More information, including how to apply and about Dourados, Brazil, is available here.
Joanna Masel, PI of the “Universal principles of evolutionary adaptation” project, is one of the authors of a new manuscript in Systematic Biology. “We show that the non-reversible models estimated with nQMaker are a much better fit to empirical alignments than pre-existing reversible models, across a wide range of datasets including mammals, birds, plants, fungi, and other taxa, and that the improvements in model fit scale with the size of the dataset. Notably, for the recently published plant and bird trees, these non-reversible models correctly recovered the commonly estimated root placements with very high statistical support without the need to use an outgroup.” The full article is available online here.
24th-25th March 2022, Beckmanns Hof and Zoom, Ruhr University Bochum
Several of our Purpose Project colleagues are speaking at this event, the goal of which “is to address the riddle of organismal agency through the lenses of philosophy, history, and the biological sciences. It aims to (i) clarify the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of organismal agency; (ii) contextualize this problem in the history of philosophy and biology in fruitful new directions; and (iii) delve into the consequences of embracing organismal agency for the study of development and evolution, its formal integration into biological theories, and translatability into scientific practice.”
More information, including registration, here.
Armin Shultz, coordinator of the Modelling Agency Formally cluster, recently published “Episodic Memory, Simulated Future Planning, and their Evolution” in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology with his colleague Professor Sarah Robins.