PI Alan Love and Scientific Board of Advisors member Günter Wagner recently published “Co-option of stress mechanisms in the origin of evolutionary novelties” in the International Journal of Organic Evolution. “Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity, we distinguish between: (1) previously identified stress-responsive mechanisms that facilitate evolution by maintaining an adaptive fit with the environment, and (2) the co-option of stress-responsive mechanisms that are specific to stressors leading to the origin of novelties via compensation.”
Armin Schulz, a philosopher of the biological, cognitive and social sciences at the University of Kansas and coordinator for the “Modeling Agency Formally” cluster, recently published the paper "What’s the Point? A Presentist Social Functionalist Account of Institutional Purpose?" in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences. The paper provides a new model of the function of social institutions - one based on what confers them increased chances of survival or reproduction in their current social environment. The author argues that this new model is fruitful for making clearer the kinds of data that are helpful to determine the function of social institutions, for bringing up hitherto overlooked theoretical possibilities, and for allowing for the clearer assessment and handling of corporate corruption.
Professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College Stuart Newman’s latest pre-print, “Form, Function, Agency: Sources of Natural Purpose in Animal Evolution,” is now available in EcoEvo. He is the PI for the “Cellular agency in multicellular development and cancer” project.
On December 17, 2021, Charbel N. El-Hani, from the subaward "Toward a science of intrinsic purposiveness: an organizational account of ecological functions and its implications to ecological research and environmental ethics," published with colleagues a new paper in PLOS One, which presents a pragmatic approach for producing theoretical syntheses in ecology. This paper is a sequel to a previous one in Oikos, in which the authors elaborated on a pragmatic view of ecological theories.
University of Toronto philosopher of biology professor Denis Walsh co-authored a paper recently published in BioEssays. Titled "Bridging the explanatory gaps: What can we learn from a biological agency perspective?" the authors "discuss how incorporating agency helps to bridge explanatory gaps left by conventional approaches, highlight scientific fields in which implicit agency approaches are already proving valuable, and assess the opportunities and challenges of more systematically incorporating biological agency into research programs."