Recent work in a variety of fields has presented a challenge to standard gene-centric evolutionary theory. Higher-level and non-genetic sources of heredity have been discovered. Artificial selection experiments have demonstrated a response to selection of whole microbial ecosystems, with concomitant implications for the formation of new evolutionary units. These results bear important relation to long-standing questions regarding the formation of new levels of biological organisation. The debate over levels of selection has an extended history. However, given recent empirical results and outstanding unresolved issues, it again seems pertinent to ask: What can selection act on? What sources of heritable variation exist? How can selection bring about new units of selection? And how can artificial life models help to answer such questions?

Areas of interest:

Major transitions in evolution, formation of new units of selection and/or levels of inheritance, non-genetic heredity/epigenetics, evolution of co-operation, ecosystem selection, multi-level selection theory, niche construction and extended heredity, origins of life, homeostasis and heredity/levels of homeostasis, self-organisation and formation of new levels of selection and heredity, development and selection, disambiguating co-evolution and higher-level selection,co-evolutionary transitions in life and the environment,…
More information at the workshop website:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/~e197/darwinWorkshop.html
Please contact Hywel Williams (h.williams @uea.ac.uk) if you have any enquiries.
Hope to see you in Lisbon!

Segnalato da Francesco Santini