Volume 17, issue 2 introduces a new collection—Critical Concepts in Biological Theory—with the article: Serial Homology.

In addition to Diversity Lost to Diversity Regained, KLI fellows covered a range of philosophical, social, and ecological issues.

KLI Colloquium: Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, 12 April, 3.00 pm

We welcome Writing-Up Fellow Christian DORNINGER who will work at the KLI on his project "Biophysical Human-Nature Disconnections as a Form of Sociocultural Niche Construction" starting on April 1st, 2019.

We welcome Roland Zimm from the University of Helsinki to the KLI.

We welcome Murillo Pagnotta from the University of St. Andrews to the KLI.

We welcome Eva Fernandez-Labandera Tejado from the University of the Basque Country to the KLI.

Vivarium: Experimental, Quantitative, and Theoretical Biology at Vienna's Biologische Versuchsanstalt. A new volume in the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology edited by Gerd Müller was published in October 2017!

We welcome Javier SUAREZ (University of Barcelona) who will work on his project "Stability of Traits as the Kind of Stability that Matters: Holobionts as Units of Selection."

The September issue of our journal, Biological Theory, is now out.

We welcome Harold de Vladar to the KLI.

Guido Caniglia took up his position as Scientific Director of the KLI in November 2018.

“...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved...” (Darwin 1859) But what about the time before the ‘so simple’ beginning? Does evolutionary theory apply there? Let's ask Schoenmakers et al.!

The Vienna Science Studies Lab is an intra-institution initiative revived this winter by the KLI, UPSalon UniVie, and the In/human project at CEU. A reading group on Feminist STS is the first event.

This reading group is loosely but seriously centered around agency.

KLI fellow Anne Le Maître, along with colleagues from the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris coordinated a special issue of the Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (BMSAP) on the topic, "Invasive, micro-invasive and non-invasive analysis of anthropobiological remains. How and why?” This special issue comprises several articles stemming from the presentations given during the 2023 annual meeting of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. (Click on title to continue)

In a recent paper published in PNAS, co-leads Barbara Fischer (KLI & University of Vienna) along with Katharina Pink (Medical University of Vienna) and team reported that female Japanese macaques, despite having the same pelvis-to-fetal-head ratio as female humans, do not suffer the same birth complications as human mothers. This is supported by evidence from a long-term demographic data showing zero maternal mortality linked to childbirth in these non-human primates. This study contributes to our current understanding of the interplay between pelvic morphology and birth dynamics and provides further insights into how to provide better care for human mothers to lessen complications during physiological births. The study made it to the cover of the journal.

In this new paper, Elis Jones argues that scientific activity is literally niche construction. Using data from interviews conducted with coral scientists, Elis examines the socio-ecological dimensions of science, especially how science shapes and is shaped by the living world around it. (Click on title to read paper summary.)

In their most recent paper published in Systematic Biology, Philipp Mitteroecker, Michael L. Collyer and Dean C. Adams introduce a new system to measure phylogenetic signal in multivariate phenotypes. Phylogenetic signal is the tendency of closely related species to resemble each other more than distant ones. The authors approach a long-standing challenge in the statistical estimation of phylogenetic signal in mutivariate phenotypes, as phylogenetic signal until now have been mostly designed for univariate traits. However, biological traits are often multivariate, and univariate measures are therefore inadequate, and not meaningful on their own. The authors propose a novel method where the multivariate data is decomposed into linear combinations with the most or least phylogenetic signal, which is measured by Blomberg’s K. These components, called K-components, can be interpreted biologically, and scatterplots can show the data in a way that preserves phylogenetic signal. (Click on title to continue.)

A recent paper in Nature Communications, co-led by Nicole Gunstra (University of Vienna), Anne Le Maître (KLI) and Philipp Mitteröcker (KLI and University of Vienna) revealed that animals with very little genetic relatedness, Afrotheria and their non-afrotherian counterparts, inhabiting similar habitats or having similar ecologies, showed high similarity in their inner ears—a clear case of convergent adaptive evolution, demonstrating high evolvability of the inner ear in mammals. The authors explain that this high evolvability is facilitated by the anatomical, genetic and developmental complexity of the ear, which bestows upon it a higher developmental modularity, and consequently leading to the high diversity observed in ears of mammals as compared to other vertebrates.