A team of KLI Fellows, co-led by Laura Menatti and Corey Bunce, and including Anna-Katharina Brenner, Joyshree Chanam, Marina Knickel and Hari Sridhar, contributed a book chapter titled, "Adapting to Heatwaves: Reframing, Understanding, and Translating Strategies from India to the EU" to the book "Strengthening European Climate Policy" produced by the European SSH CENTRE. This book chapter is the main outcome of an interdisciplinary project started in 2023, for which former KLI scientific director Guido Caniglia acted as facilitator. This book chapter proposes an innovative framework for understanding adaptation to climate change through an interdisciplinary approach. (Click on title to continue...)

Save the dates!! Here's announcing the Fall-Winter 2024-2025 KLI Colloquium Series! We have a great list of speakers for the Fall-Winter program starting on the 3rd of October: Martin Brüne (Ruhr-University Bochum), Mihaela Pavlicev (University of Vienna), Kevin Lala (University of St. Andrews), Stuart Newman (New York Medical College), Sarah Davies (University of Vienna), Barbara Fischer (KLI & University of Vienna), Simon Huttegger (University of California, Irvine), Sergio Porta (University of Strathclyde) and Martin Schmid (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU).

The 7th European Advanced School in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences (EASPLS) was held at the KLI from 9th to 13th September 2024. The EASPLS is a biennial event that brings together PhD scholars and early career researchers alongside experienced and renowned academics in a carefully curated format, aiming to facilitate professional training, ignite research collaborations, and drive intellectual growth through engagement. The event is organised by a consortium of institutes in Europe working at the forefront of Philosophy, History and Social studies of the Life sciences. This year's edition was led by Leonardo Bich (University of the Basque Country), Lucie Laplane (IHPST, CNRS/Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), Matteo Mossio (IHPST, CNRS/Université Paris 1) on the topic, “Explanation and Evidence in Biology and Medicine”. Lectures revolved around philosophical debates on explanation and evidence in the life sciences, analysing the existing strategies, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and mutual relations. (Click on title to continue.)

KLI Fellow Anne Le Maître was interviewed by Lauren Leffer for the online magazine Popular Science, along with two other scientists, viz., Mark Coleman (Associate professor of anatomy at Western Atlantic University School of Medicine, the Bahamas) and Bridget Alex (paleoanthropologist, Harvard University). In the recent article posted on 6 September 2024, titled, “Why do we have earlobes? They make no evolutionary sense”, Anne explains the complexity of the inner and middle ear in mammals, including humans, and the evolutionary transition from ancestral forms still seen in birds and crocodiles to their present mammalian form. (Click on title to continue...)

Read the editors’ summary of the latest issue, with free reading links for all the articles in 19(3). The issue includes articles analyzing the concept of goal-directedness across scientific disciplines, the use of lived experiences in sleep studies, how agency fits with the mutuality of animals and their environments, and a study of snake–human interactions for what it indicates about knowledge transmission and population evolution. The issue also includes an essay about the relationship of Richard Lewontin’s research program to the one he inherited from Theodosius Dobzhansky and two articles delving into the debate on measuring reproductive fitness.

The KLI team engaged in the Horizon Europe project PLUS Change – Marina Knickel, Guido Caniglia and Nora Hein – have developed an Ethics Handbook that provides guidance on dealing with ethical issues of equity and justice in land use research and practice. The main goal of the Handbook is to support actors in land use decision-making to prevent the exacerbation of social and environmental injustices that arise from uneven access to resources and decision-making power.

We are very happy to welcome our new Fellow Visitor Martin Andreas Schmid to the KLI. Martin is an environmental historian trained in history and archaeology. He studies the biophysical and symbolic relationships of society with nature since c. 1500 with focus on Austria and Europe. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor for Environmental History at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences (WiSo), University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). Martin’s KLI project is titled, “What Is Socio-Ecological Industrialization in Co-Evolutionary Terms?”

We are very happy to welcome our new Fellow Visitor Sean Pears to the KLI. Sean is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Philosophy in Biology and Medicine at the University of Bordeaux, with a focus on the philosophy of biology, particularly evolutionary theory and the expanded evolutionary synthesis. He will be at the KLI for two months, from September 1 to October 31, 2024. During his time at the KLI, Sean will be working on his project titled, ‘Eco-Evo-Devo and Restoration: Cultivating Evolvable Socio-Ecosystems’.

We are very happy to welcome our new Writing-up Fellow Onerva Kiianlinna to the KLI. Onerva Kiianlinna is in the final phase of her PhD at the Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts and Society, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests lie in evolutionary aesthetics, especially in the relationship between philosophical and empirical aesthetics. Her PhD research project is titled “Aesthetic Judging in Contemporary Evolutionary Aesthetics”. Onerva aims to ‘provide perspectives on how the act of aesthetic judging could and should be understood in contemporary evolutionary aesthetics’.

The 4th World Congress of Environmental History was held at the University of Oulu, Finland, from 19-23 August 2024. This mega event was the largest WCEH so far, with 973 delegates participating (753 in person, 220 online). A team of KLI Fellows, comprising Laura Menatti, Corey Bunce, Hari Sridhar, and KLI alumnus Jonatan Palmblad (Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich), actively participated in the Fourth World Congress of Environmental History, presenting their research in a panel titled "The Environment Around Us: Relational Approaches as Common Ground." The panel was organized and convened by Laura Menatti and Jonatan Palmblad, and featured 12 talks across three sessions.

Hurrah! It is with great pleasure that we share this happy news! KLI’s journal Biological Theory has now an Impact Factor! Its current Impact Factor of 1.9 puts the journal in the top quartile of journals in its category. We are happy to share this amazing news with you, and look forward to your submissions in the future! Congratulations to the entire team at Biological Theory whose dedication and hard work over the years have played a huge part in the journal reaching this important milestone!

In their recent published in Philosophical Transactions B, KLI Fellow Hari Sridhar, along with Judith L. Bronstein (University of Arizona) delve into the connexion between two different levels of cooperation, viz., within species cooperation and between-species cooperation. We are also happy to share that Hari's study system (mixed-species bird flocks) made it to the cover of this issue!

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.)

What lies behind the making of a scientific paper that challenges the very foundations of a field? In a candid interview with Hari Sridhar, Kevin Lala tells the back story of one such paper "The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions" published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2015, and reflects on the paper's influence today, nearly 10 years after it was published. Read this interview on the Reflections on Papers Past website, which is a treasure trove of fantastic conversations with authors of well-known and influential papers in the field of Ecology and Evolution. (Click on title to continue.)

Read the editors’ summary of the latest issue, with free reading links for all the articles in 19(2). The issue includes two articles that each discusses the implications for evolutionary theory of the ideas of an iconic philosopher, a critical evaluation of recent writings on agency, and an essay on a classic paper of T. C. Schneirla’s on behavior with a first-ever English translation of a live debate following its presentation.

Isabella Sarto-Jackson was invited by the Das Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung (The Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) to participate in “Science Talks” an event that promotes dialogue between researchers and interested public and stakeholders. (Click on title to read on.)

Isabella was invited to speak on national radio, ORF, yesterday, on the show Punkt Eins mit Barbara Zeithammer. The theme was, "How we optimally support children: Elementary education, brain development, research and the challenges of our present" (click on title to read on.)

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.)

The 41st Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology, with the theme Sociocultural EvoDevo: Cultural Neurobiological Inheritance Systems (CNIS) was held at the KLI, Klosterneuburg Austria, from 18-21 June 2024. This workshop was organised by Isabella Sarto-Jackson (KLI) and Daniel O. Larson (California State University). It brought together world-renowned scholars from multiple fields including neurobiology, anthropology, evolutionary developmental biology, social psychology and human development.

KLI Fellow Enrico Petracca contributed a chapter in a book project dedicated to famous economist and cognitive scientist of the 20th century, Herbert H. Simon. Edited by Gerd Gigerenzer, (the late) Shabnam Mousavi , and Riccardo Viale, the book ‘Elgar Companion to Herbert Simon’ is now out, and with Enrico’s contributed chapter titled, ‘A double-edged metaphor: Simon and the scissors of bounded rationality’. (Click on title to read on.)