We look forward to having Kevin Lala in our midst again. Kevin is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), and also serves as an External Faculty of the KLI. In their latest book, Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptive Diversity (Princeton University Press, 2024), Kevin and his co-authors makes the scientific case for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. While the book is aimed at a specialist audience, it is written in a way that makes it accessible to general readers as well.

We are very happy to welcome our new Post-Doctoral Fellow Elis Jones here at the KLI. Elis had earlier come to the KLI as a Visitor Fellow in 2022. Since then, he has been awarded a PhD degree in Sociology from Exeter University’s Egenis Centre in October 2023 for his thesis, “Understanding the role of value in coral reef science”. Here at the KLI, Elis’s post-doc project, “Theorising the Blue Economy: Connecting Economic, Ecological and Epistemic Value in Coral Reef Research”, aims to integrate the scientific and ecological significance of reef ecosystems into the emerging concept of 'blue economics’. (Click on title to continue.)

We're very happy to announce that Hari Sridhar has been awarded a Max Planck-India Mobility Grant for the period 2025-2027. The grant will allow Hari to spend a month every year in the 'Knowledge Systems and Collective Life' department of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, working on shared research interests and developing ideas for collaboration between MPIWG and the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. In particular, Hari hopes to work closely with MPIWG's newly launched Laboratory for Oral History and Experimental Media, to participate in efforts to develop new approaches to oral histories of knowledge.

In their new paper published in Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Philipp Mitteroecker and Giuseppe P. Merola present new theory for the puzzle of the evolution of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia persist in human populations despite its negative effects on a person’s evolutionary fitness. They develop a mathematical model, the cliff-edge model of the evolution of schizophrenia, based on the idea that schizophrenia is the extreme manifestation of a trait that, within a normal range of variation, confers an evolutionary advantage. (Click on title to read more..)

Hari SRIDHAR (KLI), 2024-04-25 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoins, are becoming more and more prevalent in our lexicon today, the broad common understanding being that it is a financial system that is based on technology. However, for most of us, there is still a lot more to know and understand how cryptocurrencies work, and how such a technology can affect social relationships. Enrico Petracca, along with Shaun Gallagher, in their new paper, apply the philosophy of mind concept of the "socially extended mind" to the case of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They see cryptocurrencies as institutions that perform some cognitive work (e.g., transaction verification) and identify trust as an unavoidable and desirable condition for performing such cognitive work. (Click on title to continue…)

The conference is titled: Understanding Life in a Changing Planet: 20+2 Years of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, and to be held at the Egenis Centre, University of Exeter from 17-19 April, 2024. Corey Bunce’s presentation (poster) is titled: Rethinking climate change adaptation by bringing Philosophy into dialogue with Social Sciences and Biology; Ludo Schoenmakers’ presentation (poster) is titled: Evolution at the Origins of Life

KLI Fellow Ludo Schoenmakers will give a talk at the conference Evolution at the Edges of Life: Origins, Artificial Systems, and the Conceptual Limits of Evolutionary Theory. This conference will be held at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (IEA de Paris), from 22-23 April, 2024. Ludo’s talk is titled: Minimal Evolutionary Theory at the Origins of Life.

Barbara Fischer joined the KLI on the 1st of April as the Group Leader (Evolutionary Biology). She talks to Joyshree Chanam about her earlier time at the KLI as a post-doctoral fellow, and her current role at the institute.

Philipp Mitteroecker (University of Vienna, KLI), 2024-04-18 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

The 5th Meeting of the Vienna Science Studies Laboratory was held yesterday afternoon in the cool ambience of Das Café in Vienna. The paper that was selected for this reading group’s discussion was Anderson, W., 2004. Natural histories of infectious disease: Ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science. Osiris, 19, pp.39-61.

We warmly welcome our new Postdoctoral Fellow Somya Mani to the KLI! Somya Mani is a theoretical biologist, and has studied evolutionary transitions in genetic, cellular and multicellular systems. She received her PhD from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, where she studied the evolution of the eukaryotic cell through mathematical modeling. During her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, she began to build her research on developmental evolution, and also produced the first modeling framework for the study of de novo gene birth. In general, her work involves building mathematical models to capture evolution of biological systems using tools from physics and mathematics, particularly statistics and graph theory. (Click on title to continue...)

Guido Caniglia and Coleen Vogel win the GAIA Best Paper Award 2023 for their article “On being oriented. Strengthening transgressive orientations in transdisciplinary sustainability research through queer theory”. Abstract: “We move from a provocative analogy: that transdisciplinary sustainability researchers are to academia what queer people are to a heteronormative and sex/gender binary world. Both may experience disorientation and need to learn how to transgress established norms. Queer people and scholars have extensively dealt with (dis)orientation and celebrated transgression. We suggest that queer theory can help transdisciplinary sustainability researchers to raise questions that intensify the transgressive orientations of their work when contributing to just and equitable sustainability transformations.” (Click on title to continue...)

We are delighted to have KLI alumna Barbara Fischer join the KLI again, this time as Group Leader, Evolutionary Biology! Barbara is an evolutionary biologist and data scientist with a background in mathematics and theoretical biology. She studies phenotypic evolution using theoretical and empirical approaches. Her work centers on the classical problem of adaptation vs. constraint in evolution: Why are some traits easily adapted by evolution, while others are not, with particular focus on the evolution of birth in humans. Currently, Barbara is an Elise Richter fellow at the Unit of Theoretical Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology of the University of Vienna, Austria. (Click on title to continue....)

Hans-Jörg RHEINBERGER (MPIWG, Berlin), 2024-04-09 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

We warmly welcome our new Writing-up Fellow Franziska Reinhard to the KLI! Franziska is currently a PhD researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna. Her PhD project studies practices from origins-of-life research from a philosophy of science perspective, combining aspects of general philosophy science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of the historical sciences. Franziska has completed a BA in Chemistry and Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and an MA in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. (Click on title to continue...)

Laura MENATTI (KLI), 2024-04-04 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

Isabella Sarto-Jackson discusses her book "The Making and Breaking of Minds" with Ricardo Lopes on The Dissenter, a popular YouTube channel. In her conversation with Ricardo, for the episode titled "Exploring the Influence of Social Interactions on the Human Mind," Isabella delves into various aspects of human psychology, environmental factors, niche construction, gene-culture coevolution, mechanisms, and limitations of neuroplasticity and more. (Click on title to read more!)

Jana SEMRAU (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg), 2024-03-25 15:00 (CET).

We are very happy to have our new Postdoctoral Fellow Olesya Bondareko at the KLI! Olesya has recently defended her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her current research focuses on the integration between genomics and the social sciences including psychology, sociology, and social policy-oriented research. Olesya was born and grew up in Ukraine which continues to suffer from the Russian invasion. You can help Ukrainian medics save lives by donating to https://www.hospitallers.org.uk/ or https://www.leleka.care/. (Click on the title to know more about Olesya!)