Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · February 2025
The average long-term impact of Darwinian evolution on Earth's habitability remains extremely uncertain. Recent attempts to reconcile this uncertainty by "Darwinizing" nonreplicating biogeochemical processes subject to persistence-based selection conform w ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · December 1, 2024
A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This article offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decomposition ...
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Journal ArticleRatio · December 1, 2024
The study of teleology is challenging in many ways, but there is a particular challenge that makes matters worse, distorting the conceptual space that has set the terms of debate. And that is the tendency to think about teleology in terms of certain long-e ...
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Chapter · August 1, 2024
This chapter provides an overview of field theory and the notion of agency that the theory entails. Field theory offers an account of how goal-directed systems work by noting how goal-directed entities are guided by upper-level fields that are structured h ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Journal of the Linnean Society · August 1, 2023
This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Theory · March 1, 2023
When behaviors assemble into combinations, then synergies have a central role in the discovery of productive patterns of behavior. In our view—what we call the Synergy Emergence Principle (SEP)—synergies are dynamic attractors, drawing interactions toward ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · March 2023
The 'major transitions in evolution' are mainly about the rise of hierarchy, new individuals arising at ever higher levels of nestedness, in particular the eukaryotic cell arising from prokaryotes, multicellular individuals from solitary protists and indiv ...
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Journal ArticleSynthese · January 2023
The conventional wisdom declares that evolution is not goal directed, that teleological considerations play no part in our understanding of evolutionary trends. Here I argue that, to the contrary, under a current view of teleology, field theory, most evolu ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · November 13, 2022
Ilya Prigogine's trinomial concept is, he argued, applicable to many complex dissipative systems, from physics to biology and even to social systems. For Prigogine, this trinomial - functions, structure, fluctuations - was intended to capture the feedback- ...
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Journal ArticleSynthese · December 1, 2021
Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have so ...
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Book · March 26, 2020
In this Element, we extend our earlier treatment of biology's first law. The law says that in any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase. The law plays the same role in bio ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · June 2019
The zero-force evolutionary law (ZFEL) states that in evolutionary systems, in the absence of forces or constraints, diversity and complexity tend to increase. The reason is that diversity and complexity are both variance measures, and variances tend to in ...
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Journal ArticleInterface focus · June 2017
Our estimate of the likelihood of convergence on human-style intelligence depends on how we understand our various mental capacities. Here I revive David Hume's theory of motivation and action to argue that the most common understanding of the two conventi ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · June 2017
Over the past 3.8 billion years, the maximum size of life has increased by approximately 18 orders of magnitude. Much of this increase is associated with two major evolutionary innovations: the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotic cells approximately 1 ...
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Journal ArticleEvolutionary Biology · December 1, 2016
The history of life seems to be characterized by three large-scale trends in complexity: (1) the rise in complexity in the sense of hierarchy, in other words, an increase in the number of levels of organization within organisms; (2) the increase in complex ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences · August 2016
All seemingly teleological systems share a common hierarchical structure. They consist of a small entity moving or changing within a larger field that directs it from above (what I call "upper direction"). This is true for organisms seeking some external r ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences · June 29, 2016
The Geozoic encompasses the 3.6 Ga interval in Earth history when life has existed. Over this time, life has diversified from exclusively tiny, single-celled organisms to include large, complex multicellular forms. Just how and why this diversification occ ...
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Journal ArticleScience · December 13, 2013
The contributors examine the nature of complexity and its changes over time as well as their causes. ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences · December 2013
Wants, preferences, and cares are physical things or events, not ideas or propositions, and therefore no chain of pure logic can conclude with a want, preference, or care. It follows that no pure-logic machine will ever want, prefer, or care. And its behav ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · September 1, 2012
How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence (returning to past trajectories following errors) and their plasticity (finding the same trajectory from different starting points)? Here I argue that all seemingly go ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · September 1, 2012
Barrett et al. (Biol Philos, 2012) present four puzzles for the ZFEL-view of evolution that we present in our 2010 book, Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Our intent in writing this book was ...
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Journal ArticlePhotosynthesis research · January 2011
The high concentration of molecular oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is arguably the most conspicuous and geologically important signature of life. Earth's early atmosphere lacked oxygen; accumulation began after the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis in cya ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Scientist · January 1, 2011
Daniel W. McShea reviews the book 'The mirage of a space between nature and nurture,' by Evelyn Fox Keller. Keller argues that much of the trouble has to do with linguistic practice, with slippages in usage and concepts. In her apt words, the nature- nurtu ...
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Book · July 15, 2010
Intended for evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and other scientists studying complex systems, and written in a concise and engaging format that speaks to students and interdisciplinary practitioners alike, this book will also find ... ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2009
The maximum size of organisms has increased enormously since the initial appearance of life >3.5 billion years ago (Gya), but the pattern and timing of this size increase is poorly known. Consequently, controls underlying the size spectrum of the global bi ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · March 1, 2007
The history of life is punctuated by a number of major transitions in hierarchy, defined here as the degree of nestedness of lower-level individuals within higher-level ones: the combination of single-celled prokaryotic cells to form the first eukaryotic c ...
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Book · January 1, 2007
Is life a purely physical process? What is human nature? Which of our traits is essential to us? In this volume, Daniel McShea and Alex Rosenberg - a biologist and a philosopher, respectively - join forces to create a new gateway to the philosophy of biolo ...
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Journal Article · December 1, 2005
Characterizing internal variance as complexity needs justification, because in colloquial usage, complexity connotes so much more. A complex organism is ordinarily understood to be not just more internally varied, or more differentiated, but more capable a ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · July 12, 2005
A simple principle predicts a tendency, or vector, toward increasing organismal complexity in the history of life: As the parts of an organism accumulate variations in evolution, they should tend to become more different from each other. In other words, th ...
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Journal ArticleThe anatomical record. Part A, Discoveries in molecular, cellular, and evolutionary biology · December 2004
Toothed whales (order Cetacea: suborder Odontoceti) are highly encephalized, possessing brains that are significantly larger than expected for their body sizes. In particular, the odontocete superfamily Delphinoidea (dolphins, porpoises, belugas, and narwh ...
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Journal ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology · February 2003
The maximum degree of hierarchical structure of organisms has risen over the history of life, notably in three transitions: the origin of the eukaryotic cell from symbiotic associations of prokaryotes; the emergence of the first multicellular individuals f ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · March 2002
A hypothesis has been advanced recently predicting that, in evolution, as higher-level entities arise from associations of lower-level organisms, and as these entities acquire the ability to feed, reproduce, defend themselves, and so on, the lower-level or ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · January 1, 2002
Colonial organisms vary in the degree to which they are individuated at the colony level, i.e., in the degree to which the colony constitutes a unified whole, as opposed to a group of independent lower-level entities. Various arguments have been offered su ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Evolutionary Biology · July 18, 2001
The history of life shows a clear trend in hierarchical organization, revealed by the successive emergence of organisms with ever greater numbers of levels of nestedness and greater development, or 'individuation', of the highest level. Various arguments h ...
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Journal ArticleBiological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · May 2001
Insect societies colonies of ants, bees, wasps and termites--vary enormously in their social complexity. Social complexity is a broadly used term that encompasses many individual and colony-level traits and characteristics such as colony size, polymorphism ...
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Journal ArticleInsectes Sociaux · January 1, 2001
Insect societies function at various organisational levels. Most research has focused on one or other organisational extreme. At one extreme, it is the adaptive behaviours at the individual level, the behaviour of workers, which is of interest. At the othe ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · January 1, 2001
The degree of hierarchical structure of organisms-the number of levels of nesting of lower-level entities within higher-level individuals-has apparently increased a number of times in the history of life, notably in the origin of the eukaryotic cell from a ...
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Journal ArticlePaleobiology · January 1, 2001
Recently, there has been much interest in detecting and measuring patterns of change in disparity. Although most studies have used one or two measures of disparity to quantify and characterize the occupation of morphospace, multiple measures may be necessa ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2001
To understand the functioning and organizational complexity of insect societies, a combination of different approaches is needed. One such approach, which we adopt in this study, is to consider tasks in insect societies not based upon their function, as is ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · December 1, 2000
The functional complexity, or the number of functions, of organisms has figured prominently in certain theoretical and empirical work in evolutionary biology. Large-scale trends in functional complexity and correlations between functional complexity and ot ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Ecology and Systematics · December 1, 1998
Historically, a great many features of organisms have been said to show a trend over the history of life, and many rationales for such trends have been proposed. Here I review eight candidates, eight 'live hypotheses' that are inspiring research on largest ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · April 1996
The notion that complexity increases in evolution is widely accepted, but the best-known evidence is highly impressionistic. Here I propose a scheme for understanding complexity that provides a conceptual basis for objective measurement. The scheme also sh ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · December 1994
Large-scale evolutionary trends may result from driving forces or from passive diffusion in bounded spaces. Such trends are persistent directional changes in higher taxa spanning significant periods of geological time; examples include the frequently cited ...
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Journal ArticleTechnical Communication Quarterly · January 1, 1994
Salient examples may bias human judgments about the probability or frequency of events, an effect known as the “availability heuristic” or the “salience bias.” Scientific work has not been immune to this bias; in particular, the existence of certain large- ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Journal of the Linnean Society · January 1, 1992
Little empirical work has been done to see what sort of patterns of change in morphological complexity occur in evolution, mainly because the complexity of whole organisms has been so hard to define and to measure. For serial structures within organisms, t ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · July 1, 1991
The consensus among evolutionists seems to be (and has been for at least a century) that the morphological complexity of organisms increases in evolution, although almost no empirical evidence for such a trend exists. Most studies of complexity have been t ...
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Journal ArticleThe Journal of geology · January 1986
The completeness of a sedimentary section of known timespan may be assessed qualitatively by comparing its thickness with the average accumulation for that timespan. Average accumulations may be estimated from sediment volume and continental area data. Q ...
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