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Project

Character individuation in development and evolution

Characters are the modular building blocks of organisms. Biology depends on being able to partition organisms into characters in order to compare and differentiate groups, track and explain evolutionary change, study subsystems separately from the whole organism, and much more. How should this partitioning be done so that the resultant characters are natural units of biological processes, rather than being arbitrary or reified constructs? This is the problem of character individuation. In this project I propose to build an original philosophical framework to address this problem. I start from the premise that the identification of characters should be grounded on the causal mechanisms controlling their development. I show how this requires going beyond the limited genetic models currently available, toward a new developmental approach that promises to bridge genetic effects with morphology at the level of tissue. I will explore how this developmental approach sheds new light on the individuality of organisms, viewed as colonies of characters. This project also illuminates how the individuation of characters is not only a matter of how they develop, but of their ecological interactions with other organisms and environments. Conceptually disentangling the complex and shifting overlaps between the natural units of these two processes promises to deliver consequential insight into the true characters at work in evolution.

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  1 Feb 2023
Keywords:characters, phenotypic traits, biological individuality
Disciplines:Evolutionary developmental biology, Philosophy of natural sciences