Month: September 2022

MAUREEN O’MALLY, the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Her previous positions: the University of Sydney; a senior research fellow at Egenis, the University of Exeter; Ford Doolittle’s evolutionary microbiology lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She did her PhD on evolutionary explanations in the social sciences and humanities at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sussex. https://lnkd.in/dbvHfnh View in LinkedIn

JOHN DUPRÉ “is the director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Stanford University and Birkbeck College of the University of London before moving to Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dupr%C3%A9 View in LinkedIn

COLLABORATION. “Life arises when lineage-forming entities collaborate in metabolism.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

DEFINITIONAL ISSUES. “Our perspective assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life, and does not equate life exclusively with cellular or organismal status.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

LIFE IS SPECTRAL. “We reach this conclusion through an analysis of the capabilities of a spectrum of biological entities, in which we include the pivotal case of viruses as well as prions, plasmids, organelles, intracellular and extracellular symbionts, unicellular and multicellular life-forms.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMY ISSUE. “The usual criterion for classifying many of the entities of our continuum as non-living is autonomy. This emphasis on autonomy is problematic, however, because even paradigmatic biological individuals, such as large animals, are dependent on symbiotic associations with many other organisms.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

CONTINUUM. “Our account treats cooperation and competition not as polar opposites but as points on a continuum of collaboration.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

TRANSITIONS. “We suggest that competitive relations are a transitional state, with multi-lineage metabolic wholes eventually outcompeting selfish competitors, and that this process sometimes leads to the emergence of new types or levels of wholes.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

NEW LIFE FORMS. “Our view of life as a continuum of variably structured collaborative systems leaves open the possibility that a variety of forms of organized matter – from chemical systems to ecosystems – might be usefully understood as living entities.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn

THE CORE. “The collaborative nature of living entities and processes is our essential starting point. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has, quite appropriately, focused a great deal of theoretical interest on questions of competition.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn