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TERMITE COLONY LUNGS. “These social insects shape their environments in dramatic ways, both in the construction of their mounds, and the broader physical environments in which they reside. Their mound, which serves as a wind-driven lung for the colony’s subterranean nest, offers an interesting example of how an organ of physiology can arise de novo from agents interacting with and interpreting a self-constructed environment. And because the environments in which they reside are mostly self-constructed, this poses interesting questions about the nature of adaptation, the nature of hereditary memory, and the process of evolution.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGY NOT PHILOSOPHY. “I hasten to add that I am an experimental biologist, not a philosopher, so I cannot claim to offer anything to this fascinating philosophical tradition. What I propose to offer, rather, is a description of what I believe to be an interesting example of how biosemiotic principles can constructively inform questions of how adaptation, and hence evolution, works. This is the “extended organism” embodied in colonies of the mound-building termites that are widespread throughout southern Africa (Macrotermes spp., Macrotermitinae).” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

THE CASE STUDY. “I review our findings on one such example: the mounds built by the fungus-cultivating termites of the genus Macrotermes. These structures are dynamic forms that are sustained by flows of soil from deep horizons up into the mound. The form, and hence the function, of the mound is determined by several environmental cues, most notably water and wind, as well as how termites interpret these cues, and signals that flow between termites, both directly and vicariously through the structures they build.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

RESOLVING INCOHERENCES. “This is well-illustrated by the constructed environments built by colonies of social insects, such as hives or nests, and the ancillary structures that contain them, forming an organism-like system known as a superorganism. The superorganism is marked by a kind of extended physiology, in that these constructed environments often serve as adaptive interfaces between the nest and ambient environment, and are constructed to manage the matter and energy flows between environments that constitute the process of adaptation. These constructed environments are also semiotic phenomena: interpretive structures, governed by information flow between the member insects and the structures they build.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

“MODERN DARWINISM has come to focus almost exclusively on hereditary memory, eclipsing the—arguably still-problematic—phenomenon of adaptation. As a result, modern Darwinism retains, at its core, certain incoherencies that, as long as they remain unresolved, preclude the emergence of a fully-coherent theory of evolution. Resolving the incoherencies will involve clarifying the relationship between embodied memory and apt function. In short, adaptation is a problem of semiotics: the organism must interpret the environment to fit well into it.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

HEREDITARY MEMORY, “For the workers, therefore, the environment they inhabit and interpret is both constructed by them, and is a hereditary legacy of past generations of workers. Indeed, this legacy need not be limited to the lifespan of a single colony: a small proportion of abandoned nests are re-colonized, so that elements of the mound built by a past generation can be passed on to a future one. This has interesting implications for the nature of hereditary memory.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

COLONY LIFESPANS. “A colony usually starts with a single mated pair (sometimes multiple pairs) and the small nuptial chamber they dig once alates have paired off and begin to reproduce. As the population of workers grows, so too does the mound, reaching a steady height at the same time the population of workers stabilizes at 1–2 million. This commonly takes 4–5 years. The mound will last as long as the queen’s lifespan, which is estimated to be 15–20 years, but the lifespan of the workers that actually build and maintain the mound is considerably shorter, on the order of a few months.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

COLONY MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS. “The colony’s impressive longevity and the overlap and staggering of generations of workers within means that interpretation of the mound structure by termite workers can both be immediate as well as being transmitted across generations of workers as a form of memory.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn