Leonardo Bich

➡️New article out⬅️

@leonardobich.bsky.social and @lauramenatti.bsky.social
argue that health is not about balance or stability, but about adapting and transforming in response to changing circumstances — the capacity for adaptive change.

link.springer.com/journal/13752

New Paper (2025): Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies - Dialectical Systems How could the first living systems learn to regulate themselves before the emergence of genes? In their new paper, Ben Shirt-Ediss, Arián Ferrero-Fernández, Daniele De Martino, Leonardo Bich, Álvaro M...

How did regulation and agency arise before genes?

Shirt-Ediss et al. model evolving protocell ecologies with the Araudia platform—showing how simple metabolic systems can “learn” to adapt to changing environments

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Instead of seeing health as maintaining stable/balanced states, it proposes viewing it as adaptive change - the organism's ability to modify itself in relation to varying internal and external conditions.

The paper challenges the traditional "stability-focused" view of homeostasis in medicine and the idea of health as balance.
It reframes the notion of homeostasis from cybernetic feedback models to dynamic regulation and apply it to rethink health beyond balance.

Homeostasis and Health: From Balance to Change - Biological Theory All living systems need to regulate themselves and coordinate the activities of their parts to maintain themselves under changing conditions. Historically, homeostasis is one of the central ideas that...

Happy to announce our new paper co-authored with @lauramenatti.bsky.social on the relationship between homeostasis and health just published open access in
Biological Theory!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

📖 New Book Out

Alvaro Moreno & Juli Peretó explore the major transitions in biological agency—from origins of life to metazoans—showing how agency drives the evolution of biological complexity

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

the paper is part of a special issue on "Origins of life: the possible and the actual" with many interesting contributions
royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

The first author Ben Shirt-Ediss wrote an interesting blog post discussing the main points of this research
shirt-ediss.me/blog/araudia/

Exploring the origin of regulation in prebiotic evolution, with implications for the emergence of adaptive agency, plasticity and evolvability

Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences How and why did natural systems develop the first mechanisms of regulation? How could they turn into adaptive agents in a minimal (though deeply meaningful) biological sense? A novel simulation platform, Araudia, has been implemented to address these ...

New paper: "Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies"
Happy to have participated in this work!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin

A hybrid conference bringing together voices old and new to revisit how The Dialectical Biologist still resonates, and reinvigorates, contemporary biology

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/diale...

Cover of the program booklet for ISHPSSB 2025.

#ISHPSSB2925 program booklet is out! Check it out here ishpssb2025.icbas.up.pt/wp-content/u...
#hpbio #philsci #histstm #histsci #philbio #hbio #sts

Heading to #ishpssb2025 #ish2025 to present our paper coauthored with @lauramenatti.bsky.social “Homeostasis and Health: from balance to change” recently accepted for publication in Biological Theory

New edition of Principles of Biological Autonomy - Dialectical Systems Today, we celebrate the new publication of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) by MIT Press, now accompanied by a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson.Varela’s ideas cont...

Today we celebrate the new edition of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) from MIT Press, with a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo & Evan Thompson, reconnecting Varela's legacy in cognitive science to his theoretical biology

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

AIRE Annual Conference This event will assemble the burgeoning environmental research community at Sciences Po, along with external partners. The agenda includes three panel sessions, a lunch, two keynote lectures and a clo...

Next week, thrilled to go back to #Paris #sciencespo to give a talk about 'Landscapes and medical spaces: psychological and philosophical perspectives' #health #natural and #built #environments #landscape #philosophy #psychology.

www.sciencespo.fr/institut-tra...

Embodied & enactive approaches aren’t just about individual cognition — they’re about society.

A new Mind & Society special issue brings enactivism into conversation with ethics, social theory & political philosophy.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

Henry Potter and @wiringthebrain.bsky.social challenge reductive views in neuroscience by introducing richer, temporally extended notions of causality and arguing to re-center cognition and the organism as genuine causal agents in behavior

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Philosophy of Adaptivity - Dialectical Systems At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical ...

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Asking for a friend: Has it ever happened to you that a manuscript had been ‘awaiting decision’ for 4 months? No replies from the editors. This is problematic especially for non-tenured scholars.

Portrait de Laura Menatti - chercheuse invitée - IHPST Laura Menatti est une chercheuse interdisciplinaire en philosophie des sciences et de la médecine, spécialisée dans la théorie et l'épistémologie du paysage et l'urbanisme. Titulaire de deux doctorats...

yes, it's me! Also in French #paris #philosophy #ihpst #sorbonne after two months of visiting and becoming associated here 📚✨ ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr/actualite/po...

🥳Happy to share I've been appointed as an associate researcher at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & CNRS. #philsci #science #philosophy #Paris ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr lauramenatti.weebly.com/about-me.html

Thanks! You are too kind!

and that Bernard and Cannon embraced a far broader understanding that can accommodate the alternatives advanced by the critics and provide an integrated theoretical framework for physiology.

We argue that the critics target a much narrower understanding of homeostasis put forward by the cyberneticists

Nonetheless, critics have argued that homeostasis is too limiting and have advanced a variety of alternative concepts such as heterostasis, rheostasis, and allostasis.

Since Cannon, inspired by Bernard’s discussion of the conditions required for free and independent life, introduced the term homeostasis, many have embraced it as the main theoretical principle guiding physiology and medicine. #philbio #philmed

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

New paper on homeostasis with William Bechtel finally out in Philosophy of Science: " Rediscovering Bernard and Cannon: Restoring the Broader Vision of Homeostasis Eclipsed by the Cyberneticists" @ias-research.bsky.social @dialecticalsys.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Next Tuesday at 11:30, we will have the pleasure of welcoming 𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐞́ (UPF, Barcelona), who will give a talk entitled ❞𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐨𝐟 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬❞

www.ias-research.net/blog/2025/02...

wow, I read their work many years ago during my PhD when I was into Rosen's formalism, but I didn't see further development of that work. Someone who is very competent on category theory (and also how it applies to biology and in Rosen's model) is Giuseppe Longo (Emeritus as ENS, Paris)