Matthew Sims

We found this wonderful patch of SlimeMould, Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa I think, in the Ebbor Gorge, Somerset this time last week. #SlimeMouldSunday @nationaltrust.org.uk

In this @frontiersin.bsky.social in #Ecology & #Evolution review we compile 280 studies showing empirical evidence of natural selection occuring at the levels:

- Genetic elements
- Nuclei
- Cells
- Clones
- Individuals
- Groups (demes, colonies, agreggates)
- Communities

doi.org/10.3389/fevo...

Workshop on genetics, eugenics and scientific racism next week! #Philsci #Philosophy #Ethics #HPS #Sociology #AcademicSky
We will be conducting hybrid sessions, you can find the zoom link at www.imseam.uni-heidelberg.de/en/heinzelma...

Lack of Attitude Abstract. This chapter examines the concept of belief, proposing that belief ascriptions serve as useful models of unconscious dispositions rather than ref

Kati Farkas and I have a new paper, 'Lack of Attitude', in a superb new volume edited by @eschwitz.bsky.social and @msgjonhere.bsky.social The paper is open access and available to download here: academic.oup.com/book/62410/c...

The neural basis of imagination: An evolutionary perspective The study of imagination has progressed due to its operationalization through a variety of behavioural tasks, initially designed for human participant…

Hot take: the hippocampus isn't actually "evolutionarily ancient" and its not helpful to think of it as such.

The full argument for this take is right here (but you need to scroll down to sections 5-6):
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Header of an article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution (Volume 40, Issue 4, April 2025, pages 320–322), published by Cell Press, titled "Our not-so-natural connection to nature." The authors are Yannick Joye (Vilnius University) and Andreas De Block (KU Leuven), with their institutional affiliations listed beneath the title in the journal’s standard layout.

The biophilia hypothesis holds that we have an innate predisposition to be drawn to #nature. Y. Joye & @andreasdeblock.bsky.social review the evidence in its favor, find it wanting, and suggest that #culturalevolution offers a better alternative www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #evosky #philsci

Portrait of Bill Wimsatt

I’m excited to finally announce a Festschrift SI at Acta Biotheoretica honoring the work of Bill Wimsatt with the SI’s first publication by @consume.red and @philosofir.bsky.social! The editors (@caitlinmace.bsky.social and I) are delighted! #philsci #hpbio link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Making Sense of Monitor Lizard Cognition: Ecological Drivers of Divergent Cognitive Evolution - Biological Theory Biological Theory - Monitor lizards, some of the largest and most ecologically diverse lizards, have traditionally received little attention in comparative cognition research. Although emerging...

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

Making Sense of Monitor Lizard Cognition: Ecological Drivers of Divergent Cognitive Evolution - Biological Theory Biological Theory - Monitor lizards, some of the largest and most ecologically diverse lizards, have traditionally received little attention in comparative cognition research. Although emerging...

For any one who might be curious as to why monitor lizards might have more sophisticated cognitive abilities when compared to many other closely related lizards here are a few evolutionary hypothesis. I'd more than happy to share a copy of the paper with anyone interested. Enjoy!
lnkd.in/e94-Q5uw

Learning with lacertids: Studying the link between ecology and cognition within a comparative framework Abstract. Cognition is an essential tool for animals to deal with environmental challenges. Nonetheless, the ecological forces driving the evolution of cog

Learning with lacertids: Studying the link between ecology and cognition within a comparative framework url: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Reminder 📢 We are advertising a postdoctoral position in #philbio or #philphysics to work on an interdisciplinary project that adopts the lens of self-organization & active matter to explore the boundary between living and nonliving systems👇 www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... #philjobs #philsci #evosky

An email from Martin Peterson to university administrators.

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

Registration is open for this event 16-17 March @royalsociety.org with programme (titles and abstracts) available online: royalsociety.org/science-even.... In person and online.

This is mesmerizing stuff. I'd love to know more about the data used to generate it, and what is being assumed and omitted.
aeon.co/videos/groun...

Jellyfish sleep a lot like us—and for the same reasons Study adds to evidence that sleep likely evolved among ancient animals as a means of repairing neurons

Jellyfish sleep a lot like us—and for the same reasons | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

British Society for the Philosophy of Science Doctoral Scholarships Doctoral scholarships awarded by the BSPS for doctoral work in the philosophy of science undertaken at any UK university

Apply now!
www.thebsps.org/funding/doct...

Overlooked and Under-Studied: A Review of Evidence-Based Enrichment in Varanidae by Darcy Howard and
Marianne Sarah Freeman

This article belongs to the Special Issue Fundamental Knowledge on Forgotten Species: An Exploration of Data from Rarely Studied Captive Animals
doi.org/10.3390/jzbg...

New article by Grant Ramsey - will read philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27701/

Anyone who is Editor-in-Chief of a major journal for ten years deserves enormous appreciation for their service to the academic community. Thank you Stuart for your great work.

The Organism-Environment Pairing In this first systematic book-length examination of the organism-environment relationship in the life sciences, Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda addresses a crucia...

With great joy—and a touch of nervousness—I’m thrilled to share that my first academic monograph will be published by @mitpress.bsky.social in May 2026! It examines the organism–environment relationship in biology from an integrated #HPS perspective: mitpress.mit.edu/978026205282... #evosky #philsky

Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded Properties | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Vol 76, No 2 The hierarchy of life is the result of a succession of evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). During an ETI, individuals at a particular level of organization interact in such a way as to p...

Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded Properties | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Vol 76, No 2 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

From Autopoiesis to Symbiotic Entanglement: Rethinking Enactivism Through Metabolism and Microbes - Jack Reynolds, Jan Baedke, 2025 Enactivism has recently faced criticism for either leaning too heavily on philosophical speculation without clear scientific grounding, or relying on quite old ...

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Early transitions in the evolution of cognition - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences This paper examines the early evolution of cognition in animals through the lens of the Transitions in Structural Complexity approach. By focusing on the emergence and transformation of coordination s...

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

THE SCHWEITZER INSTITUTE

I'm looking forward to the Schweitzer Institute conference 'Promoting Responsible Governance of Animal Protection: Policy Reform for an Ethical Future’ this Friday schweitzer.institute/conference-1 I'll be presenting a biocentric framework for extending moral standing to life beyond animals.

Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus With DNA focused almost entirely on replication, newly discovered organism blurs the line between cells and viruses

Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

<i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - <i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

Screenshot of a journal article titled "Two ontogenetic challenges to trait individuation" by Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, published in Synthese (2025) 205:219. The abstract reads: "Trait individuation is an epistemically indispensable and heuristically fruitful practice in biological science. However, important ontological issues transcend an epistemology-only reading of what trait individuation entails (e.g., adaptation and homology), prompting scholars to advance models and frameworks to grapple with this problem. Here, I articulate two challenges that arise when advancing theories and frameworks to tackle trait individuation: the synchronicity and the diachronicity challenges. The synchronicity challenge involves specifying the traits an organism has at a given moment in ontogeny, whereas the diachronicity challenge involves understanding the causal processes that drive trait individuation in development and tracing these units across time. To delve deeper, I introduce extant functionalist and structuralist perspectives on trait individuation and evaluate how they address both challenges. Overcoming these challenges is necessary for such accounts to fulfill their theoretical promise of individuating the traits that organisms have in an ontologically sound way."

“Traits” are central units of biological analysis—but how should they be individuated, and relative to which ontogenetic frame of reference? In my new paper, I argue that answering this isn’t easy—and matters more than it seems. 📃👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #HPBio #evosky #evodevo

Overview of the ROTO Lecture Series in the winter semester 2025/2026. The talks will be: - "Race Reification and Population Descriptors in Human Genomics" by Celso Neto (University of Exeter) - "Understanding plant holobionts through complexity science" by César Marín (Universidad Santo Tomás) - "What is Dialectical Biology?" by Chris Shambaugh (University of Oregon) - "Learning from Partial Overlaps Between Knowledge Systems" by Charbel El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) - "21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology" by Rebecca Sear (Brunel University London) - "The Organism and the System: Boundary Crossings in 20th Century Science" by Libby O’Neil (Mississippi State University)

New semester, new lecture series 🎉Starting next month, we welcome amazing scholars to give online talks in the history and philosophy of life sciences. Find all dates and registration links here: rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture...
We look forward to seeing you there 🤗
#PhilSci #HistSci #HPBio