Programme

THEME: Biological Relativity and the Biomedical Sciences
9:15am

Denis Noble (Onsite)

Biological Relativity and its Implementation in Theories of Evolution

The Principle of Biological Relativity states simply that there is no privileged level of causation in living systems. Rather, there are multiple levels of organisation. We can be sure of that because no solutions to the equations of motion in any system can be solved without knowledge of the boundary conditions. Cells alone form many of those boundary conditions, independent of genomes. So do tissues, organs, and systems of the body. The Principle of Biological Relativity is therefore a logical necessity. The lecture will outline what this must mean for any theory of evolution and why neither neo-Darwinism nor the Modern Synthesis can satisfy those conditions. Those latter theories require (1) That DNA can replicate faithfully like a crystal; (2) That the germline is isolated from the rest of the organism by the Weismann Barrier; (3) That association scores between genes and functionality represent what we can know about causality; and (4) That the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology prevents organisms from editing their genomes. All four of these assumptions are incorrect in ways that invalidate a gene-centric interpretation of evolutionary biology. Organisms are necessarily open systems. Inheritance cannot, therefore, be restricted solely to what is passed down the generations through the genome. That is what opens up many opportunities for future work in evolutionary biology.

Denis Noble is a Physiologist, Systems Biologist, and Philosopher of Evolutionary Biology. His experimental research has focused on the heart. He was responsible for developing the first mathematical models of pacemaker activity, and he also demonstrated that pacemaker processes are formed within multiple interlocking physiological control networks. Individual processes dependent on just one causal gene can therefore replace each other when the protein involved is blocked or its gene knocked out. After retiring from the Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford, Noble started working on Evolutionary Biology. He has now published more than 50 books and articles in this field. He is currently the Director of Computational Physiology in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics at Oxford and a chairholder at Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of several other National Academies, as well as the holder of Honorary Doctorates from several universities in the United Kingdom and abroad. His work on the heart won the Lomonosov Grand Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2022.

10.30am Break
11am - 13.00

Benedikt Hallgrímsson (Onsite)
The Polygenic Basis for Mendelian Disease and the Attribution of Cause

Are mutations satisfactory causes of phenotypes or even of differences in phenotypes? This question, with roots in the origins of genetics, revolves around where we separate the relevant from the extraneous in explanations of heritable variation. Genetic diseases associated with specific mutations are routinely attributed to the influence of those mutations on biological systems. Analyses of the genetics of human Mendelian diseases, however, is revealing a more nuanced picture. Many such diseases are associated with effects on complex phenotypic features, including the face. These effects are often similar to the directions of variation present in the background population of individuals who do not have these diseases. The facial shape effects associated with achondroplasia, for example, map to an axis of coordinated variation that is present in the background population and associated with variation in growth at the cartilaginous growth centers of the skull. This axis has a polygenic basis enriched for genes related to cartilage development. Remarkably, the conjoint phenotypic effects of the genes associated with this axis replicate the achondroplasia phenotype without the “causative” Fgfr3 gene, in both mice and humans. Finally, relatives of people with genetic diseases tend to score higher than expected on the disease axis of their proband relative. These findings suggest that the directions of variation associated with genetic diseases often exist independently of causative mutations, which places the explanatory burden on disease-related phenotypes more on the propensities of biological systems to respond to perturbation rather than on the mutations themselves. I explore this issue in terms of what it means to individuate genes as causes of disease, its implications for the developmental genetics of disease, and also in terms of the blurred distinction between discontinuous and continuous variation.

Benedikt Hallgrímsson is Professor and Head of the Department of Cell Biology & Anatomy at the University of Calgary. The central motivating question for his research program is how genetic and environmental influences act on developmental systems to produce anatomical variation. His program uniquely integrates advanced imaging and measurement (morphometrics) with developmental biology to understand the underlying mechanisms for phenotypic variation. His work extends to the mechanisms that underlie structural birth defects, such as craniofacial anomalies, as well as the anatomical aspects of genetic diseases and variation more generally, including differences among individuals in height or facial shape. He is currently the Deputy Director of the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institutes, and he co-leads the Canada First Research Excellence Program "One Child Every Child," which aims to improve outcomes for child health in Canada. Benedikt Hallgrímsson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018) as well as the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2019) and is a winner of the Rohlf Medal for Excellence in Morphometrics (2015). Recent biomedical publications include papers on the development of the face  and the craniofacial shape; achondroplasia-like facial variation; and how three-dimensional facial imaging assists in syndrome diagnosis. Evolutionary developmental papers include works on evolvability; phenotypic covariation; and how developmental nonlinearity drives phenotypic robustness.

Azra Raza (Onsite)

The Unpredictable Trajectory of Clonal Evolution in Cancer and the Imperative of Early Detection
Despite the common origin of many cancers in a single aberrant cell—the first cell—the downstream trajectory of malignant progression is profoundly individual. Following this initial event, each tumour undergoes clonal evolution shaped by a host of factors: genetic background, immune surveillance, microenvironmental pressures, metabolic states, and therapeutic exposures. These forces interact in non-linear, often chaotic ways, producing unique evolutionary paths for each patient. No two cancers are alike, even if they originate from the same tissue, carry the same mutation, or are diagnosed at the same stage. In this context, the same clonal architecture that leads to indolence in one individual may result in explosive growth in another. This unpredictability parallels the framework of emergent complexity described by Stephen Wolfram. In his work on cellular automata, Wolfram demonstrated that even simple rules applied to uniform starting conditions can produce wildly divergent and irreducibly complex outcomes. Cancer behaves analogously. As such, predicting the future behaviour of a tumor based on its founding mutation is inherently limited, regardless of how sophisticated our molecular profiling tools become. While tailoring treatment to the individual tumour's molecular characteristics is conceptually appealing, the staggering complexity and plasticity of cancer evolution make this approach biologically uncertain and economically unsustainable at the population level. Given these realities, the most rational and humane strategy is to intervene at the earliest stages of clonal evolution, when tumours are still biologically simple, genetically stable, and clinically silent. Early detection—catching the first cell or its earliest clonal progeny—offers the only opportunity to shift the balance decisively in favour of a cure. It is here, before the chaos of complexity unfolds, that cancer can still be a manageable disease.

Azra Raza, MD, is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the Edward P. Evans Foundation MDS Centre at Columbia University, USA. A practicing oncologist, she sees 30-40 cancer patients weekly and also directs a cancer research lab. The recipient of three serially endowed chairs and an honorary PhD, Raza has collected over 60,000 longitudinally drawn blood and marrow samples from thousands of her patients with preleukemia and acute myeloid leukaemia. She met with President Biden to plan the Cancer Moonshot and with President Bill Clinton for a 3-day Breakthroughs in Science and Technology Retreat. Describing her groundbreaking ideas in the highly acclaimed, bestselling book, The First Cell and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, Raza is devoted to shifting the healthcare focus from treatment to early detection and prevention. Raza is the Founder and Director of the Scientific Advisory Board of The First Cell Therapeutics Inc (TFCTx). Raza is the owner of thousands of books in Urdu and English, and co-authored GHALIB: Epistemologies of Elegancen, a book dedicated to the translation and interpretation of poetry. She also runs a YouTube channel which displays about 100 videos on subjects ranging from cancer to poetry. Some recent publications include papers on polyploid giant cells in Leukaemia; giant cells associated with myelodysplastic syndromes. An accessible convocational address on her cancer research is available here.

Laura Weyrich (forthcoming)

13.00pm Lunch

THEME: Natural Genetic Engineering, Biogenesis, and Reticulate Evolution

14h30

James A. Shapiro  (Onsite)

How Life Changes Itself in Evolution Organically

Conventional neo-Darwinian theory does not account for the numerous ways in which living cells can alter their genomes. For example, plasmid-based horizontal transfer and integron structures that accumulate coding sequences have enabled the evolution of multiple resistant superbugs in under 20 years. Horizontal transfers occur across virtually all taxonomic boundaries to provide one-step acquisitions of complex adaptive functions. Symbiogenetic cell fusions involving massive endosymbiont-to-nucleus transfers of coding sequences were essential in the evolution of eukaryotes and photosynthetic eukaryotes. Many proteins have evolved novel functions through domain shuffling, facilitated by exon rearrangements. Repetitive transposable elements formatted chromosomes for accurate genome replication (centromeres and telomeres) and organised complex adaptations by mobilizing control sequences to dispersed coordinately regulated loci. One genetic locus can encode multiple adaptive products via alternative splicing and production of bioactive ncRNAs. There is no junk DNA. Genome change is responsive to stress conditions, which activate transposable elements. Of particular importance is interspecific hybridization that often results from the failure to find a conspecific mate. Interspecific hybridization is the most reliable method for generating new taxa, such as the potato. As we learned in 2011, first in cancer cells and then in human and other germlines, chromosome breakage and other traumas can induce episodes of chromosome-wide or genome-wide DNA rearrangements. During the process of repairing chromosome breakage, some repair functions involve DNA polymerases that jump templates to combine sequences from multiple sites in the genome, or even produce completely untemplated DNA. There seems to be no limit on how living cells can rewrite their genomes.

James A. Shapiro is Professor of Microbiology Emeritus in The Department Of Biochemistry And Molecular Biology at the University Of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Cambridge University in 1968 under Prof. W. Hayes, FRS. At the University of Chicago since 1973, he was the Darwin Prize Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh (1993). In 2001, he received an O.B.E. for services to the Marshall Scholarship Program. He is a founder of the Third Way of Evolution, which aims to raise awareness of scientific alternatives to Intelligent Design and Neo-Darwinism. His pioneering books are on mobile genetic elements, natural genetic engineering, and bacterial multicellularity. His complete CV can be found here.

15:45 break

16:00 - 18:00

Joana C. Xavier  (Onsite)

Causality at the Root: Metabolism, Cooperation, and the Making of Life

Dominant narratives in biology raised the gene to become the privileged agent of causality not only in evolution, but in life itself. Yet, no living system known to maintain itself or replicate does so without a membrane, proteins, and cofactors supporting its genome. Here I argue that contemporary origins of life research exposes deep fractures in Modern Synthesis, a stark position in Philosophy of Biology passing as science wearing reductionist garments. I will show that data-based, engineering-informed origins science reveals the essential cooperation of multiple cellular components. If simplistic paradigms remain appealing and easier to communicate widely, modern Biology demands Noble's relativity, Kauffman's complexity, and Fox Keller's attention to the power of metaphor. My work backs up the preceding arguments through (1) The reconstruction of ancient autocatalytic cores of metabolism, which can exhibit cooperation and adaptation in particular geochemical contexts independently of genetic replication; and (2) Exposing the vital role of cofactors in establishing and coordinating those networks, all the way to modern prokaryotes and us. Metabolic networks, old and new, challenge reductionist assumptions about individuality, inheritance, and selection. They suggest instead a relational view where structure and function co-emerge from environmental constraints. Their origin and evolution depended not only on mutational variation but primarily on collective dynamics and deep environmental coupling. Processes such as constraint-based emergence and energy transfer are not background conditions, but co-constitutive with the evolution and unfolding of biological function. These findings extend current evolutionary paradigms by foregrounding systemic and multilevel causation, offering an empirically grounded and computationally formalizable path beyond the gene-to-trait paradigm. They also call for a revision of intra- and interdisciplinary boundaries, as well as a reestablishment of the boundaries between science and philosophy. Origins research emerges as the ultimate foundation for the Biology of the 21st century: understanding how life's components persist in intricate connections begins at the root.

Joana C. Xavier is a Bioengineer, Computational Biologist, Philosopher of Science, and Entrepreneur whose research explores the origins of life, agency and feelings, with a focus on metabolism, autocatalysis, and the relational dynamics of evolution. Her work bridges prebiotic chemistry, computational biology, and advanced bioengineering with philosophical approaches to causation in living systems. Xavier has held research positions at Imperial College London, University College London, EMBL, and the University of Düsseldorf. She has received research support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Argonne National Laboratory, and EMBL, and was awarded a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, which she declined. She is a co-founder and former executive board member of the Origins of Life Early-career Network (OoLEN), where she helped shape interdisciplinary collaboration across the field. Her recent publications include papers on autocatalytic networks  and reaction networks; Wilhelm Ostwald ; and the origin of life. She is currently pursuing independent research and entrepreneurship, integrating computational modelling with modern bioengineering and philosophical analysis — from prokaryotes, to dogs, to us.

Marilyn J. Roossinck  (Onsite)

Viruses, Fungi, and Plants: Intimate Relationships

Since plants made the transition from sea to land some 470 million years ago, they have relied on fungi for survival. Plant-fungal symbioses have strongly impacted the evolution of both individuals in the holobiont. Evolutionary studies of land plants often overlook the role of fungi in plant adaptation to their terrestrial environment. The role of viruses in these relationships, where viruses have been essential yet unknown actors, has been largely overlooked. With the extreme plasticity of their genomes, viruses can serve as a means for rapid adaptation to changing environments, providing essential traits for survival. Viruses are also involved in fungal-animal relationships, where they can impact a fungus's ability to colonize an animal. I will present data from field and laboratory studies that demonstrate the critical role of fungal viruses in plant adaptations to extreme environments and in the colonization and invasion of animals.

Marilyn Roossinck is an Emeritus Professor of Virus Ecology from Penn State University. She spent four decades studying the relationships and evolution of plant and fungal viruses at Cornell University, The Noble Foundation, and Penn State's Centre for Infectious Disease Dynamics. She is currently an Associate Editor for the journal Virus Evolution, and is a writer of accessible science books such as Virus, An illustrated Guide to 101 Incredible Microbes; and Viruses, A Natural History. Recent scholarly publications include
Papers on virus-free and wild-type isolates of Pseudogymnoascus destructans; The role of Pseudogymnoascus destructans partitivirus-pa in the spread of white-nose syndrome; The Impact of cultivated hosts on the recombination of Cucumber mosaic virus; and the Manipulation of aphid behaviour by a persistent plant virus.

Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life

When evolution is examined through the lenses of agent theory and systems biology, the focus shifts from a mechanical and deterministic view, where organisms are seen as passive automata shaped by selfish genes and inflexible environments, to a dynamic and indeterministic perspective. In this view, organisms are recognized as biological agents whose cognitive activities shape the living systems of our planet. The actions of these biological agents, particularly their ability to learn, drive the ever-changing structure of the biosphere, constantly expanding its phase space. This new perspective challenges the anthropocentrism often found in the life sciences, which tends to interpret cognition as a trait unique to humans. Instead, cognition is seen as a biological universal. The accomplishments of civilisation – ranging from communication and engineering to science and medicine – are typically framed by modern science as products of human culture alone. However, these achievements exist within societies formed by all biological agents, representing a long evolutionary continuum of biocivilisations, from bacteria to humans. Moreover, the anthropocentric view of human culture becomes untenable when we consider the context of biocivilisations. Culture is a phenomenon that spans the entire biosphere, arising from the learning capacities of various agents and their societies. Ultimately, this revised perspective leads to a vision of life as a biocivilising force, wherein culture transcends its anthropocentric meaning and assumes broader significance across the biosphere. It also challenges the standard evolutionary narrative, which suggests that evolutionary changes are mainly driven by genetic mutations or shifts in gene frequencies. Instead, these changes are influenced by the cognitive actions of agents, particularly their capacity to learn.

Predrag Slijepcevic is a Biologist with a keen interest in chromosome structure and organization, the evolution of life, and the philosophy of science. He is an expert in cell biology, molecular cytogenetics, and the emerging field of cell-based cognition. Throughout his career, Predrag has worked at Cambridge, St. Andrews, and Leiden Universities. He is currently a lecturer and Researcher at Brunel University of London. His book, Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life , has won the prestigious Nautilus Book Award for 2024 with a gold medal in the Restorative Earth Practices category. The German edition of the book will be published in 2026. Predrag is currently involved in a project titled Cognition-Based Biology: Sentience, Communication, and Symbiosis, collaborating with William B. Miller Jr., František Baluška, and Arthur S. Reber.

On Wednesday evening, there will be an Evening Lecture by Blaise Agüera y Arcas starting at 21h.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas  (Onsite)

A Cooperative, Computational Theory of Evolution

In the 20th century, evolution was assumed to be driven by random mutation and selection for fitness. In more recent years, this neo-Darwinian synthesis has been extended, but many questions remain open, including: How did life begin? Does it really become more complex over time? And how should life even be defined? Drawing on artificial life experiments, this talk introduces a computational definition of life, connecting it with statistical physics, information theory, the theory of computing, and neuroscience, while allowing the definition to encompass the possibility of life on other planets or based on other substrates, whether physical or digital. This work also builds upon the pioneering work on symbiogenesis—the cooperation and combination of pre-existing entities into new ones—advanced by Lynn Margulis, later expanded upon by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry. Rather than giving rise only to major transitions, however, symbiogenesis is proposed to play a starring role in evolution, operating constantly and at all scales; indeed, even "successful" point mutations can be understood as minimal symbiogenetic events. This framework offers new insights into life's origins and the ‘arrow of time’ in evolution. Finally, connections are made to recent work in multi-agent reinforcement learning, illustrating why even initially selfish agents are ultimately driven to cooperate, promoting symbiogenesis and the scaling up of parallel computation that has led to multicellular organisms, brains, civilizations, and even AI.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Vice President and Fellow at Google, where he serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Technology & Society. He is the founder of Paradigms of Intelligence, an organization conducting fundamental research in AI and related fields, particularly in the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life. In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s Innovators under 35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning that decentralizes model training avoiding sharing of private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program. A frequent public speaker, he has given multiple TED talks and keynoted the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. He has authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters on the relation between AI and art, physiognomy, sexual orientation, language, existential risk, and human intelligence, as well as several books, including Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Lifie?, is part one of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, forthcoming from Antikythera and the MIT Press in September 2025.

THEME: Epigenetics and Directed Evolution of Complex Systems
09:15am

Raju Pookottil  (Onsite)

BEEM: Biological Emergence-based Evolutionary Mechanism: How Species Direct Their Own Evolution

Building upon cell intelligence and multicellular intelligence, the hypothesis I propose, BEEM: Biological Emergence-based Evolutionary Mechanism, examines how organisms may direct their own evolutionary trajectories and how natural selection may not be the primary driver of adaptive evolution. Instead, organisms can meaningfully assess the challenges they encounter, design clever solutions, and incorporate them into future generations, essentially circumventing the need to depend on random variations or selection. The BEEM hypothesis examines various phenomena, including cell intelligence, phenotypic plasticity, genetics, and epigenetics, to support these arguments. To understand the evolutionary origins of intelligence, we must ask fundamental questions, such as how agents engage in complex interactions with meaningful outcomes. Ants, for example, are the agents in an ant colony, while complex protein molecules take up that role in cells. In multicellular organisms, the millions of cells are the agents, and their interactions give rise to practical functions and solutions. Emergence, swarm intelligence, or complex systems can help us describe these agential processes. In the BEEM approaches, genes are understood as organismal tools rather than causal agents themselves. Mechanisms and processes exist that enable the organism to control its genes, their activation, use, and mutations. Mutations are often not random, and when accidental mutations do occur, they are mostly corrected back to a functional state within a few generations. This could explain why some species, known as living fossils, have managed to remain relatively unchanged for over millions of years.

Raju Pookottil is an Engineer and Science Enthusiast who operates several firms in London. He received his Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Calicut in India and an MBA from the University of Lincoln, USA. His earlier business endeavours involved building carbon fibre propellers and other mechanical components for ultralight aircraft. For the past 20 years, Pookottil has turned to the evolutionary sciences, where he has been developing a new hypothesis of how evolution might be an organism-directed process, working independently of natural selection. Dissatisfied with the explanations offered by the Modern Synthesis on how complex traits evolve in organisms, he began exploring the fundamentals of swarm intelligence and from there investigated intelligence in cellular and multicellular systems. He then attempted to connect these concepts with modern understandings of genetics, epigenetics, and other hereditary mechanisms. Pookottil is one of the founding members of The Third Way of Evolution, which he initiated in 2014 along with James Shapiro and Denis Noble. He is a self-taught evolutionary scholar and an innovator by nature, and his core strength lies in bringing disparate pieces of information together and using them to introduce entirely novel concepts. His book on the B.E.E.M theory was reviewed by the Royal Society of Biology.

10:30 break

11:00 – 13:00

John Mattick  (Onsite)

Kuhnian Revolutions in Molecular Biology and Evolution

In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as comprising occasional paradigm shifts separated by interludes of normal science, during which investigations are designed and results interpreted within the reigning conceptual framework, until anomalies accumulate and an adequate replacement is formulated. The conceptual framework that has held sway since the inception of molecular biology is that genes are synonymous with proteins, and that all cellular functions, including the control of gene expression, are performed by proteins, tacitly assuming that the mechanisms that regulate microbial physiology are sufficient to orchestrate human development. Many anomalies have accumulated: only 1% of the human genome encodes proteins; genes-in-pieces; transposon-derived repetitive sequences; the lack of scaling of protein-coding genes and the concomitant increase in noncoding sequences with developmental complexity; a plethora of noncoding RNAs expressed in cell-specific patterns; an epigenome; and a million genetic loci termed enhancers that control the spatiotemporal patterns of development. There is a new understanding: Most genes in humans and other complex organisms encode regulatory RNAs that orchestrate the trillions of cell fate decisions that must be made with high precision, and are the primary substrate of adaptive evolution. The long-standing assumptions in evolutionary theory have been that mutations are random and that experience is not communicated to subsequent generations. Both assumptions are demonstrably incorrect, as non-random mutation and epigenetic inheritance have been well-documented in both plants and animals. The underlying issue, as articulated by Downey and Fellows, is that random searches are intractable in complex systems; therefore, evolution must have discovered ways to improve evolvability, especially in mammals, which have long generation times and limited progeny. It is clear there must be an interplay between hard-wired DNA and RNA-directed epigenetic inheritance. Evidence also suggests that the controlled use of transposable elements enhances adaptive exploration. The current challenge is to formulate a cohesive conceptual framework for understanding evolution and evolvability.

John Mattick is a Molecular Biologist and the Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He was previously Chief Executive of Genomics England, Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, and Foundation Director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland. Mattick has pioneered a new understanding of the role of noncoding RNA  in the differentiation and development  of humans and other complex organisms. He has published over 300 scientific articles, which have been cited over 100,000 times, and is currently ranked the #1 scholar globally in noncoding RNA and #4 in RNA. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. His honours and awards include Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, Associate Membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the inaugural Gutenberg Professorship of the University of Strasbourg, the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Medal, the University of Texas Bertner Award for Distinguished Contributions to Cancer Research, and the Human Genome Organization Chen Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Human Genetics and Genomic Research. His current research is focused on the role of RNA in cognitive processes, and he is currently writing a book entitled The Evolution of Intelligence. Recent works include papers on the Kuhnian revolution in molecular; Long noncoding RNAs; and enhancers that express organizational RNAs.

Abir U. (Andrei) Igamberdiev  (tbd)

Evolutionary Complexification as a Generation and Novel Interpretation of Coding Systems in the Process of Natural Computation

I propose a novel approach to understanding the evolutionary process that goes beyond the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. In this approach, the phenomenon of evolutionary complexification corresponds to the generation of new coding systems defined as Codepoiesis. The entire process of generating novel coding statements that substantiate organizational complexity leads to an expansion of the system, incorporating externality to support newly generated complex structures. During the complexifying evolution, values are assigned to previously unproven statements by encoding them using new codes or rearranging existing ones. In this perspective, living systems during evolution continuously realize the proof of Gödel's theorem. In the real physical world, this realization is grounded in the irreversible reduction of fundamental uncertainty that appears in the self-referential process of internal measurement performed by living systems. This leads to the formation of a sequence of reflexive loops that establish novel interrelations between the biosystem and the external world, providing a possibility for active, anticipatory transformation of externality. In this concept of complexifying evolution, we propose a metamathematical framework that accounts for the underlying logic of Codepoiesis, outline the basic principles of the generation of new coding systems, and describe the main codepoietic events in the course of progressive biological evolution. Evolutionary complexification represents a metasystem transition that results in the system increasing its external work through the division of labour among its components. This approach provides the conceptual basis for further development of the extended evolutionary synthesis by clarifying its metamathematical foundation, with essential consequences for understanding metabolic closure and morphogenesis. It aims to unite alternative approaches and explore new possibilities for future research in the fields of evolutionary biology, the origin of life, and consciousness.

Abir (Andrei) Igamberdiev is a Russian-Canadian Theoretical Biologist and Plant Scientist. He is a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada . His research is centred on the organization of plant metabolism, on the conceptual development of the foundations of theoretical biology and evolutionary theory, and the history and philosophy of science. He was born in Almaty (Kazakhstan) and lived in Voronezh (Russia), where he studied biology at Voronezh State University. He earned a PhD in biology from the same university and a Doctor of Science degree at the Institute of Plant Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He has held visiting scholarships at Umeå University (Sweden), Free University of Berlin (Germany), University of Wyoming (USA), and Risø National Laboratory (Denmark). Afterwards, he permanently moved to Canada, where he worked at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) and then at the Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. John's, Newfoundland), where he is currently a Professor at the Department of Biology. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal publications and several books. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal BioSystems and a subject editor of the Journal of Plant Physiology. His research focuses on the organization and evolution of metabolism, the development of code systems during eukaryogenesis, the evolution of meaningful information in the biosphere, the human-driven cultivation of pants, the bioenergetics of plant cells, enzymology, adaptation to hypoxic stress, nitric oxide metabolism in plants, the foundations of theoretical biology and evolutionary theory , and the dynamics of biological and social systems.

David Obon  (Onsite)

Creative Overcome Theory: A Systems-Theoretical Approach to How Innovation Drives Evolution

For decades, scientific orthodoxy has expanded the explanatory capacity of the Modern Synthesis—the still-dominant theoretical framework. Despite constant refinements and some reductionist missteps, these efforts still fail to provide satisfactory explanations for some of the most fundamental questions. What gives life to inert matter? How does the overwhelming complexity of life appear? How do purpose and intelligence arise? The Modern Synthesis is far from providing a satisfactory explanation, and such is not a trivial issue for an appropriate theory of life. As the conceptual limitations of the current model have become increasingly evident, valuable theoretical contributions have been made, all of which point in the same direction: innovation. Building on these contributions, this talk presents a systems-theoretical approach that sheds light on these fundamental questions. In this approach, evolution is not a passive, accidental phenomenon, but an active process driven by organic systems searching for new adaptive properties. This active dynamic should not be sought in a mysterious force, but in the capacity of organic systems to generate adaptive novelty. Life emerges, persists, and evolves because it actively seeks innovation, and innovation is a product of selection. This exploratory capacity enables living matter to learn and innovate more efficiently over time, a process accelerated by the positive selection of the most effective exploratory strategies, which I refer to as the Creative Overcome Theory. Creativity is the hallmark of life because living matter is matter that actively and permanently seeks novelty. To achieve it, life fosters systems of innovation at different levels of organic complexity. Innovation is based on specific physical, biological, and cultural devices, and these mechanisms underlie some of the major transitions in evolution. If correct, this interpretation could not only allow for a much more consilient explanation of evolutionary phenomena, but also offer the opportunity to set up a better theoretical framework capable of unifying cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution.

David Obon is a Science Writer, Systems Theorist, and Interdisciplinary Researcher from Barcelona. He holds a PhD from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Since completing his thesis, The Architecture of Complexity: Foundations of the Transdisciplinary Method, he has continued his research in search of new theoretical frameworks of broader explanatory power. With a background spanning design, biology, and philosophy of science, he has spent much of his career challenging reductionist frameworks that dominate traditional evolutionary theory. This wide-ranging research has been published in different media and has led him to teach and give lectures at diverse international universities. Obon advocates for a consilient and transdisciplinary approach that connects the fundamental branches of science in the pursuit of a unified theory of evolution. His work encourages us not only to rethink how life and evolution works, but also to consider how humanity can innovate more responsibly in a world where the inexorable increase in complexity pushes us towards an accelerated and uncertain future. Obon is the author of Evolution: The Invention of Creativity,
where he argues that evolution is not a passive process driven solely by random mutations and natural selection, as postulated by the current Modern Synthesis, but an active process powered by the capacity of living systems to generate novelty. He also wrote a Spanish book on emergence and complexity.

13:00 lunch

THEME: Paradigms and Narratives of Evolution

14:30

Nathalie Gontier https://sites.google.com/view/nathaliegontier/ (Onsite)

From the Flower of Evolution to the 7E Cognition Approach for Understanding Symbolic Evolution

The biological sciences evolved along seven leading research schools, each studying different aspects of the evolution process. The school of Darwinism introduced natural selection theory; the Modern Synthesis combined selection theory with drift and population genetics; Microevolution examines molecular structures; Mesoevolution takes an organism-centred approach; Macroevolution studies how species and higher groups evolve over deep time; Ecology researches organism-environmental relationships; and Reticulate evolution investigates community interactions. I depict these schools as a large hexagonal structure that I call the Flower of Evolution. The Flower of Evolution is as valuable an educational tool for what it incorporates into these evolutionary epistemological frameworks as for what it leaves out. The symbolic sciences are one such example. The symbolic sciences study behaviour, cognition, communication, sociocultural, economic and political lifeways, and technological innovations. While attempts have been made to integrate such research within the various evolution schools, research on symbolism has often remained confined to traditional cognitive and behavioural fields that primarily focus on how humans and, to some extent, other animals manipulate signs, symbols, and information. The cognitive study of these phenomena gave way to the 4E cognition approach, which recognizes cognition as embodied in the organism, embedded in sociocultural lifeways, enacted by agential individuals, and extended into material artifacts. I will demonstrate that this approach finally allows for an evolutionary perspective on symbolism. 4E cognition theory can be extended to what I call a 7E cognition framework, which additionally recognizes cognition as Evolved, mostly Extra-genetically, by Ensembles of individuals. A 7E approach to symbolic evolution requires an eco-evo-devo and reticulate, as well as a hierarchically interactive understanding of how not just individuals but entire communities bring forth symbolic lifeways that in turn shape biorealities; the life-based and lived actualities that define a community's past, current, and future worlds.

Nathalie Gontier is a Philosopher, Anthropologist, Science Educator, and Academic Editor, affiliated with the Mind, Language, and Action Group of the Portuguese Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto. Her expertise lies in the philosophy of the evolutionary sciences, where she investigates how evolutionary theories impact worldview formation; how evolutionary theories develop in biology; how they are applied to study symbolic evolution; and how biological and symbolic evolution are depicted in diagrams and cosmographies such as cycles, chains, scales, timelines, trees, and networks. She has organized numerous conferences and symposia on these topics for, among others, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the International Symbiosis Society, the Portuguese Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology. Her work has been presented at the Linnaean Society, the UNESCO-patronaged Ontology conference, Euraxess, and various Natural History Museums, amongst others. Gontier is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Nature Book Series Interdisciplinary Evolution Research; Editor of the Elsevier Journal BioSystems; Associate Editor of the Springer Nature Journal Evolutionary Biology​; and Advisory Board Member of the Intellect Books Journal Empedocles. Recent publications include the Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, special issues on topics such as Evolutionary Epistemology and Combinatoriality and Compositionality in Apes, Hominins, Humans, and Birds, as well as encyclopedia entries on 7E Cognition, Language Research, and the history of Symbiosis and Symbiogenesis research.

15:45 break
16:15- 18:15

Johann Peter Gogarten (Online) 

Reticulate Evolution and the Units and Levels of Selection and Evolution

Organisms do not live isolation, rather they closely interact with other organisms, including symbionts (parasites, mutualists and commensal). Selection can act on multiple levels: genes, individuals, groups of organisms, and holobionts (i.e. a eukaryotic host and all its microbial symbionts). Selection at the gene level occurs in two flavours: (1) Selfish genetic elements or molecular parasites, which can be parts of genes as in the case of introns and inteins, that propagate in genomes of infected organisms. At least initially these molecular parasites do not increase the fitness of the infected organism or virus. (2) Genes that are adapted to a particular ecological niche, and through gene sharing can help newcomers to survive in the new environment. Selection at the group level includes Pyotr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, but also biofilms and microbials communities. Members of microbial communities formed by members of the same species or by different species often engage in a division of labour that results in mutual interdependence as described in the different versions of the Black Queen hypothesis.
In addition to natural selection favouring units that create more offspring or are more persistent, evolution also occurs through constructive neutral evolution (CNE). Due to the transfer of genetic information, the phylogeny of genomes is embedded in a web formed by transfers of genes and parts of genes. Some hold out hope that the main strands in the genes' histories reflect the tree of cells. However, highways of gene sharing, bias in gene transfer, frequent within-gene recombination events, and transfers from now extinct or unsampled lineages make inferring the tree of cells a problematic enterprise. Phylogenetic reconstruction is further complicated by artifacts due to high substitution rates and compositional bias. Nevertheless, the study of molecules' evolutionary histories provides insights into early evolution, dating back to the time before the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the origin of molecular innovations, and the contributions of molecular parasites to shaping the web of life.

Johann Peter Gogarten is a Geneticist who studies molecular evolution, with expertise in the early evolution of life, ancient gene duplications, horizontal gene transfer, and molecular parasites. He is Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and a member of the Institute for Systems Genomics at the University of Connecticut, USA. The National Science Foundation has funded his research, as well as NASA's Exobiology/Astrobiology Program and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation. Gogarten was one of the pioneers recognizing the importance of horizontal gene transfer in microbial evolution. Dubbed one of the four horsemen of the gene transfer apocalypse, his ideas on exchange groups and pan-genomes  as a shared genetic resource /full have dramatically changed the understanding of microbial evolution and of approaches to reconstruct evolutionary history. He is best known for rooting the tree of life  using an ancient gene duplication in ATPases/ATPsynthases that predated the divergence of the three cellular domains. Using this information, he inferred properties of the last universal common ancestor, and suggested correlations between molecular phylogenies and Earth's early history. His recent work focusses on inteins, aka self-splicing protein introns. These are selfish genetic elements that often harbour a homing endonuclease domain, which allows for the invasion of previously uninvaded homologs. These molecular parasites provide a means to trace gene flow, and they illustrate that the apparent result of group selection (increased recombination rate) may often be better explained using a gene-centred view of evolution. The Gogarten lab recently discovered an intein-based gene drive in phages, which leads to rapid invasion of local phage populations. More of his works are available here.

Laura Nuño de la Rosa  (Onsite)

Reproduction and Evolvability

Although heredity has long been central to evolutionary theory, reproduction itself—understood as the material process by which new organisms are generated from organisms of the same kind—has often been reduced to genetic transmission and framed as a strategy for maximizing fitness. This gene-centred, adaptationist view overlooks the complex relational and material dimensions of reproduction, a limitation also present in much of evolutionary development studies or evo-devo, which has historically focused on internal embryological processes generating morphological characters. In contrast, recent work in evo-devo enables us to theorize reproductive characters—such as gametes, gonads, courtship, incubation, and nourishment—as well as reproductive modes (e.g., oviparity, internal fertilization, matrotrophy) — in relational and developmental terms that account for diversity across lineages. In this conference, I explore how considering inter-organismal reproductive relations—between parents and between parents and offspring—offers a new perspective on evolvability. Rather than viewing reproduction merely as a vehicle for heredity or fitness optimization, I argue that it should be seen as the material link between generations, regulating plastic interactions with the environment and shaping the evolutionary potential of different lineages through constraints and affordances embedded in reproductive modes.

Laura Nuño de la Rosa is a Philosopher of Science whose research spans the History and Philosophy of Biology and the general Philosophy of Science. While she has worked on Aristotle's biology and the legacy of morphological thought, her main focus is the recent history of evolutionary biology, particularly evo-devo and evolvability. She combines bibliometric analysis and oral history to reconstruct scientific practice and applies conceptual tools from cultural evolution to interpret its dynamics. Her philosophical work explores dispositions and propensities in evolutionary explanation, the role of imaging in developmental biology, and teleological and agential reasoning in evolution. More recently, her research has turned to reproduction, both as a theoretical contribution to evolutionary understanding and as a feminist critique of scientific representations of female sexuality. Her broader interests include theory integration, interdisciplinarity, values in science, new materialism, and scientific realism. She has been an Assistant Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and has recently joined the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) as a Tenured Scientist. She has held a Juan de la Cierva Fellowship, is External Faculty at the KLI Institute, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B. She co-coordinates the Philosophy of Biology group BioKoinos University/Lab website:. She leads the project Metaphysics of Biology (2022–2026), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and has recently coordinated two thematic clusters within the Evolvability project (2019–2020) and the Templeton-funded Agency, Directionality, and Function project (2021–2024). Recent publications include works on Pere Alberch; The evolution of reproductive characters; Agency in reproduction; The female orgasm; and A mapping of evolvability research.

Athena Aktipis (forthcoming)

On Thursday evening, there will be a Recital by Denis Noble and the Oxford Trobadors, starting at 21h.

THEME: Cognition, Teleonomy, Agency, and Consciousness
9:15am

Eva Jablonka  (Onsite)

Evolving Evolutionary Theory: Towards a New Unification of the Life-Sciences?

In this lecture, I argue that the changes in our current view of evolution are leading to a new unification of the life sciences. I discuss two aspects of this unification on which my research had mainly focused: the first is a synthesis between development and heredity, which is leading to important changes in our view of evolution, usually discussed within the framework of the extended evolutionary synthesis. The second is an incorporation of mental processes into evolutionary considerations stemming from evolutionary studies of consciousness, which, I suggest, lead to a new unification of psychology, the cognitive sciences and biology. My discussion of the first aspect focuses on the evolutionary implications of inheritance systems that allow the between-generation transmission of developmentally induced and selected epigenetic, behavioural, and symbol-based variations. I emphasize the ways in which transmission of such Lamarckian variations extend established notions of developmental plasticity, the role of living organisms in the construction of their ecological niche, and the concept of selection. In my discussion of the second aspect – the role of consciousness in evolution – I examine the effects of the emergence of minimal consciousness in living organisms on patterns of evolution. I argue that consciousness gave rise to a new category of selection – mental selection – which led to the evolution of intricate perceptual, emotional, and motor patterns of biotic signalling that could not have existed before the evolution of consciousness. Mental selection can therefore be considered as a distinct form of selection, akin to, but distinct from, artificial human selection. Its study and research into additional aspects of the evolution of consciousness promises to forge new relations between biology and psychology as well as between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind.

Eva Jablonka is Professor Emerita in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. She is an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of biology, whose main interests include understanding evolution driven by non-genetic hereditary variations and the evolution of nervous systems and consciousness. Her books in English include: Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution  (with Marion Lamb), Animal Traditions  (with Eytan Avital), Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT with Marion Lamb), The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul  (with Simona Ginsburg), Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis  (with Marion Lamb), and Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution  (with Simona Ginsburg and the artist Anna Zeligowski). She is a member of the Israeli Academy of Science.

10:30 break

11:00-13:00

Pamela Lyon  (Onsite)

Cellular Learning and Its Possible Role in Embedding Behavioural Sequences in the Genome

A defining feature of biological processes is that so much of it unfolds in sequences: this happens, then that happens. Such sequences may comprise many steps whose genetic enablers are dispersed throughout the genome, steps that may be dissociable and susceptible to conditioned change over one or more generations. Biological relativism is grounded, in part, on growing empirical evidence that plasticity and epigenetics play critical roles in the development of genomically embedded behavioural sequences released by transcription factors. Because such sequences reflect knowledge about the world in which the organism makes a living, cognition also must have played an indispensable role in evolution, especially the associative learning of temporally conjoined events. Two ubiquitous examples show: (1) that over-exposure to UV radiation damages DNA, so it must be mitigated; and (2) toxic products generated by metabolism must be temporally segregated from other processes that can be damaged by them or the toxins repurposed where possible (i.e., nitric oxide). Transcriptionally released behavioural sequences, elements of which may be dissociable and subject to conditioning (learning), are found in all domains of life. Drawing on empirical work in the emerging field of single-cell learning, I will argue in my talk that cognition has profoundly shaped evolution of life on Earth, a position advanced at the turn of the 20th century by proponents of the Baldwin Effect and at the end of that century by the founders of cognitive biology: developmental biologist Brian Goodwin (Conrad Waddington's protégé) and organic chemist Ladislav Kovàč. Evolutionary theory will remain hobbled, no less than it has been by the Modern Synthesis, until it incorporates the cognitive reality of biological phenomena.

Pamela Lyon is a Natural Philosopher specializing in research on the biology and evolution of cognition. She utilizes the primary scientific literature across a wide range of disciplines to answer fundamental questions about the origin and nature of the mind: what it is, what it does, and how it functions. Based on the biogenic approach to cognition she developed as a mature-age PhD student, Dr Lyon co-founded the emerging field of basal cognition. The aim of basal cognition is to connect the dots and identify genuine discontinuities in the evolution of cognitive capacities and mechanisms, from organisms occupying evolutionary branches prior to and at the threshold of nervous systems to animals with nervous systems, including humans. Lyon is an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Adelaide Department of Philosophy in the School of Humanities. She has been invited to give talks at seminars, workshops and conferences in the United States (UCLA, Harvard, Indiana, Minnesota), Europe (Barcelona, Bonn, Bremen, Bochum, Frankfurt, Jena, Lund, Warsaw), South America (Congreso del Futuro/Santiago), Australia (Sydney, Wollongong), including keynote addresses to the International Conference for Artificial Life and the Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology. Key projects include the guest-editing of a double special issue for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on basal cognition with Michael Levin, Fred Keijzer and Detlev Arendt (part 1  and part II ) as well as a collection on Animal cognition with Ken Cheng for Animal Cognition. Other representative publications include an issue on Cognitive Biology for Biology Theory ; and papers on the cognitive cell full and the biogenic approach to cognition.

Peter A. Corning (Online) 

Teleonomy and Synergy: How Living Systems Shaped Biological Evolution

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was seriously deficient. His concept of natural selection was a significant contribution - highlighting the fundamental fact that life on Earth is a contingent, always at-risk enterprise - but he failed to acknowledge the fact that all living systems, from the smallest single-celled bacteria to humankind, are also shaped by their evolved purposiveness (teleonomy). Their initiatives and activities – their agency – have had a significant influence on the trajectory of life on Earth, as one of Darwin's predecessors, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, fully appreciated. He proposed that changes in an animal's habits, stimulated by environmental changes, have been a primary source of evolutionary change over time. Darwin and many of his successors also portrayed evolution as a fundamentally competitive process (the struggle for existence in Darwin's terms). Today, we recognize that life has also been a multifaceted, cooperative (synergistic) enterprise, and that this has been of overriding importance in the evolution of complexity over time. Teleonomy and cooperative functional effects (synergy) have shaped natural selection in many different ways. Indeed, we now know that there have been many other influences in evolution as well. The proposed Inclusive Synthesis I propose is open-ended, because it is expected that still more has yet to be learned about biological evolution. It represents an ongoing work in progress rather than a completed theoretical edifice. Teleonomic Selection (after Corning) and Synergistic Selection (after John Maynard Smith) have played a significant role. It's time for a more inclusive theory.

Peter A. Corning  graduated from Brown University, served as a naval aviator (with 106 carrier landings), then as a science reporter for Newsweek magazine, earned a Ph.D. at New York University, did a post-doc at the Institute for Behavioural Genetics (University of Colorado), taught for many years in the Human Biology Program and Institute of Political Studies at Stanford University, and directed the Research Institute in Complexity Science. He has also published over 200 scientific papers and nine books, including The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw Hill); The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice; and Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind . Most recently he wrote a trade book on the Superorganism: Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species. In recent years, Corning and his wife, Susan, developed and operated a diversified, four-season organic market farm on San Juan Island in Washington State. They have two daughters, a son, and two grandchildren (so far), all living and working in Seattle.

Kristin Andrews  (Onsite)

The Social Origins of Consciousness

The evolution of social consciousness in non-human animals remains a little explored topic within the evolutionary sciences. According to the social origins of consciousness hypothesis that I propose, the ability to coordinate with group members was the original adaptive function of consciousness. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from a phylogenetic argument according to which consciousness is widespread among existing animals, and widespread capacities are likely to be evolutionarily old. Early animals relied on consciousness to solve a problem that arose during the Cambrian, when animals first became behaviourally flexible -- how to predict others' behaviour, and stay together as a group. Even very simple brains possess the capacity for social rewards and pain, and modern brains retain close connections between the substrates for social cognition and affect. There is a deep adaptive alignment between social pain and harm to animals such that, in preference tests, bodily pain is preferred to social pain in a wide range of species. The hypothesis is empirically tractable and can be tested by examining the salience of social stimuli test and the over-attribution of agency test. Scientific research that takes the social origins of consciousness hypothesis seriously could lead to significant breakthroughs in research, especially by focusing on simpler systems than those currently studied.

Kristin Andrews  is a Philosopher of Science with expertise in the Philosophy of Animal Minds and the Philosophy of Psychology. She is a Professor at the CUNY Graduate Centre in New York, York Research Chair in Animal Minds at York University, CIFAR Fellow in the Future Flourishing Program, and Founding Director of the Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behaviour Association. Her research combines philosophical and empirical approaches to questions about animal consciousness, agency, and sociality. Her books include The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition, How to Study Animal Minds, Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers' Brief. She is currently writing a trade book on animal culture.

13:00 lunch

THEME: Learning and Intelligence Across and Beyond Life

14:30 Mike Levin (forthcoming)

15:45 break

16:15-18h:15

Oded Rechavi  (tbd)

Transgenerational small RNA inheritance

In C. elegans nematodes, dedicated machinery enables the transmission of small RNAs, which regulate gene expression across multiple generations, independently of changes to the DNA sequence. Different environmental challenges, including exposure to starvation, genomic parasites, pathogens, and heat stress, generate heritable small RNA responses that, in some instances, might be adaptive. Recently, we have also demonstrated that neuronal processes can produce small RNA-mediated heritable responses, and that the decisions made by their progeny are influenced by whether their ancestors experienced stress or not. I will discuss the underlying mechanisms and the potential of small RNA inheritance to affect the worms' fate. Lastly, I will examine how these new findings might change our view of the process of evolution and the limits of inheritance and provide evidence that transgenerational inheritance of small RNAs also occurs in other, very different organisms.

Oded Rechavi is a Molecular Geneticist, a full professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. His mission is to challenge fundamental long-held dogmas. He provided the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited, and worked to elucidate the mechanisms and rules of RNA–mediated transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Using C. elegans nematodes, simple yet powerful model organisms, he discovered that nematode brains can control the behavior of the progeny, and identified a simple neuronal circuit–level mechanism that explains economic irrationality. Aside from his work on epigenetics, Dr. Rechavi utilized genome sequencing of ancient DNA to “piece together” fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, demonstrated that Toxoplasma parasites can be genetically engineered to deliver drugs to the nervous system, and found a mechanism that dramatically delays forgetting. He is a European Research Council (ERC) Fellow and has been awarded many prestigious prizes, including the Polymath Award (awarded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s foundation, Schmidt Science), the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists (awarded by the New York Academy of Science and the Israel Academy of Science), the Kadar Family Award for Outstanding Research, the Krill Prize of the Wolf Foundation for Excellence in Scientific Research, the Alon Fellowship, the F.I.R.S.T (Bikura) Fellowship, and the Gruss Lipper Postdoctoral Fellowship. He won multiple teaching awards and is a member of the Israel Young Academy and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). His publications can be found here.

Richard Watson  (Onsite)

Cognition-First Evolution

The conventional narrative of evolution is that living things are mostly dumb, bio-molecular machines, created by and for their genes, from instructions that natural selection writes into the DNA. Cognition, in such a view, is irrelevant, rare in the tree of life, and late in the evolutionary story. In fact, what we find is that cognition is coextensive with life, the characteristics of organisms are only weakly determined by genes, the interaction of organisms with their environment influences their behaviour, their morphology, their development, their genetic activity, and the mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance on which natural selection depends. Even the identity of the Darwinian unit is repeatedly redefined. And yet, the conventional narrative does not budge. It is anchored by the assumption that natural selection is the only possible natural mechanism capable of producing adaptive organization. But this is not true. Learning is more fundamental (and smarter) than natural selection, and it does not need natural selection to originate or function. Learning by natural induction can occur in any dynamical system described by a network of interactions that give way under stress, even a network of randomly connected springs. This is sufficient for a system to learn to solve problems (resolve conflicting constraints) better with experience, without any natural selection (or design). Biology is full of such viscoelastic networks. This opens the possibility of turning the conventional narrative on its head – biological cognition comes first, before natural selection, and continues to lead adaptive change. The learning capabilities of life include genetic evolution as one of many layers of memory that it involves in the natural induction process. This inversion sheds light on numerous biological puzzles, ranging from neutral evolution to genetic indeterminism and phenotype-first adaptation, to evolutionary transitions in individuality.

Richard Watson is a Theoretical Evolutionary Biologist, Complexity Scientist, and Professor in Artificial Intelligence. His expertise ranges from modelling adaptation in biological networks to combinatorial optimization algorithms. His work has radically extended the unification of evolution and learning, in particular with unsupervised connectionist learning familiar in neural networks. He also studies the evolutionary transitions in individuality and seeks a broader interpretation of biological evolution that goes beyond natural selection. He is a Professor in the school of Electronics and Computer Science, and a member of the Institute for Life Sciences, at the University of Southampton, UK University/Lab website. He is the author of Compositional Evolution (MIT Press), and recent papers include How Can Evolution Learn? (TREE), Natural Induction (Entropy), Agency, and goal-directed behaviour (Biological Theory), and Design for an Individual (Frontiers Ecol/Evo).

Henry H. Heng Henry H.Q. Heng, PhD | WSU Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics (Onsite)

Correcting Darwinism: Macroevolution Precedes Microevolution in Two-Phased Cycles of Information Innovation, Preservation, Mutual Selection, Population Growth, and Carrier Replacement

Evolution is a well-established fact, but the traditional Darwinian mechanism—natural selection acting on small, gradual changes over long timescales—remains inadequate to explain speciation. While short-term changes are observable, most species show prolonged stasis. Genomic data reveal that large-scale genome reorganization—not gradual gene-level mutations—has driven evolutionary history. Population genetics fails to explain how incremental shifts in gene frequency (microevolution) give rise to new species with distinct karyotypes (macroevolution). These facts necessitate a re-examination of evolution's core assumptions. To address the challenge of observing macroevolution, we use cancer as a model in which macro- and micro-level somatic evolution unfolds within years. Longitudinal karyotype tracking reveals a two-phased process: genome chaos drives macroevolution, followed by gene-mediated microevolution. This insight, also relevant to organismal evolution, underpins Genome Architecture Theory, which challenges key neo-Darwinian assumptions: (1) microevolution primarily constrains change and cannot drive macroevolution; (2) speciation begins with macroevolution, followed by microevolution to expand the population. New karyotypes arise in individuals—not populations—and reproductive barriers block gene flow from the outset. Most individuals with altered karyotypes fail to find compatible mates and are eliminated, explaining why new species often emerge during mass extinction events, when rare transitions gain a survival advantage. To unify and prioritize evolutionary mechanisms, we propose a general spiral model, where complexity arises through distinct, historically contingent processes and mutual selection cycles. Macroevolution generates new system-level information through genome reorganization, while microevolution conserves and amplifies this information via inheritance, bio-regulation, and population growth. The cycles of innovation/constraint, driven by carrier replacement/growth to maintain information flow, are shaped by environmental crises, organic codes, and the progressive rise of biological complexity. Such research offers a more realistic view of the mechanisms and sequences of evolution than Darwinism, and it also suggests that artificial intelligence could emerge as a superior information carrier, potentially displacing humans.

Henry Heng Henry H.Q. Heng, PhD | WSU Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics is a Molecular Cytogeneticist specializing in chromosome and genome structure, function, and variation, with implications for inheritance, cancer, and evolution. He is a Professor at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, USA, serves on seven editorial boards of international bioscience journals, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, two dozen book chapters, and multiple books. Heng's contributions span cytogenetics, cancer biology, genomics, and evolutionary theory and have introduced new theories and concepts that help advance new research avenues. These include (1) Genome Architecture Theory (GAT) which proposes that genome organization, rather than individual genes, drives macroevolution, with karyotype coding defining species identity and system-level information; (2) Genome Chaos theory  which introduces stochastic, large-scale genome reorganization as a driver of speciation and cancer evolution, with environmental crises acting as key triggers for information self-creation via genome chaos; (3) The Two-Phased Evolutionary Model that understands macroevolutionary innovation as preceding microevolutionary adaptation, distinguishing mechanisms across genomic levels; (4) Karyotype Coding and Information Self-Creation theory which demonstrates that species identity is karyotype-encoded through the order of genes on chromosomes, and that evolution depends on information self-creation and preservation; (5) Function of Sexual Reproduction theory which argues that its primary role is preserving karyotype coding, with microevolution acting mainly as a constraint rather than system-level innovation; (6) Cancer Evolution theory  that, applied to GAT shows that tumours evolve via two-phased dynamics, reshaping understanding of therapy-induced resistance and chromosomal instability; and finally, (7) regarding cytogenetic advances, Heng identified diverse chromosomal and nuclear variants, pioneered high-resolution FISH, and developed DNA–protein-co-detection techniques.