We welcome our new writing-up fellow Gregory RUPIK (University of Toronto) who will work on the project "Organismal Agency in Romantic Biology and Today."

A group around KLI fellow Nicole Grunstra and Philipp Mitteroecker developed new methods to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships from morphology.

Gerd B. Müller and Ehab Abouheif's new entry on evo-devo offers an introduction to characteristic themes and highlights selected papers that address crucial conceptual aspects.

Co-authored by KLI fellow Christian Dorninger, their new paper shows that rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South.

A new article co-authored by Guido Caniglia combines niche construction theory with social-ecological systems science to better understand the relationships between sociocultural and environmental co-evolutionary processes that have led to the current planetary crisis.

What has Conspiracy Theories got to do with individual personality traits and socio-environmental factors?? Quite a lot actually, according to a new multi-author paper including Guido Caniglia, published in SN Social Sciences. (Click on title to read more…)

New paper by Hari Sridhar and Priti Bangal revisits the ‘nuclear species’ concept, finding frequent mis-citations of core ideas.

How do participants in arts–science collaborations reason together to overcome disciplinary boundaries and to co-create interventions? This article by Luana Poliseli and Guido Caniglia chronicles how inter- and transdisciplinary reasoning unfolded in such a collaborative project involving experts from the natural sciences, humanities, and the arts. It appears that embracing of differences rather than seeking consensus among diverse perspectives allows inter- and transdisciplinary reasoning to help navigate unpredictable situations effectively by capitalising on and leveraging differences. (Click on the title to read a summary article of this new paper!)

New paper in Nature Sustainability by Caniglia et al. outlines a new role for practical wisdom and virtue ethics in knowledge co-production for transformative change.

New paper by Caniglia and Vogel outlines how queer theory can help transdisciplinary sustainability researchers to embrace transgressive orientations.

Laura Menatti and Mariagrazia Ranzini 's new paper explores the effects of Covid lockdowns on relationships and connectedness, with important implications for future health policy.

KLI fellow Enrico Petracca questions the problem’s main assumption: That cognitive phenomena can be categorized based on their inherent complexity or representation-hunger.

Prose, poetry, creativity…but hang on, did Evolution extort a heavy price for such human ingenuity? Perhaps. Of the many traits that separate modern humans from our close ancestors, Schizophrenia is one; a severe and disabling mental disorder unique to us Homo sapiens, which evolved as we diverged from archaic hominids including the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Schizophrenia’s high prevalence (1%) also make its an evolutionary paradox. How did it evolve and why, despite it severely reducing evolutionary fitness, has Evolution not weeded it out yet, or at least made it rare? Philipp Mitteroecker and Giuseppe P. Merola review the many theories proposed to explain the evolution of Schizophrenia and test them against modern epidemiological and genetic evidence. They also present the first mathematical formulation of the Cliff Edge model of Schizophrenia, significantly demystifying this evolutionary puzzle. (Click on title to continue...)

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoins, are becoming more and more prevalent in our lexicon today, the broad common understanding being that it is a financial system that is based on technology. However, for most of us, there is still a lot more to know and understand how cryptocurrencies work, and how such a technology can affect social relationships. Enrico Petracca, along with Shaun Gallagher, in their new paper reveal that while technology is an important aspect of cryptocurrencies, the very humane emotion of trust, which is the basis of social and interpersonal relationships, is still at the core of the cryptocurrency enterprise. (click on title to continue…)

A new study, co-authored by Guido Caniglia, highlights optimism and complexity thinking as key factors to foster interpersonal trust during times of crises.

Led by fresh KLI alumna Anna-Katharina Brenner, this paper explores the long-lasting impact of settlement arrangements in cities on sustainability, and emphasizes the importance of understanding the drivers that change settlement patterns.

We welcome Richard Gawne from the Duke University to the KLI.

KLI Fellow Enrico Petracca contributed a chapter in a book project dedicated to famous economist and cognitive scientist of the 20th century, Herbert H. Simon. Edited by Gerd Gigerenzer, (the late) Shabnam Mousavi , and Riccardo Viale, the book ‘Elgar Companion to Herbert Simon’ is now out, and with Enrico’s contributed chapter titled, ‘A double-edged metaphor: Simon and the scissors of bounded rationality’. (Click on title to read on.)

In their most recent paper published in Systematic Biology, Phillip Mitteroecker, Michael L. Collyer and Dean C. Adams introduce a new system to measure phylogenetic signal in multivariate phenotypes. Phylogenetic signal is the tendency of closely related species to resemble each other more than distant ones. The authors approach a long-standing challenge in the statistical estimation of phylogenetic signal in mutivariate phenotypes, as phylogenetic signal until now have been mostly designed for univariate traits. However, biological traits are often multivariate, and univariate measures are therefore inadequate, and not meaningful on their own. The authors propose a novel method where the multivariate data is decomposed into linear combinations with the most or least phylogenetic signal, which is measured by Blomberg’s K. These components, called K-components, can be interpreted biologically, and scatterplots can show the data in a way that preserves phylogenetic signal. (Click on title to continue.)

In this new paper, Elis Jones argues that scientific activity is literally niche construction. Using data from interviews conducted with coral scientists, Elis examines the socio-ecological dimensions of science, especially how science shapes and is shaped by the living world around it. (Click on title to read paper summary.)