The September issue of our journal, Biological Theory, is now out.

We welcome Harold de Vladar to the KLI.

Guido Caniglia took up his position as Scientific Director of the KLI in November 2018.

“...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved...” (Darwin 1859) But what about the time before the ‘so simple’ beginning? Does evolutionary theory apply there? Let's ask Schoenmakers et al.!

The Vienna Science Studies Lab is an intra-institution initiative revived this winter by the KLI, UPSalon UniVie, and the In/human project at CEU. A reading group on Feminist STS is the first event.

This reading group is loosely but seriously centered around agency.

In a recent publication in PloS One, KLI senior postdoc fellow Anne Le Maître and KLI alumna Lumila Menéndez argue for more sustainable and ethical practices for the study of anthropological collections. (click on title to continue)

In a recent article in Biological Theory, Philipp Mitteroecker questions traditional concepts of measurement error in biology. (click on title to continue)

In a recent paper published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, KLI fellow Oryan Zacks, along with Eva Jablonka, discusses the evolution of neural structures related to imagination. (click on title to continue)

KLI fellow Anne Le Maître, along with colleagues from the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, coordinated a special issue of the journal BMSAP on the topic "Mortuary practices and social inference.” (Click on title to continue)

KLI fellow Anne Le Maître, along with colleagues from the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris coordinated a special issue of the Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (BMSAP) on the topic, "Invasive, micro-invasive and non-invasive analysis of anthropobiological remains. How and why?” This special issue comprises several articles stemming from the presentations given during the 2023 annual meeting of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. (Click on title to continue)

A recent paper co-authored by Barbara Fischer and Philipp Mitteroecker applies the cliff-edge model of obstetric selection to real-world data and illustrates how medical interventions can alter evolutionary dynamics. (click on title to continue)

In a new article in the Journal of the History of Biology, KLI postdoctoral fellow Marcelo Domingos de Santis challenges the conventional narrative of the systematics wars. (click on title to continue)

In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, KLI fellow Sanjay Narayanaswamy and colleagues investigate the role of Notch signaling in self-organizing gastruloids. (click on title to continue)

In a recent paper published in PNAS, co-leads Barbara Fischer (KLI & University of Vienna) along with Katharina Pink (Medical University of Vienna) and team reported that female Japanese macaques, despite having the same pelvis-to-fetal-head ratio as female humans, do not suffer the same birth complications as human mothers. This is supported by evidence from a long-term demographic data showing zero maternal mortality linked to childbirth in these non-human primates. This study contributes to our current understanding of the interplay between pelvic morphology and birth dynamics and provides further insights into how to provide better care for human mothers to lessen complications during physiological births. The study made it to the cover of the journal.

KLI fellow Anne Le Maître, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (BMSAP), together with Bérénice Chamel (Institut Français du Proche-Orient, Beyrouth, Lebanon), coordinated the new issue of this journal. (Click on title to continue)

A recent paper co-authored by Isabella Sarto-Jackson and Barbara Fischer presents a new theoretical perspective on the transmission of behavior, the “Integrative Neurobiology and Cultural Context (INCC) theory”. (click on title to continue)

In a recent publication, Philipp Mitteroecker shows how genetic variance in the timing of development and reproduction increases the speed of adaptive evolution, which also has implications for the evolution of aging. (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.)

In their most recent paper published in Systematic Biology, Philipp 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.)