Does natural selection organize ecosystems for the maintenance of high productivity and diversity?

A Framework for Investigating Rules of Life Across Disciplines

Clearly and usefully defining the Rules of Life has long been an attractive yet elusive prospect for biologists. Life persists because requirements for existence and successful transmission of hereditary information are met. These requirements are met through mechanisms adopted by organisms, which produce solutions to environmentally imposed constraints on life. Yet, constraints and their suites of potential solutions are typically context-specific, operating at specific levels of organization, or holons, and having cascading effects across multiple levels, or the holarchy. We explore the idea that the interaction of constraints, mechanisms, and requirements within and across levels of organization may produce rules of life that can be productively defined. Although we stop short of listing specific rules, we provide a conceptual framework within which progress toward identifying rules might be made.

Evolutionary Connectionism: Algorithmic Principles Underlying the Evolution of Biological Organisation in Evo-Devo, Evo-Eco and Evolutionary Transitions

The mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, on which evolution by natural selection depends, are not fixed over evolutionary time. Current evolutionary biology is increasingly focussed on understanding how the evolution of developmental organisations modifies the distribution of phenotypic variation, the evolution of ecological relationships modifies the selective environment, and the evolution of reproductive relationships modifies the heritability of the evolutionary unit. The major transitions in evolution, in particular, involve radical changes in developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations that instantiate variation, selection and inheritance at a higher level of biological organisation. However, current evolutionary theory is poorly equipped to describe how these organisations change over evolutionary time and especially how that results in adaptive complexes at successive scales of organisation (the key problem is that evolution is self-referential, i.e. the products of evolution change the parameters of the evolutionary process). Here we first reinterpret the central open questions in these domains from a perspective that emphasises the common underlying themes. We then synthesise the findings from a developing body of work that is building a new theoretical approach to these questions by converting well-understood theory and results from models of cognitive learning. Specifically, connectionist models of memory and learning demonstrate how simple incremental mechanisms, adjusting the relationships between individually-simple components, can produce organisations that exhibit complex system-level behaviours and improve the adaptive capabilities of the system. We use the term "evolutionary connectionism" to recognise that, by functionally equivalent processes, natural selection acting on the relationships within and between evolutionary entities can result in organisations that produce complex system-level behaviours in evolutionary systems and modify the adaptive capabilities of natural selection over time. We review the evidence supporting the functional equivalences between the domains of learning and of evolution, and discuss the potential for this to resolve conceptual problems in our understanding of the evolution of developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations and, in particular, the major evolutionary transitions.

The self-organizing fractal theory as a universal discovery method: the phenomenon of life

A universal discovery method potentially applicable to all disciplines studying organizational phenomena has been developed. This method takes advantage of a new form of global symmetry, namely, scale-invariance of self-organizational dynamics of energy/matter at all levels of organizational hierarchy, from elementary particles through cells and organisms to the Universe as a whole. The method is based on an alternative conceptualization of physical reality postulating that the energy/matter comprising the Universe is far from equilibrium, that it exists as a flow, and that it develops via self-organization in accordance with the empirical laws of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. It is postulated that the energy/matter flowing through and comprising the Universe evolves as a multiscale, self-similar structure-process, i.e., as a self-organizing fractal. This means that certain organizational structures and processes are scale-invariant and are reproduced at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Being a form of symmetry, scale-invariance naturally lends itself to a new discovery method that allows for the deduction of missing information by comparing scale-invariant organizational patterns across different levels of the organizational hierarchy.An application of the new discovery method to life sciences reveals that moving electrons represent a keystone physical force (flux) that powers, animates, informs, and binds all living structures-processes into a planetary-wide, multiscale system of electron flow/circulation, and that all living organisms and their larger-scale organizations emerge to function as electron transport networks that are supported by and, at the same time, support the flow of electrons down the Earth's redox gradient maintained along the core-mantle-crust-ocean-atmosphere axis of the planet. The presented findings lead to a radically new perspective on the nature and origin of life, suggesting that living matter is an organizational state/phase of nonliving matter and a natural consequence of the evolution and self-organization of nonliving matter.The presented paradigm opens doors for explosive advances in many disciplines, by uniting them within a single conceptual framework and providing a discovery method that allows for the systematic generation of knowledge through comparison and complementation of empirical data across different sciences and disciplines.

The group selection controversy

Many thought Darwinian natural selection could not explain altruism. This error led Wynne-Edwards to explain sustainable exploitation in animals by selection against overexploiting groups. Williams riposted that selection among groups rarely overrides within-group selection. Hamilton showed that altruism can evolve through kin selection. How strongly does group selection influence evolution? Following Price, Hamilton showed how levels of selection interact: group selection prevails if Hamilton's rule applies. Several showed that group selection drove some major evolutionary transitions. Following Hamilton's lead, Queller extended Hamilton's rule, replacing genealogical relatedness by the regression on an actor's genotypic altruism of interacting neighbours' phenotypic altruism. Price's theorem shows the generality of Hamilton's rule. All instances of group selection can be viewed as increasing inclusive fitness of autosomal genomes. Nonetheless, to grasp fully how cooperation and altruism evolve, most biologists need more concrete concepts like kin selection, group selection and selection among individuals for their common good.

Are algal communities driven toward maximum biomass?

In this continental-scale study, we show that in major benthic and planktonic stream habitats, algal biovolume--a proxy measure of biomass--is a unimodal function of species richness (SR). The biovolume peak is observed at intermediate to high SR in the benthos but at low richness in the phytoplankton. The unimodal nature of the biomass-diversity relationship implies that a decline in algal biomass with potential harmful effects on all higher trophic levels, from invertebrates to fish, can result from either excessive species gain or species loss, both being common consequences of human-induced habitat alterations. SR frequency distributions indicate that the most frequent richness is habitat-specific and significantly higher in the benthos than in the plankton. In all studied stream environments, the most frequent SR is lower than the SR that yields the highest biovolume, probably as a result of anthropogenic influences, but always within one standard deviation from it, i.e. they are statistically indistinguishable. This suggests that algal communities may be driven toward maximum biomass.