About

This website is my (ongoing) attempt to think through some puzzles about the evolution of multicellular complexity.

I’m not the only one puzzled. Despite enormous progress in biology, there are persistent debates about how best to think about the interplay of the various causes and processes in evolution.¹ This is especially true when the organisms being studied are like us: beginning life as a single cell, yet developing into things with limbs, organs, and attitude. These sort of critters may not be the most common by count on the planet, but there seems to be something special about what nature can produce once it starts putting a bunch of cells together.²

The puzzles I find most interesting, and the way I think about them, are driven by my background. I’m a software engineer and a philosopher of science.

As an engineer, what I find most puzzling is how nature builds multicellular creatures. Embryogenesis is an alien technology³, utterly unlike the way human engineers work. And the process itself is malleable, in a way that our own technology is not. So it’s not just how it works, but how it can change over time.

As a philosopher, what interests me most is the array of different explanations at play, and a dearth of often fuzzy concepts deployed in these explanations (evolvability, modularity, robustness, to name a few). How do we adjudicate amongst these explanations, and how do we nail down these concepts?

My approach here is try and build something that exhibits at least some recognisable and relevant phenomena, but with far fewer moving parts than the biological analog. Then to see how explanation works or how concepts apply in these simpler worlds. The hope is that by exploring these simpler worlds, we might gain insight into the more complex biological ones. Or, failing that, at least clarify what we are arguing about.

Acknowledgements

The germ of many of these ideas, and the initial models, were developed during postdoctoral positions at the KLI in Vienna, with Paul Griffiths at the University of Sydney, in Joshua Epstein’s group at Johns Hopkins Centre for Emergency Medicine, and at the Centre for Biology and Society, ASU with Manfred Laubichler. I’m grateful to these people and institutions, and to many others who supported me during my embryonic stages in philosophy. I’m especially indebted to Kim Sterelny, who kick-started my interest in these ideas, and supported my early academic career.

Modelling Code

The code on this website is a combination of Rust, Python, and Javascript. I am indebted to all the open source software developers that have contributed to the libraries I use. My code is not (yet) open source, but I please contact me if you are interested in working with it.

Citation

If you use or refer to material on this website, please cite it as:

Calcott, B. (2026). Minimal Epigenesis (Website version 2026.07.29). https://minimal-epigenesis.org

Footnotes

For some examples, see Lynch (2007); Pigliucci (2007); Lala et al. (2024). ↩︎
Yes, plants are like this too. I should think more about them. ↩︎
I am taking this phrase from Jamie Davies wonderful book on human development (Davies 2014, p3). ↩︎

References

Davies. (2014). Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself. OUP Oxford.

Lynch. (2007). The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity.

Pigliucci. (2007). Do We Need an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis?.

Lala, Uller, Feiner, Feldman, Gilbert, Andrews. (2024). Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity. Princeton University Press.