Building as Thinking

Models do not investigate nature. Instead, they investigate the validity of our own thinking […] (Kokko 2007, p7).

The models here are deliberately simple. They don’t aim to capture the full scope of extended evolutionary theory.1 There’s no niche construction, no cultural inheritance, no social interaction, no epigenetics. Nor are they simulations of real systems. They’re thinking tools, built to explore what modeling decisions are needed to produce minimal epigenesis: a process capable of giving rise to the generative richness, bottom-up precision, and adaptive flexibility of development in complex organisms. My hope is that, with the aid of such models, we’ll be able to think more clearly about ongoing debates in evolutionary biology.2

References

Kokko, Hanna. 2007. Modelling for Field Biologists and Other Interesting People. 1 edition. Cambridge University Press.
Laland, Kevin N., Tobias Uller, Marc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, et al. 2014. “Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink?” Nature 514 (7521): 161–64. https://doi.org/10.1038/514161a.
Pigliucci, Massimo, and Gerd B. Müller, eds. 2010. Evolution - the Extended Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Footnotes

  1. For a more comprehensive overview of evolutionary theory, see Pigliucci and Müller (2010)↩︎

  2. For example, see the contrasting perspectives in Laland et al. (2014).↩︎