Website reaches blastula stage
I still expect to incessantly rename and re-organise things for a while, but the website is now live. There are a few initial models, and some philosophy.
What is it all about?
The landing page sums it up. Multicellular development is totally baffling, and it is doubly baffling when you consider it can evolve. So how should we go about explaining it? That will depend on how we think about it. If you are medical researcher, the information The explanations will not cure cancer.
A key theme of the website is that much of my bafflement has little to do with natural selection. This is not anti-selectionist, nor evolution-denying, nor an attempt to undermine how important natural selection is for explaining organismal complexity. It is simply that natural selection does not explain the bit I find the most interesting.
This is largely.
That is personal way of staying it. But ideas that comes along are because somebody has an itch they want to scratch.
I know I’m not alone in this dissatisfaction, for there are plenty.
Some of my publish papers have tried to capture this in various ways. Lineage explanations. Both generating benefit.
A long time ago, I decided that one way I could try and think more clearly about these issues was to build some models. Modeling forces lots of decisions.
It also turns that modeling is hard work. Trying to make something simple and interesting and illuminating is a challenge. And even when you have something that meets these even illuminate some aspect of the problem, you need to build the tools to investigate it, measure it, draw it, and more. So it has taken a while to get here.
Why a website?
There are pragmatic reasons I can give for why I chose website fits my needs. I can provide animations, the simulations, Online publications are trendy
Mostly, however, it was time to go public, and a website was the method I deemed most likely to succeed. Despite the good things about peer review, I find it a gruelling process. Making websites is kind of fun. Also, I am not paid as an academic, so I don’t need keep up my publications.
What is next?
I have a large backlog of models and related ideas to write up. Here is a selection of what I hope to cover in the next few months:
- A simple model of modularity.
- An analysis of why networks.
- How to evolve goal-directed behaviour at the multicellular level without selecting for it.
But there is more to do. I hope to cover some of the following topics in the coming months: