wayne lewis Kording Lab 🦖 Kevin Mitchell Luiz Pessoa Maxim Raginsky Philip Ball Manlio De Domenico Ricard Solé Adam Frank Marcelo Gleiser Constraints are processes that operate at slower time scales than the processes they constrain by limiting their degrees of freedom. So, yes, ontological. That's not the same as coarse-graining in a model by smoothing over fine details. See this book link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…

Organisms are self-producing and self-maintaining sense-making systems that establish their own norms and enact their environments in precarious conditions.

New aviary, new affordances.

An example of morphological and functional novelties being enablements, not well-honed Darwinian adaptations. It's because organisms have agency. As Stuart Kauffman says, "How many uses does a screwdriver have? It's uncountable."

Few books proposed such a nuanced yet provocative view on the intersection of behavior and evolution as this one.

I don't mind the selfish gene metaphor to describe things like TEs, meiotic drives, toxin-antitoxin pairs, etc. But the metaphor frequently causes confusion -- a sign of an *unsuccessful* metaphor. Even Dawkins somewhat regrets it.

Lala, Uller, Feiner, Feldman and Gilbert's ‘Evolution Evolving. The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity’ will be published by Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.s on September 24. Pre-order now for a 30% discount. Find out more at evolutionevolving.org #evolution #biology

Some pages are still under construction, but the website is finally online !! Learn everything about our research here : animalinventiveness.com 💥 (Teasing: If you are viewing the website from your computer, you will see a cute video of Dr Mathilde Tahar’s pets playing)

I'm reading Plessner's newly translated book. It reads like an independent emergence of many core enactivist ideas from within zoology and animal behavior (he was a long-time collaborator with Buytendijk). Really enjoying it so far.

New preprint out (finally) !!!! We present YOLO-Behaviour, a flexible, easy to implement, robust framework for automated behavioural annotation from videos. Centre for the Adv Study of Collective Behaviour biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

📰 New paper alert! 🇬🇧 Prenatal maternal stress can have phenotypical effects into the third generation. We observed specifically increased fearfulness and neophobia in females. Led by Marion Charrier and the EthoS team Read more here Royal Society Publishing : doi.org/10.1098/rsos.2…

Got the physical copy! Can’t wait to read through it!

New office mate.

Curly whirly. Hummingbird hawk moth

New paper! The sociality of sleep in animal groups cell.com/trends/ecology… An Opinion article that just came out in Trends in Ecology & Evolution

How can we detect communities in complex networks? The standard view is based on geometric proximity, which is blind to deeper links playing similar roles . Check this paper on a new, very general topological picture by Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CSIC) Luis Seoane Luíño 🏉🤖🏳️‍🌈 arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02317