nucleation

THEORY-1351: In West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers's account, a transition in individuality is defined by two separable conditions, mutual dependence (parts that once replicated alone can replicate only within the larger unit) and negligible within-group conflict, and proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps; across transitions what explains them is an ecological benefit to cooperation together with group formation that unites the members' interests (clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy, vertical transmission of clonal symbionts), while kin discrimination and the repression of competition played relatively minor roles

1 min read

Properties4
StatusProposed
Tagsphilosophy-of-biology, individuation, altruism
SourceLIT-2003 — Major evolutionary transitions in individuality
CorroboratesCLAIM-474 — From interconnection to individuation, the relationships are distinct achievements that form a partial order, not a nested sequence: none implies the next, and a later one need not require every earlier one. Interconnection fixes what joint behaviour is possible, compatibility which local descriptions admit a coherent whole, dynamics which organizations persist, individuation which have sufficiently robust identity and boundaries, organizational autonomy which help maintain their own constitutive constraints, and inquiry which can measure and revise their own models and apparatuses under resource bounds, inquiry and reconstruction occurring without autonomy. The research program is to find the conditions for each, and their dependencies, apart from the order in which an inquiry meets them

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Source

West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers (2015), LIT-2003, read in NOTE-1538.

What was actually shown

No new data. The definition is stipulated. Table 1 scores known transitions and near-misses against its two conditions, and finds each condition without the other: social aphids, and Melipona. The explanatory claim, “only in species where … group formation is clonal”, is a comparative generalization from the cited literature.

What this does not say

  • That division of labour or communication is necessary. They are what the second step “typically involves”.
  • That a transition cannot be reversed. Breakdown is one of the paper’s open questions.

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